Chapter 22 Stolen Code
Sloane’s POV
The word camera tasted like metal in my mouth.
“Eli, we are on camera,” I whispered, every hair on my arms rising.
I felt his arms tighten, not in panic, but like he was trying to make his body bigger between me and the thing I had seen. He did not look up. That was almost worse, that he trusted my eyes enough to move without checking.
“Where,” he asked quietly.
I lifted a shaking hand and pointed. High on the beam, no bigger than the nail of my thumb, a tiny dark dot sat in a knot of wood. Invisible unless you were already looking for monsters.
He shifted so his back blocked its sightline while I moved. “Chair,” he said. “I have you.”
He set a kitchen chair under the beam, steadying it with both hands. When I climbed, his palms settled at my waist, anchoring me. It was ridiculous how steady that made me feel, standing on old wood with my fingers inches from a piece of hardware that should not exist here.
Up close, the lens was obvious. A small circle of glass set flush with the grain. I dug my nails in, pried. The wood splintered a little, then gave. The device came free into my hand, light but heavy with implication.
I dropped it into the metal mug he held up, ceramic clink echoing too loud in the quiet room. If it was still transmitting, the mug would muffle it until we gutted it.
At the table, I dumped it onto the surface, grabbed my toolkit, and tried to pretend my hands were not shaking.
It was a neat little thing. Barely a centimeter across. Miniature microcontroller. Tiny sensor. Custom printed circuit board with an unusual power management layout that squeezed more life out of small batteries than most off the shelf designs.
My stomach sank before my brain finished mapping the traces.
I knew that architecture. I had drawn it once on a whiteboard at two in the morning with ink on my fingers and Noah laughing beside me. We had built half a dozen prototypes on that pattern, told ourselves god mode was just an internal joke, something we would never unleash.
“These were never released,” I said. My voice sounded far away. “They were supposed to be destroyed or locked in a lab under three layers of security.”
The realization hit like ice water. Plot twist, my mind offered bitterly. The bullets they were shooting at me were ones I had machined myself.
“You are sure,” Eli said.
I did not answer right away. I traced one more line, saw the little quirk I always put in my sensor arrays, a choice in how capacitors were paired. No one else would bother with that exact inefficiency. They would just copy the broad strokes. This was mine.
“Yes,” I said. “This is my design. Mine and Noah’s. Someone took a prototype that should not exist anymore and stuck it in your cabin.”
Guilt roared up and tangled with fury. “This is my fault,” I snapped. “All of this. Berlin, the penthouse, your safehouses. I built the tools. They are just using them.”
“Stop,” Eli said sharply. “Tools are neutral. A knife cuts food or it cuts someone’s throat. That is on the hand holding it.”
“Without my work there would not be a blade,” I shot back.
“Without your work there would be a lot of very stupid systems sitting unprotected,” he countered. “Do not give them credit for your genius and all the damage, and none of the good.”
The words bounced off and lodged somewhere they might sink in later. Right now all I could see were equations where every variable ended in blood.
“The god mode project was never meant to leave test,” I heard myself say. “We built something that could see into almost everything. Traffic, cameras, building systems, the whole mesh. I pulled back. I said it was too much power in too few hands. Noah wanted to harden it and sell it to people like your Council. We fought. He walked. I signed papers and told myself all the scary pieces were locked or wiped.” I laughed, ugly. “I did not personally count every board. I trusted inventory systems and signatures. I trusted processes, not people. Obviously that worked out.”
Eli was quiet for a beat, leaning on his elbows. “Is there anything in this,” he asked, nodding at the board, “that only you know how to break?”
I dragged in a breath, forced my brain to focus past the shame. “Maybe.”
I dug deeper, flipping it, squinting at the firmware tag. Someone had modified my original signature, added a layer. Arrogant. Confident. It gave me something to hold on to that was not self loathing.
“If we can get a signal to it without tripping other alarms, we could feed it garbage,” I said slowly. “Make it report what we want. Show them us sitting in one place while we are somewhere else.”
His gaze warmed. “Then we stop dancing on their stage and start dragging them onto ours.”
The surge of relief and terror was too much. My eyes burned. I pressed my palms against them, but the tears leaked out anyway, hot and humiliating.
“I am so tired,” I said, voice cracking. “Every time I build something, someone finds a way to twist it. Every time I think I have closed a door, they are already inside the next room.”
He came around the table without asking, arms going around me. I let him. For once I did not try to hold myself up alone. My forehead pressed into his shoulder, the smell of soap and sawdust and smoke filling my nose.
“You are not responsible for how a coward uses your genius from the shadows,” he said into my hair. “You are responsible for what you do with it now.”
Something in me snapped then. Maybe it was the way he said your genius like it was a fact and not a weaponized compliment. Maybe it was just the fact that his arms around me felt more solid than any system I had designed.
I tipped my head back and kissed him.
No warning, no testing. Just surged up and crushed my mouth to his, hands fisting in his shirt. Years of control went right out the window.
He froze for a heartbeat, then everything from Berlin to last night caught up. His hands tightened on my hips, pulling me closer, his mouth opening under mine. The kiss was nothing like the careful anonymity of that hotel. It was urgent and desperate and full of every unsaid thing that had hung between us. He walked me backward until my shoulders hit the wall, his body a hot, hard line pinning me there.
“This,” he said against my lips when he finally tore his mouth away, breath ragged, forehead pressed to mine, “if we keep going, this is not about a bad night in Berlin. This is us.”
“It is already us,” I whispered. Because it was. Because pretending otherwise had hurt more than any bullet ever could.
An engine growled faintly in the distance, the sound skimming across the lake and punching through the bubble we had built for a few stolen minutes.
We both stilled, listening. The world was still there. The enemy was still moving.
He stepped back inch by inch, eyes dark, chest rising fast. The line had been crossed. We both knew it, even as we put breathing room back between us.
I looked down at the gutted camera on the table, my own stolen code laid bare.
“Enough,” I said, wiping the last of the tears with the back of my hand. “Let us stop letting them watch the show and start hunting them back.”