The Algorithm

Chapter 1

Georgia Hale

“Final diagnostics are green across the board. The servers are purring like kittens who just discovered a lifetime supply of cream. Ready to change the world, boss?”

The voice, Chloe’s, crackles with an energy I haven’t felt in years. It comes through the comms embedded in the obsidian walls of the Nest, my self-contained world. I don’t look away from the holographic display dominating the space in front of me. It’s a shimmering, three dimensional nebula of data points, the collective heart of Elysian.

“Run them again,” I say. My own voice is flat, a stark contrast to her fizzing excitement.

“Georgia.” A sigh. “I’ve run them ninety four times. The system is stable. It’s more than stable. It’s perfect. Just like the code you wrote.”

“Perfection is a theoretical concept, Chloe. Ninety five is a better number.”

I hear the click of her keyboard. She’s indulging me. She always does. Chloe is the only person besides my head of security, Leo, who has clearance to even speak to me in here. She’s my lifeline to a world I’ve systematically cut myself off from.

“Okay, ninety five is a go. Still green. Look, the board is getting anxious. The launch presser is scheduled for nine a.m. tomorrow. They actually expect you to, you know, show up. Or at least beam in a hologram that doesn’t look like a hostage video.”

I trace a glowing data stream with my finger, the light warming my skin. “The board can wait. They get their money. I get my results.”

“About that,” she says, her tone shifting, becoming softer. “Why don’t you let me order you something? Real food. Not just nutrient paste. That Thai place you used to love? We could celebrate. It’s been six years, Georgia. You did it. You actually did it.”

Six years. The words hang in the sterile, filtered air. Six years of working, of coding, of building this digital fortress around me. Six years since my world collapsed into a single, catastrophic point of failure. A betrayal so complete it rewrote my personal source code.

“I’m not hungry,” I lie.

“Right. Of course not. God, you’re impossible. At least think about the presser. You could wear that black Armani suit. The one that makes you look like you could acquire a small country with a single glare.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“That’s all I ask.” A pause. “Are you okay?”

I finally look away from the data cloud, my gaze landing on my faint reflection in the dark glass of the server racks. A pale woman with eyes that hold too much information and not enough light. My dark hair is pulled back so tightly it pulls at my temples. I look severe. Reclusive. Exactly what a tech billionaire who hasn't been seen in public in half a decade should look like.

“I’m fine, Chloe. Just… final checks.”

“Okay, boss. Just… call me if you need anything. Anything at all.”

The comm clicks off. Silence returns, thick and heavy. She’s right. Six years. Six years to build Elysian from the ashes of another company. Another life. Elysian. My life’s work. An algorithm so adHaled it can sift through the chaos of seven billion lives and find the one. The single, statistically perfect soulmate for any given person. It analyzes everything, from genetic markers and psychological profiles to the subconscious digital footprints we leave scattered across the internet. It maps desire, predicts compatibility, and eliminates the risk. It eliminates the pain. The kind of pain that can break a person.

It’s my gift to the world. A world I no longer want to be a part of. A way to ensure no one ever has to feel what I felt.

My fingers hover over the master console. The system is ready. It’s flawless. I’ve run every simulation, every permutation. It works. But the scientist in me, the broken part of me, needs one last piece of data. One final, private test before I hand my creation over to the masses.

My own profile is already in the system, a ghost entry used for diagnostics. Coded under a dummy name, scrubbed of all identifying markers except the raw data of me. My entire life, my personality, my hopes, my fears, all translated into cold, hard data.

My heart, an organ I generally try to ignore, starts to beat a little faster. It’s a foolish idea. An exercise in pure ego. What would it even tell me? That I’m incompatible with the entire human race? I already know that.

But my hand moves of its own accord. I pull up the search interface, the clean, minimalist design I sketched out on a napkin all those years ago. A single search bar pulses with soft white light.

I authorize the query. ‘Run Profile 001.’

It’s me.

The system asks for confirmation. My thumb hovers over the biometric scanner. This is a bad idea. A stupid, sentimental, human idea. My entire empire is built on logic, on data, on the predictable patterns of code. This is the opposite of that. This is hope. And hope is a dangerous variable.

I press my thumb to the scanner. It glows green. The search initiates.

The nebula of data on the main screen constricts, then explodes into a supernova of light. Trillions of calculations per second. Elysian is sifting through the world, looking for my other half. For a second, a memory flashes, hot and sharp. A different room, a different screen. Late night coffee and the smell of ozone from overworked computers. Laughter. His laughter.

“We’re building a universe, El,” he’d said, his fingers flying across his keyboard, perfectly in sync with mine. “A digital Eden. Just you and me.”

Simon.

The name is a shard of glass in my memory. Charismatic, brilliant, beautiful Simon Keaton. My partner. In every sense of the word. We built our first company, Genesis, on that dream. We were going to change the world together. And I loved him with a terrifying, absolute certainty. A certainty that made what he did next not just a betrayal, but an extinction level event for the person I used to be.

I shake my head, trying to clear the memory. He’s gone. A ghost. A footnote in my history that I have spent six years and three billion dollars trying to erase.

The algorithm hums, its processing fans the only sound in the room. It’s working through the final candidates. Thousands become hundreds. Hundreds become dozens. Then ten. Five. Three. Two.

My breath catches in my throat. I shouldn’t care. This is just data. This doesn't mean anything. It’s a vanity search. A statistical anomaly. I tell myself this over and over, a mantra against the sudden, ridiculous fluttering in my chest.

The screen goes blank for a single, agonizing second. Then, the result materializes in the air in front of me. Crisp, white text floating in the darkness.

MATCH FOUND.

Beneath it, a name.

Simon Keaton.

And below his name, the compatibility score. A number that glows with an obscene, impossible confidence.

99.9%

I stare. My mind simply refuses to process the information. It’s a system error. It has to be. A bug. A ghost in the code left over from Genesis, the company we built, the code he stole.

“No,” I whisper, the word a puff of air in the silent room. “No. It’s impossible.”

I bring up the error logs. Nothing. I run a full diagnostic on the search parameters. Flawless. I check the core code for any corruption, any trace of old data that could have skewed the result. The system is clean. Pristine. Perfect.

My creation, the most sophisticated matching algorithm in human history, the machine I built to protect people from the kind of devastation he caused, has just looked at me, at the sum total of my being, and declared that my perfect match is the man who ruined my life.

My legs feel weak. I sink into my chair, my eyes locked on his name. The system has pulled his public profile picture. It’s a few years old, but it’s still him. The same dark hair, the same sharp jawline, the same eyes that used to look at me like I was the only thing in the universe that mattered. Now he’s the CEO of some high end cybersecurity firm. A success. Built, no doubt, on the money he got for selling our dream to the highest bidder. To our biggest competitor, the smug, arrogant Marcus Hale, who paraded his stolen victory in every tech journal for a year.

I feel a surge of rage, so hot and pure it makes me dizzy. It’s an old, familiar feeling. The fury that fueled me for six years. The engine that built this entire company.

“You,” I say to the picture, my voice trembling. “How dare you show up here. In my house. In my machine.”

My hand balls into a fist. I want to smash the screen, to shatter his face into a million pixels of light. But I can’t. This is my work. This is Elysian. And Elysian doesn't make mistakes.

The implications of that fact crash down on me. If the algorithm is right, what does that mean? That the foundation of my life for the past six years, the cold, hard certainty of his betrayal and my hatred, is wrong? That the man who tore my world apart is somehow, cosmically, the one person meant to put it back together?

It’s a joke. A cruel, twisted joke played by a universe with a sick sense of humor. Or a flaw in my logic so profound that my entire life’s work is a lie.

I lean forward, my face inches from his name. My reflection is superimposed over his image, two ghosts in the same machine. My perfect match. The man I’ve spent every waking moment of the last six years hating with every fiber of my being.

“What did you do?” I whisper to the empty room, to the phantom on my screen.

The number just glows back at me, a silent, damning verdict.

99.9%.

Chapter 2

Georgia Hale

Six years ago.

The world smells like cold pizza and electricity. It’s three in the morning. Our world is a single room, a converted warehouse loft with exposed brick and enough server racks to power a small city. This is Genesis.

Our Eden.

“It’s sentient,” Simon says, his voice a low murmur beside me. “I swear to god, El, it’s learning.”

I don’t look away from the lines of code scrolling across my screen. A cascade of green and white symbols that feel more like poetry than logic. “Don’t be dramatic. It’s a predictive analytics engine. It’s not going to ask for voting rights.”

I feel his grin more than I see it. His arm snakes around my waist, pulling me back against his chest. He rests his chin on my shoulder, his warmth seeping through my thin t-shirt. “But what if it did? What if Prometheus actually came alive?”

Prometheus. That’s what he calls our core code. The part of the system that could map a person’s digital footprint and predict their next move. It was supposed to revolutionize online security.

“If it comes alive,” I say, leaning my head back against his, “we’ll teach it to make better coffee. This stuff tastes like battery acid.”

He laughs, a sound that vibrates through my whole body. “You’re so pragmatic. It’s one of the top five things I love about you.”

“Only top five?” I arch an eyebrow, finally turning to look at him. His face is illuminated by the glow of the monitor. Dark hair falling across his forehead, eyes so bright with intelligence and something else, something just for me, that it still makes my breath catch.

“Well, there’s your brain. The way you look when you’re solving an impossible problem. The fact you can quote every line from Blade Runner. Your very questionable taste in music,” he says, ticking them off on his fingers.

“My taste in music is impeccable.”

“It’s not. But I love it anyway. And then there’s this.” His thumb gently traces my bottom lip. My own private algorithm goes haywire. My heart rate spikes. My skin temperature rises. All the biological data points of being hopelessly, completely in love.

He leans in and kisses me, slow and deep. It tastes like stale coffee and the future. A future so bright it’s blinding. When he pulls away, his eyes are serious.

“The final build is compiling,” he whispers. “It’s done, Georgia. We did it.”

“We’re close,” I correct, my voice softer than I intend.

“We’re there. Tomorrow we lock the code. Next week, we show it to the world. And Marcus Hale can kiss our collective, brilliant asses.”

Marcus Hale. Our competitor. A man with more money than sense and a team of coders who couldn't innovate their way out of a paper bag. He’d been trying to poach us for months.

“I’d pay to see that,” I murmur.

“We won’t have to. We’ll be so far ahead of him he’ll be a speck in our rearview mirror.” He kisses my forehead. “Get some sleep. We have a universe to launch tomorrow.”

I don’t sleep. I stay up, watching the progress bar on the final compilation. Watching our dream become a reality. I trust him. I trust him with my code, with my company, with my heart. The trust is absolute. A constant variable in the chaotic equation of my life.

That is my first mistake.

Two days later, the universe ends.

It doesn’t end with a bang. It ends with the cheerful ping of an incoming email. I’m at my terminal, running final security checks. Simon is in a meeting with our patent lawyers. The subject line is from a friend at a tech blog. ‘Congrats on the acquisition?’

My fingers freeze over the keyboard.

Acquisition? We haven’t been acquired. We haven’t even launched.

I open the email. There’s a link. A press release from Hale Industries.

‘Hale Industries Acquires Groundbreaking Predictive Technology, Set to Unveil Flagship Product ‘Oracle’.’

My blood runs cold. I read the product description. It’s not similar to our work. It’s not inspired by it. It’s a word for word lift of the abstract from our patent application. It’s Prometheus.

“No.” The word is a crack in the silence of the office.

It has to be a lie. A scare tactic. Marcus is arrogant, but he’s not stupid enough to claim something he doesn’t have.

Unless he has it.

My hands fly across the keys. My mind is a steel trap, slamming shut on every emotion except cold, hard logic. Accessing the server logs. Checking the firewalls. Everything is clean. Too clean.

No breach. No forced entry. No alarms tripped.

It wasn’t taken from the outside.

It was given from the inside.

My search deepens. I peel back layers of encrypted logs, using the backdoors only Simon and I know exist. My heart is a frantic, panicked drum against my ribs.

And then I find it. A single data transfer. Three a.m. the night before last. While I was asleep, dreaming of our future. A compressed file, containing the entire source code for Prometheus. Sent from an internal terminal. Masked. Rerouted. But not good enough to hide from me.

I run the final trace. My fingers tremble.

The screen flashes with the origin point. The terminal’s unique identifier.

JKeaton_01.

Simon’s machine.

For a moment, I just stare. My brain refuses to connect the dots. It’s a frame job. It has to be. Someone spoofed his ID. Someone got his credentials.

I keep digging. I need more data. I hack into our financial servers. Another backdoor, this one I built myself, just in case. I search for any unusual activity. Anything linked to Simon.

Something pings. A shell corporation I’ve never heard of. A transaction was processed yesterday. A transfer from an untraceable account based in the Cayman Islands. A deposit.

Fifty million dollars.

The beneficiary account is registered to one person.

Simon Keaton.

The data is clear. The evidence is irrefutable. My algorithm, my logic, my own two eyes are telling me a truth so monstrous I can’t breathe.

The man I love sold our dream. He sold our future. He sold me.

The door to the office clicks open.

It’s him. He’s smiling, holding two cups of coffee. The same way he does every morning. He looks exactly the same. Nothing in his face betrays the cataclysmic betrayal he just unleashed.

“Hey,” he says, his smile widening. “Lawyers are handled. The patents are ironclad. You are officially looking at the co-founder of the most valuable piece of intellectual property on the planet.”

My face is a mask. I don’t move. I don’t speak. I just watch him.

His smile falters. “El? What is it? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I have,” I say, my voice a hollowed out version of itself. “My own.”

I turn my monitor so he can see it. The bank statement is on the screen. The fifty million dollar deposit glowing in the dim light.

He puts the coffees down. He walks over. He looks at the screen. The color drains from his face. “What is this?”

“I think you know,” I say. My voice is steady. Frighteningly steady. The grief is so large it has burned away all the tears, all the anger. All that’s left is a core of frozen certainty.

“No. I have no idea what this is. This is a joke, right?” He looks at me, his eyes wide with a confusion that would seem genuine if I didn’t know better. If I didn't have the data.

“It’s not a joke.” I click a key. The screen changes to the Hale Industries press release. “This isn’t a joke either, is it? ‘Oracle.’ Did you come up with that name, or did Marcus?”

He reads it. He shakes his head, stepping back from the desk as if it’s radioactive. “No. Georgia, no. This is impossible. Someone stole it.”

“Yes,” I say, standing up. We’re facing each other across the space that used to be our shared world. “They did. The transfer came from your terminal, Simon. The money went to your account. Do you see the problem here? Do you see the data?”

“The data is wrong! It’s forged! It has to be!” He runs a hand through his hair, his composure finally cracking. “Georgia, you have to believe me. I would never. We built this together.”

“Yes, we did. Which makes it so much easier for one person to sell out the other.”

“Why would I do that?” he pleads, taking a step toward me. “Fifty million? Our company is going to be worth billions! It makes no sense!”

“Maybe you got scared. Maybe you wanted a sure thing. Maybe you were lying about everything, all of it, from the very beginning.” The words fall like shards of ice.

He stops. He looks at me. And in his eyes, I see something shift. The panic recedes, replaced by a strange, bleak resignation. It’s the look of a man who knows he’s been perfectly trapped.

“Don’t say that,” he says, his voice quiet. “Don’t you ever say that.”

“Give me a reason not to.” I challenge him. “Give me one piece of data to contradict what I’m seeing.”

He just stares at me. He opens his mouth, then closes it. He can’t. He has nothing. The evidence is perfect. The frame is flawless.

“I can’t,” he whispers. “You just… you have to trust me.”

I laugh. It’s a terrible sound. Brittle and broken. “Trust? Trust is a variable I’ve eliminated from the equation. All I had was you. Your word. Your promises. They were my constants. And they were all corrupt.”

His face hardens. “If you think that, then there’s nothing I can say.”

“No,” I agree. “There isn’t.”

The silence stretches. It’s filled with the ghosts of every late night, every shared dream, every kiss.

“Get out,” I say. The words are calm. Final.

“Georgia.”

“Get out of my company. Get out of my life.”

He looks at me for a long moment, his expression unreadable. It’s not guilt. It’s not anger. It’s something else. Something that looks almost like pity. As if I’m the one who is lost.

Then he turns. He walks to the door without another word. He doesn’t look back.

The door closes behind him.

I am alone.

I stand there for an hour. Maybe two. Time has ceased to have meaning. I walk over to the whiteboard. It’s covered in our handwriting. Flowcharts, equations, plans for the future. ‘Genesis Launch Party.’ ‘Buy Champagne.’

His name is next to mine everywhere. Georgia & Simon.

I pick up a dry erase marker. I walk back to my terminal, to the glowing screen with the evidence of his betrayal. My hand is steady now. My purpose is clear.

He took my heart. He took my trust. He took our company.

I will not let him take my work.

I sit down. I open a new file. Blank. Clean. A fresh start. I will build something new. Something better. Something that can never be broken or betrayed.

Something that can see a fracture like this coming, and protect against it. Something that can find the perfect match, with perfect certainty, so no one ever has to feel this way again.

My fingers begin to move across the keyboard. The first lines of a new code appear on the screen. The first lines of Elysian.

Chapter 3

Georgia Hale

The name hangs in the air, a hologram of a ghost. Simon Keaton. 99.9%. My perfect match. The perfect lie.

My fist clenches. I want to shatter the projection. I want to wipe his name from my system, from my memory, from existence itself. A system purge. A full memory wipe. But I don’t move. Elysian doesn’t make mistakes. That is its one, perfect, unchangeable function. This result is a data point, and I do not discard data, no matter how much it burns.

My finger moves to the console, to the command that will erase the search. Delete the query. Bury the evidence of this statistical insanity.

Before I can touch the screen, the world turns red.

A klaxon screams, a raw, tearing sound that violates the sterile silence of the Nest. Every surface, every wall, every server rack flashes with crimson emergency lighting. It’s an alarm I have never heard outside of a simulation.

A core breach.

“Georgia!” Chloe’s voice is sharp with panic over the comms. “We have an intrusion! It’s not a drill! I repeat, not a drill!”

I’m already moving. My chair glides to the master console, my hands flying across the holographic interface. Code scrolls past my eyes, a language I speak more fluently than English. The rage, the confusion from moments ago, it all vanishes. Replaced by ice.

“Where is it coming from?” I demand.

“Everywhere!” Chloe sounds breathless. “They bypassed the outer firewalls like they weren’t even there. They’re inside the primary network.”

“Lock it down. Isolate the Elysian servers. Now.”

“I’m trying! They’re anticipating my every move. It’s like they have a map of the whole system.”

The klaxon cuts off. The red light remains, bathing the room in a bloody glow. A new voice, calm and lethal, slices through the comms.

“Hale. Talk to me.”

Leo. My head of security.

“They’re inside,” I say, my eyes scanning a dozen diagnostic windows at once. “They’re not brute forcing it. They’re elegant. They’re looking for something specific.”

“Elysian,” Leo says. It’s not a question. “My team is sweeping the physical perimeter. Nothing. This is purely digital.”

“They’re too fast, Leo,” Chloe says, her voice strained. “I’m putting up walls and they’re just walking through them.”

“Then stop building walls and start digging trenches,” I snap. “I need a trace. Give me an origin point.”

“Working on it.”

I see the attacker’s digital signature moving through my network. It’s a phantom, sleek and silent. It ignores the financial data, the corporate servers, the employee records. It makes a direct line for the heart of my empire. The code that powers Elysian.

“They’re not trying to steal it,” I murmur, watching its path. “They’re reading it. Scanning the architecture.”

“Reconnaissance,” Leo’s voice is grim. “They’re casing the joint before they rob it blind.”

“I’m not letting them get that far.”

My fingers become a blur. I stop defending and go on the attack. I write a feedback loop on the fly, a recursive piece of code designed to trap the intruder, to drown them in their own data requests. It’s a digital python, and I’m letting it loose in my own house.

“What are you doing?” Chloe asks.

“Setting a trap,” I say.

The phantom slows. It encounters my code. It prods it. Tests it. For a second, it seems to recoil. I can almost feel its surprise. Then, it does something I don’t expect. It doesn’t try to break the trap or flee. It disengages. It simply pulls back, retracting its tendrils from every corner of my network with surgical precision.

And then it’s gone.

The red lights switch off. The sterile white of the Nest returns. The diagnostic screens all flash green. Normal.

The silence that follows is more terrifying than the alarm.

“What just happened?” Chloe asks, her voice barely a whisper.

“They left,” Leo says.

“Did you get the trace?” I ask, my heart still hammering against my ribs.

“A ghost,” Leo replies. “They bounced the signal through two dozen proxy servers. Moscow, Shanghai, Buenos Aires. By the time we pinpointed one, it was already gone. They left nothing behind.”

I lean back in my chair, the adrenaline starting to fade, leaving a cold dread in its place. I stare at my system logs. Flawless firewalls, state of the art encryption, and they slipped through it all as if they had a key.

“The Nest is compromised, Georgia,” Leo’s voice is low and serious. “I’m coming in.”

I don’t argue. A minute later, the pneumatic door to my sanctuary hisses open. Leo steps inside. He’s a tall man, built like the soldier he used to be, with a stillness about him that commands respect. He’s the only person besides Chloe who has ever set foot in here, and only in the direst of emergencies.

This qualifies.

He doesn’t look at the technology. His eyes find mine. “Report.”

“The attack lasted four minutes and seventeen seconds,” I say, pulling the final summary to the main screen. “They made no attempt to steal or corrupt any data. They simply observed. They mapped the core infrastructure of the Elysian network. It was a probe. An intelligence gathering mission.”

“They were testing our responses,” Leo says, his gaze fixed on the screen. “Seeing how we’d react. What defenses we’d deploy.”

“They know our playbook now,” I finish.

“And they’ll be back.” He turns to me, his expression unreadable. “Whoever they are, they’re professionals. This isn’t a corporate rival, Georgia. This isn’t Marcus Hale trying to peek at your work. This is a different league entirely. This was funded. It was military grade.”

I nod, my throat tight. “I need new protocols. Stronger firewalls. I can write them tonight.”

“You can’t,” he says flatly.

I look up at him, my brow furrowing. “What?”

“Your defenses are the best in the world. I’ve seen them. The problem isn’t the walls you built. It’s the foundation they’re built on.”

My blood runs cold. I know what he’s talking about.

“They didn’t look for a new door to break down,” he continues, his voice steady. “They were looking for an old one. One that was built into the house from the beginning.”

“Genesis,” I whisper.

The name of the company I built with Simon. The source of the original code. The ghost in my machine.

“I rewrote ninety percent of it,” I say, my voice defensive. “The core architecture is all new.”

“Ninety percent isn’t a hundred,” Leo counters. “This attacker, they don’t just know code. They know the philosophy behind your code. They know how you think. How you build. To stop them, we need someone who knows it better. Someone who thought it with you.”

A sick feeling rises in my stomach. The two events, Elysian’s impossible result and this perfectly targeted attack, are starting to feel connected in a way I can’t comprehend. A way that makes no logical sense.

“No,” I say, shaking my head. “There’s no one else.”

“There is,” Leo says.

He doesn’t need to say the name. I feel it coming. I can feel it resonating in the air between us, a toxic frequency only I can hear. For six years I have built this fortress, this life, this empire, on the bedrock of one single, undeniable truth: his betrayal. And now, that fortress is under siege, and the one person who might have the key is the same man who helped lay the foundation.

Leo holds up a tablet. On the screen is a corporate profile. A man in a sharp, dark suit. A little older. Sharper lines around his eyes. But it’s him. The same ghost from Elysian’s search result.

Keaton Security. The world’s leading cybersecurity firm.

His company.

“He’s the best there is at this, Georgia,” Leo says, his tone leaving no room for argument. “He specializes in defending against exactly these kinds of threats. He knows the Genesis code because he wrote half of it.”

I stare at the picture. Simon Keaton. My traitor. My ruin. My 99.9% match.

The universe has a sick sense of humor.

“No,” I say. The word is a shard of ice. “Absolutely not.”

“This isn’t about your history,” Leo presses, his patience wearing thin. “This is a strategic decision. He’s our only viable asset.”

“He is not an asset. He is a liability. He is the man who sold my code to the highest bidder. How do we know he’s not behind this attack?”

“We don’t,” Leo admits. “But if he is, it’s better to have him in here where we can watch him. If he’s not, he’s the only one who can help us find who is.” He takes a step closer. “They will get in, Georgia. Next time, they won’t just be looking. They’ll take it. They’ll take Elysian. Everything you’ve built for the last six years will be gone.”

My hands are trembling. I hide them under the console. The thought of Simon here, in my space, in the Nest, looking at my code, looking at me… it’s a violation I can’t stomach. It’s impossible. Unthinkable.

“Find someone else,” I say, my voice dangerously low.

“There is no one else.”

His words are a death sentence. A choice between two impossibilities. Let my life’s work be stolen, or invite the devil back into my house to save it.

I turn away from him, my gaze fixed on the blank, silent screens. I built this place to be safe. To keep the world out. To keep him out.

“Get out, Leo,” I whisper.

He hesitates for a moment. Then he places the tablet on the edge of my console, Simon’s face looking up at me. A silent, unavoidable ultimatum.

“The clock is ticking, Georgia,” he says softly.

The door hisses shut behind him, leaving me alone in the silence.

Alone with the ghost on the screen and the ghost in my machine. One and the same. My perfect match and my perfect enemy. And apparently, my only hope.