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“That one.” Ryder pointed to the smaller desk. He hadn’t needed to. She could tell immediately which was the air-gapped system.

Cassandra sat down.

She’d been afraid for hours. Afraid in the lab, afraid in the car, afraid standing at the fence line with Nolan making jokes to keep her from shaking apart. The fear had been a constant, humming presence in her body since the moment she’d volunteered.

It stopped.

Not gradually. Not a slow fade. It just stopped, the way noise stopped when you closed a door, and the only thing left was the screen in front of her and the hum of a machine she’d never met.

She woke it. Login prompt. Dark background, single password field, minimal interface. She pulled a thumb drive from one pocket and a small toolkit from the other. She didn’t try the login.

The obvious way in was never the smart way on a system someone had built to keep people out.

Instead, she went around it. Her fingers found the keyboard and started working. Boot sequence first, looking for a gap between the startup protocols and the login authentication layer. Custom, but not as sophisticated as she’d feared.

Come on, baby. Show me something.

The system’s startup sequence had a maintenance backdoor that the builder had probably left for their own use and then either forgotten about or assumed nobody would find. It took her about forty seconds.

There you are.

She dropped into the root directory and felt the grin spread across her face before she could stop it. This was it. This was the part where her brain did the thing it was built to do, and for the first time in days, maybe weeks, she felt like herself.

Not the woman who couldn’t handle crowds. Not the civilian who needed protecting. Not the liability on a team of professionals.

Just Cassandra, sitting in front of a machine that thought it could keep its secrets, having a conversation it didn’t know it was having.

The file structure unfolded in front of her. Nonstandard naming conventions. Nested encryption on some folders, none on others. A handful of directories that could be decoys or redundant backups.

The naming convention shifted halfway through the tree, which told her two different people had worked on this system at different times. The second person was better. More careful. More paranoid.

Good for you. But not good enough.

She was looking for the primary data cluster, the place where the real information lived. Everything else was architecture, scaffolding, camouflage. The cluster would have the heaviest encryption and the most deliberate placement within the file structure.

She started mapping, her brain sorting and discarding and sorting again, building a picture of how the system was organized and where the valuable things were hidden.

The encryption protocol was repeating across three specific directory branches. Not random. Someone had applied the same level of protection to three separate locations, which meant those three locations held the same category of information. That was the cluster. Distributed rather than centralized, which was smarter than dumping everything in one folder, but the repetition gave it away.

She was mapping the third branch, planning the extraction sequence she’d run when she came back, when Ryder’s voice cut through.

“Cass.”

She held up a finger. She was close. Needed ten more minutes, max. The third branch had a secondary encryption layer the other two didn’t, which meant either it held the most sensitive files or it had been added later by the more paranoid builder. If she could just verify which⁠—

“Cass.” His hand on her shoulder. She looked up. His head was tilted toward the door, and his face had gone flat and tight.

“I’ve almost got it.”

“We need to go,” he said.

“Ten minutes.”

“Now. You can come back another time. Somebody is awake. We’ve got to get you out of here.”

She looked at the screen. She wasn’t done. She was about halfway through the mapping, and she hadn’t extracted a single file. Everything she’d learned was in her head, not on the thumb drive, and leaving now meant trusting that she’d remember every detail of the architecture when she came back.

She would. Her brain didn’t forget patterns.