Chapter 19 Echoes in the Dark
Eli’s POV
The chair and I were starting to have a relationship. I woke in it again, neck kinked, lower back complaining, the faint indentation of my gun grip pressed into my ribs. Through the bedroom doorway I could see Sloane asleep, face half buried in the pillow, the little note I had left probably crumpled somewhere under her hand. She had not come out during the night. That was a good sign. Or a distracting one. Hard to tell anymore.
The cabin had a rhythm now. Mornings offline. Coffee, eggs that were getting less burnt as I practiced, perimeter checks, Sloane glaring at the lack of bars on her phone. Then a narrow window where we let the world in through a line we controlled. It was not peace, but it was a pattern.
During one of those windows she sat at the table with my hardened laptop, chin in her hand, scrolling through an old webmail account she had not touched in years. I was half listening to Diaz on the satphone about some Ward database probe when her shoulders went rigid.
“Eli,” she said quietly.
I hung up and crossed the room. On the screen, at the top of a dusty inbox full of newsletters and ancient forum digests, was a single unread message. The subject line was four words that made my gut knot. Remember when we built god mode.
“Only two people ever used that phrase,” she said. Her voice was very calm. “Me. And Noah.”
Her ex cofounder. The man whose file was already glaring at me from the suspect column on my mental whiteboard.
“Open it in a sandbox,” I said.
She already was. Virtual machine inside our bubble, air gap where there could be one. Even so, my shoulders tensed as the email bloomed.
Short body. No greeting. No fluff. Just a log excerpt. A list of timestamps and target tags that might look like nonsense to anyone else. Berlin CCTV. Her building automation system. Ward perimeter ranges. An almost casual signature at the bottom. Nice to see our toy in the wild. N.
“No obvious route,” Mila said from her laptop by the stove when we looped her in a minute later. “That thing sat here for a long time. Looks like it was sent months ago but stayed frozen in queue. Clever. Barely any footprint.”
Sloane stared at the screen like it had personally betrayed her. “He would not go this far,” she said, almost to herself. Then, “Except he always wanted to. This is exactly his idea of a joke.”
“That or someone is very good at imitating his sense of humor,” I said. “Name. Style. The god mode line. It fits. It also might be a frame.”
Her eyes cut to me. “You think someone stole his code.”
“I think someone stole a lot of things from that lab years ago,” I said. “Your prototypes. Maybe his scraps too. Noah walks too close to the line for me to trust him, but I do not know yet if he is the architect or just another rotten piece.”
She closed the email without replying, but the damage was done.
That night we sat on the porch with two glasses of whiskey between us and the lake black and still. Stars burned through the clear sky. No city glow to dull them.
She talked. More than she had in days. About early nights with Noah building tools just to see if they could. About laughing over stupid variable names and drinking cheap coffee because neither of them could afford anything else. About the moment she realized he had started talking to Avalon Ridge without her in the room.
“I thought he was the one person who saw all of me and did not flinch,” she said. “Turned out he just saw leverage.”
Low grade jealousy twisted in my gut. Not because of the sex. Because of the way her eyes went soft when she remembered those early builds, like that had been the last time she felt truly alive in her work without fear.
“Whoever is behind this,” I said, “wants you anchored in what you messed up back then. They want you busy replaying that betrayal instead of fixing what is happening now.”
She huffed a humorless breath. “Good luck to them. I can hate myself and multitask.”
When we went back inside, something small snagged my attention at the back door. A fresh scratch by the lock, bright against older wear. My bells and lines were intact. Nothing had tripped. But something had tested the hardware.
I knelt, ran my fingertip along the groove. New. A millimeter deep. Someone had brushed metal there. Tool or key.
For a second I nearly called her over. Then I pictured the look on her face when that email opened. The way her hands had tightened around the glass when the generator paused.
She was already spinning at enough velocity to tear herself apart. Telling her that someone had literally run a fingernail along our last clean door would not help anything tonight.
Tomorrow I would reinforce the frame. Add another bell. Change the lock. Watch the tree line harder.
Tonight, I let her have the illusion that the only things touching this cabin were raccoons and the wind.
She went to bed early for once, the paperback she had been reading tucked under her arm. I took the chair, as promised, gun within reach, listening to every creak and sigh of the wood.
Every shift of the breeze sounded like a footstep. Every brush of a branch on the wall like fingers.
Sleep did not come. I sat there in the dark, ears tuned to faint bells outside, hand resting on the rifle, knowing that somewhere out there a stranger had already put one scratch on my door.
And I did not know if I was more afraid of them coming back.
Or of what it would do to her when she realized there really were no safe systems left.