The morning air in the archives was stifling, thick with the smell of ozone and the stale, recycled oxygen of the facility. Zeta sat at his desk, his fingers moving with practiced, mundane slowness as he processed the day's intake of digital manifests. He had spent the previous night testing the boundaries of the Ghost Walk protocol, his mind still reeling from the integration of Elias’s hidden code. Every movement he made felt like a delicate dance on a razor’s edge. He kept his posture slumped and his eyes downcast, the portrait of an unremarkable worker, but his mind was constantly calculating his next move.
Miller, sitting at the adjacent terminal, was unusually quiet. Zeta could feel the man’s gaze on him, a prickling sensation on the back of his neck that warned of impending troubl
