“What did you just do?”
My voice came out sharper than I expected.
On the screen, Dante only smiled calmly, like a man who had just flipped the board in the middle of a chess match. Behind him, the system interface glowed brighter, lines of code rewriting themselves faster than I could follow.
The countdown that had been racing toward zero was frozen.
00:00:41
Marcus stared at the monitor, disbelief written across his face.
“You’re not even in the system,” he said slowly. “You were standing right here a minute ago.”
Dante tilted his head slightly.
“That’s the problem with assumptions,” he replied. “They make smart people careless.” Vordon’s hand tightened around my shoulder. “You hacked the system,” he said.
Dante laughed softly.
“Hacked?” he repeated. “No. I improved it.”
The w
