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CHAPTERONE
Grace Harlan didn’t needcaffeine to feel alert. Her body ran on precision now. Predictable routines, optimized input, minimal noise. Still, she cupped the paper mug between both hands, letting the heat soak into her palms as she watched the steam rise in soft spirals toward the recessed ceiling of the NCIS Cyber Division. The overhead fluorescents, third row, second from the left, whirred faintly, always a half-second delay when they flicked on, just enough to be irritating.
This facility in the middle of the desert just outside Phoenix, Arizona, had its own kind of silence.
Not the quiet, peaceful kind that came with still mornings or slow rain. This dense silence was institutional. Measured in badge swipes and locked doors.
Grace walked the same path every morning. Past the armed checkpoint. Past the blue-and-gray corridors lined with framed insignias and grainy satellite photos. The air always smelled faintly of copier toner and reheated coffee. A security camera followed her movements with the same indifference as the people who passed her in the hall.
Inside the dead-end department they had buried her in, the light changed. Cooler. Brighter. Harsher, somehow. Rows of desks stretched under low ceilings, each workstation boxed in by partitions and silent keyboards. The sound of typing was constant. The conversations, when they happened, stayed clipped and low. The walls were clean. The monitors never slept, and no one asked questions unless they had to.
Her office was more a partitioned shadow, tucked at the far end of the floor. A forgotten corner between two overworked analysts and a cold vent that blew year-round. No nameplate, no door. Her work didn’t need visibility. That was the point.
She slid into her chair, powered up the three monitors, and opened her scripts. Lines of code blinked across the screen, familiar and silent, the only language that never asked for more than she could give.
Here, in this space, she could vanish without effort. Just another ghost in the machine.
Most days, she preferred it that way.
Across the bullpen, someone laughed too loudly, a sharp break in the usual hum of data queries and digital scans. Grace blinked once, steady, then turned back to her screen. Six open windows, two databases syncing, her own script running a checksum, a number or value generated from a block of data that helped to verify the data's integrity and detect errors or tampering, all ran in the background just to confirm the government-issued software hadn’t missed anything. It had. Twice.
Her fingers hovered above the keys, paused. Then she resumed auditing a naval drone maintenance invoice, something under a subcontractor’s subcontractor. The numbers were off. Not by much. Just enough to itch.
It wouldn’t matter.
She could flag the discrepancy, add a note, cross-reference the timestamped approval chain. But the report would be passed up, filtered, sanitized, and buried somewhere no one would touch again. That was the rhythm here.
A junior analyst leaned into her doorway. She didn’t look up.
“Morning, Grace,” he said.
“Morning,” she replied, still typing.
A pause, too long to be casual. Then the shuffle of awkward shoes stepping away. The click of his keyboard resumed a few desks down.
People liked her. They just didn’t know what to do with her. She was polite, quiet, competent, exactly the kind of person you thanked in passing but never invited to lunch. She hadn’t always been like this. There was a version of her that used to laugh without flinching. She remembered that girl sometimes, like a dream seen through glass.
Grace minimized her report and glanced at the corner of her monitor. The date flickered. It had been one year to the day since she was pulled off active field intel. One year since a breach she didn’t cause left four people dead, and her body shattered in ways no one could see unless the sleeves rode up too far or someone caught her flinch when the elevator jolted.
Before that, she had been the quiet one in the room full of guns, the field agent with a keyboard instead of a trigger, deployed alongside shadows and operators, trusted to see threats before they hit.
The mission was supposed to be a drone test. Routine.
Mouthpieces called it a malfunction. Grace knew better.
Thinking about it never helped. The body remembered enough without her mind joining in.
She touched the keyboard again, grounding herself.
The numbers made sense. They were her language now. Clean. Contained. They didn’t ask questions likeHow are you really?orDo you still dream about the screaming?They didn’t look at her the way her mother did the week after the tribunal with that polite, polished silence that said everything without speaking.
Grace clicked back to the checksum. Something flickered. A vendor string that shouldn’t have rerouted. Her pulse ticked higher, then evened out. She flagged the anomaly, already pulling the associated files.
Outside her glass partition, the world spun fast and wild, chaotic in a way that scraped raw against the bone. Inside, it was nothing but dry wasteland, air recycled until it tasted of paper and regret, a desert of hollow tasks that even a blindfolded monkey could have managed. Here, in her little corner of faded screens and dying light.
The day passed quickly with Grace working fast and efficiently. When she finished for the day, the lights hummed overhead, the bullpen emptying. A few goodbyes.
She stood, smoothed her blouse, and reached for the navy-blue cardigan framing the back of her chair. The fabric was soft, a barrier between skin and questions. She draped it over her arm and deleted her local logs with three quick keystrokes before locking her terminal.