The bloody jacket stayed in the control room. I still had an old paper ledger, duplicate contracts, and a hard drive inside my study wall.
Those copies predated Skylight and could rebuild part of the network. Serena could not reach them from the bottom of the lake.
I ran to the study and stopped in the doorway.
One monitor lit the room in blue. Isabella sat with her back to me, humming the same little tune she used at dinners when the elders watched her.
She hummed while Serena’s silver feather hung from the private data port on my desk, hard-lined to the vault. The monitor read `DATA TRANSFER: 98%`.
“Isabella. What the hell are you doing?”
The progress bar reached 100 percent.
`TRANSFER COMPLETE`
She unplugged the necklace and turned the chair toward me. No timid smile this time.
