Chapter 1

The air in the server farm tasted like recycled ozone and stale Red Bull. It was a basement tomb of humming black towers and blinking green lights, buried three stories beneath the rainy pavement of downtown Seattle.

To most people, this room was just the internet infrastructure for a mid-tier logistics company. To me, it was a canvas.

"Leo."

The voice was low, vibrating with a growl that wasn't entirely vocal. It hit me in the spine before it reached my ears.

"Not now, Silas," I muttered, my fingers flying across the mechanical keyboard. "I’m stabilizing the quantum variable. If I lose the thread, we lose the window."

Silas paced behind my chair. Even on the concrete floor, his movement was silent. He was a glitch in the matrix of my life—a six-foot-four wall of muscle and scars who looked like a vagrant but moved like an apex predator. He didn't belong in this world of fiber optics and fluorescent lights. He belonged in a place where physics was a suggestion and magic was a law.

" The shadows are getting louder," Silas said. He stopped pacing and leaned over my shoulder, his nose twitching. He smelled of wet pine and copper, a sharp contrast to the sterile heat of the servers. "They know you’re knocking on the door."

"Let them knock back," I said. "I’m almost there."

I wasn't hacking a bank. I was doing something that would have gotten me laughed out of every physics department in the country. I was mapping Ley Lines—ancient energy currents—onto the city’s fiber optic grid. I was using the speed of light to brute-force a hole in the fabric of reality.

On the third monitor, the chaotic static of the graph suddenly snapped into a perfect sine wave.

*Target Lock: 47.6062° N, 122.3321° W. Altitude: 180 meters.*

"Got it," I breathed, the rush of dopamine hitting me harder than caffeine. "I found the frequency."

Silas stiffened. "Is it stable?"

"It’s as stable as a soap bubble in a hurricane," I admitted, grabbing my backpack. I shoved the portable transceiver—a modified satellite dish duct-taped to a high-capacity battery—inside. "The breach opens at 11:00 PM. That gives us twenty minutes."

"Where?"

"The roof," I said, zipping the bag. "The Thin Spot is right above us."

I spun the chair around and looked at him. Silas looked tired. The fluorescent lights washed out his skin, highlighting the jagged scar running from his temple to his jaw. He looked like a caged animal that had stopped fighting the bars and started waiting for the executioner.

"This is it, Si," I said, trying to ignore the hollow ache in my chest. "You’re going home."

Silas didn't smile. He looked at the heavy steel door of the server room, his eyes flashing a momentary, brilliant gold.

"Then we better run," he said. "Because the landlords are coming to collect the rent."

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