The neural chip felt like a live wire in Miyu's palm.
She rolled it between her fingers, the cracked casing catching the dim light. "You expect me to believe the Firewall Pact was real?" Her voice was steady, but her pulse wasn't. Every hacker knew the stories—whispers of a group that had cracked the Sentinel's core protocols. A ghost story. A fairy tale for anarchists.
Kai didn't blink. "I expect you to look at the data." He nodded at the rig. "If you're as good as Ren said."
That stopped her. "Ren talked about me?"
A muscle twitched in Kai's jaw. "Said you were the only one reckless enough to try what he did."
Miyu's throat went dry.
Outside, the sirens had faded, replaced by the distant thrum of a hover transport—probably carrying another batch of "volunteers" to the re-education blocks. The bulb above them flickered, casting jagged shadows across Kai's face. He looked older in the uneven light. Tired.
She exhaled sharply and plugged the chip into the rig.
The screen flared to life, lines of code scrolling too fast to follow.
"Oh, you've got to be kidding me."
It was encrypted with a Turing Lock—a nightmare algorithm that adapted as you cracked it. The kind of thing the Sentinel reserved for top-tier traitors.
Kai leaned over her shoulder. "Can you break it?"
Miyu's fingers were already moving. "I can piss it off."
She bypassed the first layer with a brute-force exploit, but the system retaliated instantly—corrupting her own inputs. The screen glitched, a distorted face flickering for half a second before dissolving into noise.
Miyu froze.
Was that—?
A new line of text appeared, red and pulsing like a wound:
[TRACE DETECTED. COUNTERMEASURES ENGAGED.]
Kai's hand clamped on her shoulder. "They're here."
The safehouse door exploded inward.
YOU ARE READING
A Bug in the Code
Mystery / ThrillerIn a totalitarian cyber-surveillance state, Miyu is a brilliant but laid-back hacker who makes a living off other people's data to survive. When she stumbles upon a hidden encryption tied to a vanished resistance group, she's thrust into a deadly ga...
