The lock on Hernan’s door clicked shut with a finality that made the silence heavier.
No lights. Just the glow from his portable screen.
He’d disabled every smart sensor in the room — unplugged his comm-band, flipped his wall console to manual mode, even draped a towel over the tiny surveillance orb in the ceiling corner. It wouldn’t stop a real watcher. But it would give them shadows instead of smiles.
He sat at the desk. Placed the flash drive in his palm like it was sothing sacred.
Or radioactive.
He slid it into the port. The screen flared.
One file.
CAM_DRN_D4-WNDMAIN-R01.UNEDITEDTistamp: 17:32:44 — District 4 main corridor.
He hit play.
The video crackled — then settled. A wide-angle drone shot of the District 4 firefight unfolded in real ti. No music. No comntary. Just the ugly roar of chaos.
Flas licked across vehicles. Civilians scattered. Hernan watched himself enter the fra — small and fast, flanking Ashvein in that signature left-angle sweep Virex had whispered mid-fight.
The footage was ugly. Real. His skin blistered again just watching it.
He fast-forwarded. Watched himself land the second hit. Ashvein staggered. The crowd panicked, scattered, scread.
Then—
Just after the second blast, between the mont the wrecked bus crashed and Hernan’s knee hit pavent—
A flicker.
He paused.
Rewound.
Fra by fra, now. Tap. Tap. Tap.
There.
In the far background — behind the smoke, just outside the crowd control drones — a figure.
Stationary. Unmoving. Watching.
No flas near them. No panic.
Cloaked. Hooded.
Wrong.
He zood in. The footage pixelated, but held enough to catch the shimr of displacent tech around the boots — thermal mufflers, military grade. No HCA intern could afford those. Hell, most field Zodiacs didn’t wear them.
And the face...
Blurred.
Not from smoke. Not from motion.
Digitally blurred. Live.
Even in raw capture mode — before a single editor touched the file — the figure’s face was already censored.
He leaned in. Pulse climbing in his throat.
"Who the hell—"
The feed hiccuped. For a blink, the screen stuttered — like it resisted being seen.
Then it jumped two fras forward.
Hernan yanked the tiline back.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Gone.
The figure vanished between one fla burst and the next.
Not a glitch.
The file’s internal clock showed a microsecond mismatch — a break in continuity. Not from drone shake. Not from heat distortion.
Tampering.
He opened the file tadata.
Thousands of system flags. Routine entries... until he scrolled deeper into the header stream.
There — nested between cara calibration tags and flight protocol keys — a buried string:
Edit-PreFlag: SYS.ADM.CR-001@05:47:15_PRELOCK
Prelock.Soone with system-level clearance flagged that mont while the drone was still airborne.
Hernan stared at the code. Then back at the still — Ashvein left, himself mid-motion, and behind them... a ghost, hidden in pixels.
Not erased after the fact.
Scrubbed during.
He hit pause. The cursor blinked.
"You were never supposed to be there," he whispered.
The blurred figure stared back, faceless.
The server room beneath Hero Academy wasn’t on any student map.
Hernan had found it in week one. Not out of paranoia. Not then.
Now it felt like prophecy.
He moved through the back halls of the west wing, past dead labs and unused storerooms. Lights overhead were motion-triggered. He avoided them. When one blinked on, he froze.
Shadow was safer than silence.
The server node door looked like a janitor’s closet. That was the trick. No biotric lock. Just a scuffed keypad.
He knelt, snapped a fiber bypass clip into the panel, and pulsed it.
Green.
The door hissed open, exhaling cold, stale air.
He stepped inside.
Tall server towers humd like standing coffins. Blue lights blinked softly across data strips. A single maintenance terminal pulsed at the aisle’s end — waiting.
He kept his gloves on.
Slotted the flash drive. No network sync. No cloud mirror. Everything local.
He wasn’t looking for the ghost anymore.
He wanted the signature.
He pulled up the capture hash — the embedded watermarks logging each data stage.
Scrolled deeper.
Buried low, nearly lost beneath corrupted checksums, a string of five characters broke pattern:
CNRY:03/Live
Hernan froze.
Canary protocol.
He’d read about it once. Hidden in a redacted Zodiac training leak — a threat tag embedded in live data streams to flag internal surveillance.
CNRY:03 was Category 3 — live threat assessnt.
Soone had flagged the District 4 footage while it was being recorded — and they weren’t watching Ashvein.
They were watching him.
A whirring sound snapped his thoughts.
A drone — small, quiet — skimd just outside the server room door. Its lens flicked side to side, scanning for heat signatures.
Hernan dropped flat.
The terminal dimd behind him. He crawled under the platform and held his breath.
The drone hovered.
Its blue lens glowed softly.
Then drifted on.
He counted seven seconds.
Then rose.
The terminal had gone passive. But a blinking ssage lingered in the top corner:
ADMINISTRATIVE ACCESS OVERRIDE DETECTED.USER ACCOUNT CURRENTLY MIRRORED.
His hands went still.
Not just a warning.
It ant soone was logged in under his na. Watching what he saw. In real ti.
Not only had soone flagged the footage...
They were watching him watch it.
No panic.
He ejected the drive. Wiped the buffer cache. Ran a fastprint sterilizer on the keyboard.
Unhooked the ergency coolant line.
Let five drops fall across the console chassis — just enough to fog the heat trace. Distort pattern recognition. Smudge evidence.
Then he turned.
Pulled his hood up.
Walked to the door like a ghost.
No alarms followed.
Not yet.
He stepped back into the hallway, letting it swallow him whole. No glance back.
Four flights up, in a dead stairwell corner, he pressed a gloved palm flat against the cold concrete.
His breath was slow. Even.
But the burn behind his eyes felt like molten wire.
They weren’t guessing anymore.
They were watching.
And not because they feared him.
Because they expected sothing.
He pulled his hood lower.
Started walking.
If they want to watch, he thought, let them see what a real traitor looks like.
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