Chapter 42
The VIP prep wing of the convention center carried a tension so thick it felt almost chemical, a pressure that crowded every breath even though not a single word was raised.
Teams from the top architecture firms were doing their last-minute system checks, and people hovered over computers with the kind of hyper-focus usually reserved for air traffic control. Here, even a deviation in the third decimal place could destroy months of work.
The summit would begin in less than an hour.
Outside Northstar Architecture's private prep room, Sophia stood tucked into a blind spot between two security cameras.
She wore a sharp wine-red suit that looked almost too luxurious for the backstage chaos, yet her palm was slick against her phone, cold sweat clinging to her skin.
The underground paparazzo Charlotte had hired last night with an absurd amount of money had suddenly vanished. Charlotte had been raging like someone about to set the world on fire.
Sophia knew exactly what that disappearance meant for her.
Isabella's warning at the preview dinner—the one that had felt more like a death sentence than a conversation—still echoed in the back of her mind.
If Isabella presented her breathing-structure architecture model today, and if she exposed the academic plagiarism Sophia had buried two years ago, then Sophia wouldn't just lose her reputation. She would face a lawsuit that could ruin the rest of her life.
There was only one card left to play. The cruelest one she had.
"Has everything been properly handled?" Sophia lowered her voice to a rough whisper.
On the other end, a man chuckled, his voice gravelly. "Relax, Ms. Brown. When the money clears, everything gets really agreeable. Ten minutes ago, I went in under the badge of a facilities inspector. Claimed I needed to check the wiring. I plugged it straight into the demo machine connected to Northstar Architecture's control console. Military‑grade data‑wipe bomb."
A flash of vicious satisfaction lit Sophia's eyes.
Inside the prep room, Nora sat rigid in front of Northstar's high‑spec display system.
Following the instructions Isabella had emailed her around dawn, she ran yet another full check on the 3D architectural projection that would appear on the summit's main screen. The model represented half a month of Isabella's sleepless work, reworked and rebuilt so many times it felt like a perfectly crafted art piece—one that shouldn't have been possible under human deadlines.
"Thirty minutes on the clock," Nora murmured, exhaling as she typed the final command. "Running the last core‑drive scan."
The instant she hit Enter, the screen flickered.
Not a normal flicker—something sharp, predatory.
The 3D holographic model twisted as if someone had poured acid over a frozen sculpture. Its clean lines warped into a horrifying melt, shapes collapsing into themselves.
Within seconds, the entire structure disintegrated. The screen exploded into pulsing red code, glitching so violently the air seemed to buzz.
"What—what is happening?" Nora's voice broke as she hammered random recovery commands. None of them worked. The red corruption spread like a plague, devouring every line of logic the system had.
"Mr. Miller!" Nora's cry cracked. "Help! The system's crashing! The primary architecture files are being wiped!"
Joseph, who had been confirming the stage schedule with the summit coordinators, froze. Then he sprinted to the workstation. The pulsing red symbols reflected in his glasses like something alive. Sweat gathered instantly on his brow.
He snapped toward their cybersecurity engineer. "Cut all physical links. Now! Patch into the backup defense grid. Salvage anything you can!"
The engineer lunged forward, hands flying, but after a few seconds, he just stopped. His face drained. He sank into the chair like someone whose legs had given out.
"Mr. Miller… we're too late."
"This is a destructive virus targeted specifically at architectural core code. It came from inside the venue's internal network. The attackers used the mainline to inject it."
"How long to decode and reverse it?" Joseph gripped the edge of the table tightly with both hands, the veins on the back of his hands bulging prominently.
"At least forty‑eight hours."
Silence. Then horror.
Forty‑eight hours.
The words landed like a hammer to the skull. Isabella's presentation slot was for thirty minutes.
On a global stage where even the stress load on a single beam required tens of thousands of verified calculations, stepping onstage without data was suicide. No digital model. No projections. None of the thousands of pages of structural logic.
Northstar Architecture was about to walk into an international spotlight with absolutely nothing.
The prep room dissolved into chaos. Someone swore. Two assistants choked back sobs.
Just outside, half hidden behind a structural column, Sophia watched through the narrow slit of the half-opened glass door. The panic inside reflected faintly across the floor tiles. Her lips curled. The smile that rose was reptilian.
Isabella, genius or not, was nothing without computational proof. And before a panel of world‑renowned experts, without numbers, she wouldn't even qualify as a joke. Let's see how you fall.
Just as everyone was plunged into despair and felt utterly frozen, the door to the waiting room was pushed open from the outside.
Isabella walked in wearing a deep navy suit tailored so sharply it carried its own gravity. She held a cup of warm water as if she had just stepped out of a quiet lounge instead of a battlefield collapsing around her.
She glanced, barely, at the flashing red screen and the trembling team clustered around it. She didn't need explanations. Just from the pattern of the corrupted code, her mind mapped the entire sabotage in seconds.
In the face of a disaster so total it might as well have been a death sentence, Isabella showed no fear. No panic. Not even anger.
Her calm was almost terrifying.
"Isabella," Joseph said, moving to her with the heaviest expression she had ever seen on him. The man who usually stayed unshaken through disasters looked gutted. "Someone bribed an internal tech. They planted a destructive virus. Our digital blueprints and cloud backups are all gone."