Chapter 200

# Chapter 200 ## KAEL The security protocols felt inadequate the moment we started documenting the breach. Not because they were poorly designed—Chen had rebuilt them from the ground up after the cascade, incorporating redundancies and failsafes that should have made unauthorized access virtually impossible. But staring at that fifteen-second void in the collective field, I realized we'd been building walls against the wrong kind of threat. We'd prepared for brute force. For system overloads and cascading failures. Not for something that could slip through the network like a whisper, leaving barely a trace. Seraphina worked beside me in silence, her fingers dancing across holographic displays as she pulled thread after thread of data. Her implants flickered with a rhythm I'd learned to recognize—deep concentration tinged with something else. Unease, maybe. Or recognition. "Talk to me," I said quietly. She didn't look up. "The gap isn't uniform." I leaned closer to her display. "What do