Dio
The text message from Elara was a jagged shard of glass embedded in my mind. Even now, as I locked the heavy, reinforced door of The Node, the words refused to dissolve.
"There is a very urgent family matter."
It was a clinical sentence, stripped of emotion, yet I could see the tremors between the characters. I knew her well enough to recognize the difference between a genuine emergency and the suffocating weight of a Dwijaya crisis. This was the latter—a desperate, formal cry for help hidden behind a wall of politeness.
I moved toward the center of the room, where my black glass desk sat like an altar to cold logic. The air here was thin and frigid, kept at a constant sixteen degrees Celsius. It was a necessity for the server banks humming behind the soundproof walls, but tonight
