Page 124 of Thorne
"Yes."
Line thirty-two. Line thirty-three.
"Can you stop it?"
"Not without leaving the terminal." Line thirty-five. "If I break the connection now, Phoenix will recognize the framework as hostile. It will purge the input, and we'll never get another chance."
"How much longer?"
"Two minutes. Maybe more."
"And the halon?"
I don't answer. I don't have to.
Line thirty-eight. Line thirty-nine.
Thorne reaches for his tactical vest, his movements a blur of efficiency. "Masks."
The hiss starts before he can finish.
It comes from the ceiling, venting from recessed slats hidden between the server racks. White vapor pours into the room, thick and chemical. The halon dump. Phoenix is trying to starve the room of oxygen to save the hardware—and kill the intruders.
I grab my mask with my left hand, pulling the rubber housing over my face. The seal tightens against my skin with a dull suction, and the first breath of filtered air is sharp and metallic in my lungs. My right hand never leaves the keyboard.
When I saw the team prepping at the farmhouse, I thought the "standard loadout" was overkill—the redundancies, the gas masks for a digital insertion, the extra magazines for aquietcorridor.
I've spent my life in climate-controlled offices where a crisis meant a crashing server, not a chemical blackout. I didn't understand the utility of being over-prepared until now.
In Thorne's world, the math isn't just on the screen. It's in the filters. It's in the tactical vest he's currently using to shield my back.
I squint through the clear acrylic of the mask, the white fog turning the server room into a ghostly labyrinth. The cursor blinks, steady and indifferent to the gas.
Three minutes to handshake.
"Stay on it." Thorne's voice crackles through the internal comms of the mask. He's a dark silhouette in the mist, his rifle raised, his body a barrier between me and the only door. "I've got the room."
I don't answer. I don't have the breath to waste. I just type.
Line forty-one. Line forty-two.
The vapor spreads into a white haze.
Line forty-four. Line forty-five.
Line forty-seven. Line forty-eight.
The server room is a white-out of freezing vapor, the halon hissing from the ceiling like a thousand disturbed snakes. I squint, my eyes stinging behind the clear acrylic, focusing on the green pulse of the cursor.
A sharp, metallicclackechoes off the rack to my left—a piece of a shattered security droid's housing, kicked up by the crossfire.
The impact is a blunt, violent force against my temple.
The world tilts forty-five degrees as the metal fragment shears across the side of my face. There is a jagged, high-pitchedsnapof polycarbonate. The clear face shield of my mask spiderwebs, a radiating map of white fractures blooming over my left eye. Then the structural seam at the temple gives way entirely.
The seal doesn't just leak; it vanishes.
The hiss of the internal oxygen supply is swallowed by the rush of the chemical fog. The first breath of halon is a cold, dry vacuum. It hits the back of my throat like a lungful of powdered ice, instantly stripping the moisture from my windpipe. My chest hitches, a reflexive, violent spasm for air that isn't there.
