Page 180 of What We Become

I sit back. Rub my eyes.

“Not there,” I tell the screen. “You’re not there.”

The screen, like my servers, doesn’t respond. Rude. I need to build myself a Milo chatbot that thinks like me. But then I’d never get anything done because we’d banter all day. It’d be a triumph. But unproductive.

Being this amazing and interesting is a genuine curse.

I close the diner feeds and pull up my network’s traffic logs. Routine check. Kind of like a digital perimeter walk. Check the fence posts, gate latches, making sure nothing got in while⁠—

The alert fires.

I sit up so fast my chair rolls backward.

It’s the same signature. Third time. Same bounce pattern. Same clean, surgical knock against the perimeter before it disappears.

The first hit my firewall at Mom’s twelve days before the sunflowers, and I sat on it for too long. The second hit the security controller at home while someone was placing those flowers on the kitchen counter. I flagged that one and sent it to Fenrir.

Now the same signature is back at my firewall at 11:47 p.m. on the night before kitten’s birthday.

Twelve days between the first and second probes. Six days between the second and third.

Whatever this is, it’s accelerating.

I don’t believe in coincidence. Not anymore.

“Hello, little node,” I whisper. “Show me your secrets.”

My fingers hit the keyboard before the thought finishes forming. The route unfolds exactly as it did before—Virginia, Amsterdam, São Paulo—then the final node disappears the second I push against it.

I switch to traffic analysis, looking for the shape of the connection rather than the address, but the rhythm vanishes with the node. Not unresponsive. Gone, like someone reached into the infrastructure and yanked the cable.

“Shit.”

This isn’t one of the automated scans that batters every exposed network. Those are noisy and indiscriminate. This is deliberate—someone choosing one point, using the same route, withdrawing before it counts as an intrusion.

Someone knocking on my door and running before I can answer.

“Don’t,” I tell myself. The shake starts up in my hands. “Don’t connect things that aren’t connected. Keep your cool. Holden isn’t here to kiss you out of it this time.”

I take a deep breath, steady myself. Then I start typing. Furiously. Logging everything—timestamps, packet captures, routing data, the dead node in São Paulo. Firewall records. Access logs. Intrusion alerts. Every crumb of it, into one encrypted file.

Then I open the secure channel.

Fenrir once locked me out of my own server and somehow made silence feel smug. My current theory is that they aren’t a person at all, but a vindictive algorithm Odin taught to hold grudges.

Tonight, that particular personality defect might be exactly what I need.

I attach the file and type:

ME:

Third ping. Same sig. Same bounce. São Paulo node went dark the second I traced it. Someone is probing my perimeter with military-grade patience and I need to know if I’m losing my mind or if this is what I think it is.

The cursor blinks. Thirty seconds. A minute. Long enough that I start wondering if the channel is compromised too, which is a fantastic rabbit hole to fall down at midnight in my mom’s basement.

A message comes through.

FENRIR: