Page 20 of Knight (Chambers Brothers Trilogy #3)

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Knight

I don’t really believe she’s a technical mastermind, not anymore. No one can keep up that level of … I cut off that train of thought, eyes narrowing as a new pattern emerges in the virus’s attack sequence.

“Fucking Victor.”

“What’s happening?” Glitch’s voice barely carries over the alarms.

“Your delivery is trying to eat my code.” Another alert flashes.

“I’m sorry.” Her soft words cut through the noise, and I glance over at her.

The message he sent pushes its way to the front of my mind.

Can you save them both? It might have to be your systems or the girl. The clock is ticking.

Save her from what , though? She’s right here, watching my systems burn down with the kind of wide-eyed terror that can’t be faked.

The virus breaches another firewall as the timer hits thirty-five minutes. The other is now at ten. I don’t know what will happen when either of them reach zero. But each minute reveals more about how the attack was engineered. It’s not just Victor’s work. It carries traces of other influences. Other styles.

Almost like he’s been teaching someone else.

I rub the back of my neck with one hand, still typing with the other.

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Yes, you can stay there, shut the fuck up and don’t touch anything.” I scan another sequence of code.

Certain sequences show Victor’s trademark elegance, but there are others that display a different approach. More aggressive. Less concerned with stealth. It’s as though someone took his foundation, then built something cruder on top of it, like using a sledgehammer to open a door instead of a lock pick. They both work. One is just less likely to be noticed.

“Those symbols. They keep repeating over and over.” She leans forward, surprising me, and points at a line of code. “Is that normal?”

“What are you, tech support now?” But she’s right. There is a pattern. A signature that shouldn't be there. “Be quiet and let me work.”

Sweat trickles down my spine while I trace the virus’s path.

“Son of a fucking bitch. He’s got a new student.”

“What? Who? A student?”

“Victor.” I dig deeper, examining the coding structure. This definitely isn’t just his work. Someone else had a hand in this.

Now that I know what I’m looking for, I can see it everywhere. It’s a collaboration. A not-quite-perfect fusion of his teaching methods and someone else’s implementation. Someone who understands enough about the architecture of hacking to be dangerous, but lacks the finesse that comes with experience.

“Can’t you just disconnect everything?” Glitch wipes sweat from her forehead. “Turn it all off.”

“Brilliant strategy.” My fingers don’t stop moving across the keyboards. “I’m sure no one has ever thought of that before.”

“I’m just trying to help.”

“You’ve helped enough.” The first timer hits thirty minutes, the second reaches five. “Or did you forget how we got here?”

She falls silent, but I can feel her watching me work. The virus tears through another protocol. My screen fills with cascading failure notices. At this rate, there won’t be anything left to save.

I could cut power to everything. It would stop the virus cold, temporarily anyway. But that could mean losing years of work, every project, every piece of code I’ve developed.

And I’d be trapped in here … with her.

“The timers. What happens when they hit zero?”

“Nothing good.” I track another breach, noting the pattern. Someone is definitely learning Victor’s methods, but they’re impatient. Crude. Showing hints of more experience in some areas than others. “Probably something appropriately dramatic knowing Victor.”

“That’s not an answer.”

"It's the only one you're getting."

The alarm is reaching a point where the sound is unbearable. The heat is building. We need air before breathing becomes difficult.

She’s right about one thing. At this rate, the equipment will cook itself before the virus finishes its job.

“Knight?” Her voice carries an edge of panic. “If you’ve got any plan, right?—”

“Shut up.” I study the latest attack sequence. “I need to think.”

Temperature warnings flash across my remaining screens. The heat from the equipment is going to make this room uninhabitable soon.

I’m out of options.

“I know you said you’re not going to do it, but will cutting power stop it?”

“Yes. But it also traps us here. No elevator. No security. No communications.”

“You have a balcony. Surely there’s a way to get someone’s attention. A neighbor?—”

“When I said it’ll trap us in here, I mean in here . This room.”

“In the dark?”

“Having second thoughts about breaking into my apartment?”

“I didn’t break in. I had codes!”

“Which worked out so well for everything.” I scrub a hand down my face, take in a deep breath, and initiate the shutdown sequence before I can change my mind. “Hold onto something.”

“What? Why would I need to?—”

The lights go out, followed by a flicker as the emergency backups kick in briefly before I kill those too. One by one, my remaining screens go dark. The familiar hum of equipment dies, the alarms cut out, leaving nothing but silence and residual heat from my overloaded computers.

And somewhere out there, Victor’s student is learning how far I’ll go to protect what’s mine.

“Knight?” There’s a tentative touch on my arm. “What happens now?”

“Now?” I lean back in my chair. “Now we wait here, while I figure out what Victor’s playing at. Try not to do anything stupid like move around. There’s a lot of expensive equipment in here that you could trip over.”

"For how long?"

“Until I decide what’s worse—letting the virus finish whatever it’s been designed to do, or being trapped in here with you.”

What did Victor mean about saving her or my systems?

My gut tells me I won’t have to wait long to find out. And right now, in the dark, with a woman I still don’t trust, and computers I can’t access, I’m starting to think that cutting power might have been exactly what the end game of that virus was.