Page 40 of GlitchBorn Heart

Vikktor turns away from her, a razor-thin smile slides across his stone face. “And tell me, my brilliant daughter, would you prefer chaos? Riots in the streets? Magic running unchecked until the city burns?” He tilts her chin up to match his steel gaze. “No. Order must be absolute. Those children you’re so worried about? They’re without structure, they’re already lost. What kind of life are they currently living on the streets, hungry, cold, and uneducated? They’re the perfect target for the rebel leaders.”

Ember shakes her head, her voice trembling but firm. “You’re just dressing up slaughter in corporate language. Call it order all you want, but it’s still murder.”

Vikktor steps closer, smothering any space around his daughter. He lowers his voice, but the lab cameras still catch it “Careful, Ember. You forget who gave you your seat in this lab. Who gave you your name. Loyalty is not optional in this family—it’s mandatory for survival. If you insist on speaking like this...”

He lets the pause stretch, his shadow falling over her like a cat about to devour a mouse. “You might find yourself in the same sector as those children you pity so much and not in that pretty little penthouse on the upper east quadrant.”

The air between them seems to freeze, the hum of the servers swallowing the silence. Ember holds his icy stare, jaw set, but I can see her begin to shake.

I shut the feed down, the video searing into my retinas. I’ve seen enough of “Father Of The Year.” Vikktor’s calm, clinical menace is inhuman. Having him as a father must be torturous on her.

Genocide. Correction. Variables.

The corporate management speak twists in my skull like a dagger. Vikktor Vosse never lost control of the conversation, or of her. But Ember? She was being reckless and defiant, a raw fire against his polished steel.

Brave but foolish. I tent my fingers. The kind of foolishness that gets people erased and labs shut down in this city. I’ve never seen this side of her.

I should walk away, and file what I just saw in the footage in the mental drawer marked “not my problem.” But I can’t.

Instead, I linger, the image refusing to leave me. Ember’s body seized under the surge of adrenaline caused by her father’s shadow swallowing her whole. Vikktor didn’t back down, didn’t even hesitate. When he threatened her, his only daughter, it wasn’t rage or desperation in his eyes, but cold calculation. As if she were just another employee to be leveraged.

That realization settles heavily in my chest. He didn’t become one of the most powerful men in the Corporation because of ambition. His status and power comes from ultimate control, and it has rotted his soul.

A man who would sacrifice his daughter without blinking for the sake of progress is not a man at all. Now I don’t just understand what Vikktor is, I feel it in my bones. He isn’t just a tyrant billionaire playing with power. He’s far worse: A man who believes love is a weakness to be exploited. People are just tools to be used and discarded.

I lean back into the darkness, away from the glow of the monitors, the metallic tang of sadness stings my throat. I exhale slowly, controlling my thoughts, like I’ve been trained to do. This is the Vikktor I know. The one who speaks of humanity like data to be rewritten and dollars to be shoved into his enormous wallet. I’ve seen this every day I’ve worked for him. It sickens me that Ember is caught in his sights, and that she still believes there is a line he won’t cross.

Is she naive or frightened to the core?

I come to the realization she’s not wrong. This isn’t an update. It’s a virus. A purge dressed in suits and semantics designed to erase people. Vikktor’s CIC geek squad didn’t build it to protect the city. He had them build it to silence it. To rid the world of magic and rebellion, the two things he fears the most.

I hate that I have to stand by tomorrow night in this lab, my lab, and watch it run its course. I’ll stand there, the perfect corporate lapdog and watch it execute line by line while I pretend I don’t know exactly what it’s doing.

It’s not my war, not my responsibility. I have to convince myself restraint is the same as innocence, but the truth is uglier.

I could stop it. I know where to have LINK intervene, where to corrupt the rollout just enough to buy time. I’ve done worse things at times. I just...don’t.

I ask myself why. Because my focus keeps sliding elsewhere, as if I’m being drawn into the depths of a black hole. Because every piece of my mind is consumed by two powerful anomalies glowing on my map like beacons pulling at something inside me I didn’t know I still had.

So, I let the purge loom in the background, unresolved, ignored. I tell myself I’ll deal with it later. No blood on my hands that way.

After I find them, study them, understand them, I’ll process the moral dilemma of VikkCorp. It’s easy to justify looking away when obsession gives you something more satisfying to look toward.

But Ember’s eyes linger in my mind as I turn away from the screens. A warning or maybe a mirror to my soul.

My next thoughts drift to earlier this afternoon. The “urgent” meeting in the glass-walled boardroom upstairs. Suits lined up like stone statues, their ties too tight, their eyes too cold.

I’d been presenting the anomaly data from last night, tracing their irregular pulses, showing how TheKast on top of this type of power could strain or even destabilize entire dream layers in the DreamNet. I made it blatantly obvious to the corporate pricks that anomalies could even take down the very system that VikkCorp runs daily to keep this city running. Nothing like hitting them in the wallet to get their attention.

From GameNet and advertisements, to crime monitoring, I carefully explained to them, like six-year-olds, how surges of this size can impact the grid. I thought they were listening, but then Vikktor cut me off at the knees.

“I’ll handle this from here, Dr. Ryudon.” His voice was silky smooth but dismissive. “I have a CIC team that can investigate this for me, now that we know just how powerful this source may be.”

“With respect, sir,” I pushed back, “my team is already embedded. I created this system. If the anomalies strengthen, it compromises my entire grid. That’s not something you can brute force stop.”

“You underestimate me, Kael,” he said, a flicker dark behind his smile. “Or perhaps you underestimate how easily TheBoard bends to me. This is a very large surge, absolutely unheard of. The power that must be behind it...” He shakes his head in disbelief. “Leave the anomalies to me this time.”

I’d wanted to argue more. To press until his calm demeanor cracked, but then he’d said it. “Don’t let obsession cloud your loyalty.”