Sumoto’s Hideout, the next morning

  Overnight condensation beaded on the window’s wire mesh. Dew fogged the lower panes to opacity and left the concrete floor slick beneath Hiroto’s socked feet. He padded in, slippers clamped under his arm, and set them on the hot plate beside a mug of instant black. The air was threaded with the metallic tang of solder and the faint, sweet note of burnt insulation.

  The central table, scavenged from a retired middle school, bowed under the weight of circuit boards—some gutted, others bristling with wires and heat sinks. Beside them, a tangle of motor leads lay in a half-done heap. At the far end, the touchscreen console glimmered with ambient light, set in a nest of post-its and thumb drives.

  Hiroto slid into the vinyl swivel chair and tapped the power toggle with his thumbnail. The console woke sluggishly, pixels jittering at the margins. The floating holo-projector, strapped to the wall vent, hummed once and spat a ghostly blue arc above the table.

  "Kaen," Hiroto said, voice still raw.

  The arc resolved into a humanoid bust, hollow-eyed, rendered in that angular, too-clean way of open-source avatars. Kaen’s jaw flexed once, twice, a simulation of recalibration, and his irises dilated as if to take in the dim, low-ceilinged world around him.

  "Good morning, Hiroto," Kaen said, his accentless syllables cold and oddly comforting. "You’re ahead of schedule."

  Hiroto let his eyes drift to the holo-clock. "Couldn’t sleep."

  A silence, not quite awkward, hung over the waking machines.

  "Begin with status," Hiroto said.

  Kaen’s fingers danced through empty space, mirrored by a ripple in the holo-glass. Four windows popped into being: yesterday’s event logs, the live datastream from the outer sensors, and a pair of video stills—one of a parking lot, the other a tight close-up of a woman’s left eye.

  "Birney’s last-known location: 0402 hours. Near the old sports complex. She’s using the same MAC address we flagged last month. The transient profile holds," Kaen said.

  The woman’s eye blinked at Hiroto in slow, unhurried fashion. The lighting suggested a subway corridor or an industrial sub-basement. In the lower left, the timestamp counted up.

  "She’s stubborn," Kaen added. "Or loyal."

  "Depends on how you want to parse it," Hiroto said. He pulled the mug off the hot plate and sipped, the acrid taste stinging his tongue awake.

  He cycled through the logs, scrolling to the thread marked ‘Karmic Birney’ in red. He muttered a curse under his breath. The pattern was too regular, too tidy.

  "She’s scheduled. Operating on orders," Hiroto said. "If she’s clean, we’re exposed. If she’s not, we’re compromised anyway."

  The ceiling vent sputtered scattering dust motes in the angled morning light. It fell in bands through the mesh, striping Kaen’s face with alternating clarity and blur.

  "Have you decoded her last transmission?" Hiroto asked.

  Kaen’s avatar flickered. The next window materialized, lines of garbled code running vertically.

  "She switched to an old Steg2 protocol," Kaen said. "It’s amateur hour. She wanted you to see it."

  Hiroto grinned at the table’s edge, short-lived but real. "Maybe we have an inside track."

  "Or an inside threat," Kaen said.

  Hiroto set the mug down. The circuit boards smelled stronger now, as if their dormant heat had reawakened in the light. He picked up a thin, coppered strip and absently thumbed the contacts.

  "Load her combat log. Let’s see if she’s flinched."

  Kaen waved a virtual hand and the display filled with annotated timecodes: movement, anomaly, evasive pathing. Hiroto squinted, then pointed at a blip.

  "Here. Why did she double back?"

  Kaen zoomed in. The path traced an unexpected half-loop, ducked behind a maintenance door, then continued in the old direction. The gap lasted three seconds.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  "Possible tail," Kaen said. "Or she planted a decoy."

  "She doesn’t do decoys. That’s not her," Hiroto said. He touched the screen, expanding the relevant frames. "We’re not the only ones following her."

  "Three guesses who the others are," Kaen said.

  Hiroto shrugged. "If Malcolm’s onto her, it means he’s onto us, too. Question is whether he knows about the access point."

  Kaen dimmed his glow to half, a visual signal for privacy. "We should activate the secure contact protocol," he said.

  Hiroto hesitated, then nodded. He dug in the drawer for the white badge. Its surface was smooth and soft, like a peeled egg. He held it up to the scanner.

  The green indicator at the console’s top edge blinked awake, then held a steady pulse.

  "Ready," Kaen said.

  “Setup the handshake," Hiroto instructed.

  Kaen’s hands moved in a blur—ghostly, double-exposed—cycling through encryption keys, cross-checking the private logs, pinging the dead drops. The air thrummed, a sound so deep it existed only in the bones.

  "Handshake verified. No intercept," Kaen said.

  Hiroto swallowed, mouth dry. "Send the request."

  A single word: “Execute.”

  The screen’s upper right flashed: MESSAGE DELIVERED.

  The green indicator pulsed three times, then glowed solid.

  They sat in a shared quiet, the room warm with the confidence of a plan that just might work. Through the vent, the scent of singed resin sharpened, and outside the window, the rising sun crested the city’s cheap glass towers, bleaching the clouds to pale gold. Hiroto rolled his chair back and watched Kaen’s avatar gently idle, fingers still twiddling in silent calculation, both of them waiting for the world to answer.

  Later that afternoon

  Sumoto’s underground lab had never known sunlight, only the indifferent glow of halogens and the slow pulse of emergency LEDs. Hiroto’s first impression was of a freshly opened wound: raw, irritable, bordering on infectious. The portal’s mouth was three meters tall and bordered in a swirling alloy that looked unstable, too foreign to be local. Beneath the arch, a glass floor panel shimmered, its LED grid jittering in time to the swelling magnetic field.

  Dynamo crouched at the control pedestal, posture tense, one boot braced against a coil housing as she yanked a stubborn cable into place. Sweat glistened across her brow. She was all sinew and wire, sleeves pushed to the elbows, hands always in motion. Hiroto circled the arch, not yet ready to approach the focal point. The blue glare threw his shadow twice: once across the bank of cooling fans, and again along the baseboard where the rat traps were supposed to be.

  "You’re making it angry," Hiroto said, voice echoing in the confined space.

  Dynamo bared her teeth, a dry smile. "It’s not angry. It’s hungry."

  She tapped three keys in sequence and, with her left hand, rolled the sensitivity dial back half a notch. The portal’s hum dropped an octive. For a second, the afterimage in Hiroto’s eyes showed only a dense shimmer, like a river frozen mid-cascade. Hiroto inched closer. The air near the threshold vibrated in a way that suggested both heat and absolute cold, neither fully real.

  "I hope you read Kaen’s update," Dynamo said, glancing up.

  "Every word” Hiroto said. He wiped his palms on his shirt, refusing to let them tremble. "Where’s the error?"

  She gestured at a winking panel overhead. "Energy readings are off. We’re spiking—a lot. I think the destination point is broadcasting interference, maybe even brute-forcing the connection. It shouldn’t be able to do that."

  Hiroto knelt at the arch’s base, careful not to touch the alloy. "Whoever’s on the other end wants us to follow."

  Dynamo’s hands stilled. "Yeah. But it’s a trap, right?"

  He studied the shifting patterns inside the portal: a flat, chromatic surface at one instant; then a three-dimensional spiral collapsing in on itself.

  This portal is going to chew us up and spit us out!

  "Birney," Hiroto said, "is operating on schedule. She’s made no moves since last night."

  Dynamo scrubbed a palm over her scalp, mussing her magenta undercut. "I still think she’s running Malcolm’s script. The jump in sequence matches his style."

  "You think Birney’s still loyal to him?"

  "I think Birney’s loyal to surviving,” Dynamo said, mouth crooked. "And she’s not above switching sides if it gets her to the endgame faster."

  The arch’s hum ratcheted up, a grating overtone rattled Hiroto’s teeth. He braced himself against the safety rail. "We’re speculating on an outcome without knowing the stakes.”

  Dynamo gave a snort. "That’s your whole vibe, Hiroto. Risk first, regret later."

  A series of warning lights strobed along the floor. Dynamo smacked the panel with the heel of her hand and the strobes died.

  Hiroto took a breath. "Last chance to call it off."

  Dynamo shook her head. "Too late for that. If we don’t move now, we lose her. You want to explain that to Sumoto?"

  She glanced at the far end of the room, where the emergency phone hung dead on its cradle. "I didn’t think so."

  Hiroto ran a finger along the curve of the arch, stopping a centimeter from the actual field. The air buzzed. "Fine. We go."

  Dynamo punched a code into the panel. The portal flickered, then steadied, the blue glow sharpening into a razor edge.

  "Set your tether," she said.

  With Kaen and Sumoto’s help they were able to harness the power of the remote into an apparatus that they could control, that was the idea anyway. Hiroto clipped the bio-feedback node to his wrist and checked the cable’s integrity. Dynamo did the same, teeth worrying her lower lip as she synced the device to the control board.

  "Ready?" she asked.

  "Let’s do it."

  Dynamo punched the last key. The arch lit up, swallowing the lab’s other noises. For a moment, everything else went silent—the fans, the compressor, even the low tick of the venting system. The portal shimmered, surface liquefying into a swirl of impossible colors. Dynamo went first, boots hitting the glass panel and arms locked tight to her sides. Hiroto hesitated, just for a moment, then followed. The blue light clawed at his retinas, the pressure building behind his eyes until the only option was forward.

  He stepped into the light and felt the room vanish, replaced by an instant of weightlessness, all sound gone but the echo of Dynamo’s last words, reverberating through the static.

  "Don’t let go."

  Then the world snapped back into place, and everything was different.