The first mistake wasn’t obvious. That was what made it dangerous. It didn’t come in the form of a breach alert or a system failure. There were no alarms, no urgent calls from the operations floor, no visible disruption to the carefully constructed structure Aria had maintained for weeks.
It came quietly. Subtly. Almost invisibly. But Aria saw it the moment it happened. She was standing in the monitoring suite, the soft glow of layered data reflecting across her face as streams of information moved in precise, controlled sequences. Every access point, every internal movement, every authorization request — it all followed patterns she had already memorized.
Which was why this one stood out. Not because it broke the pattern. But because it tried too hard to follow it. Her fingers stilled o
