Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 77051 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77051 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Catnip for a coward.
Knight and I sit shoulder to shoulder in Riverside’s back room, laptops open, comms live. Ozzy’s on his rooftop with a directional antenna because he says the sky “makes computers honest.” Arrow paces, stretching the knuckles in his right hand like the bones keep time to the fans.
Arrow says, “Honeypot’s up. Canary creds seeded.”
Ozzy says through comms, “Pings are clean. Any rat that sniffs this cheese gets a bell round its neck.”
Render adds, “I added a blinking ‘skull’ emoji to the footer.”
Knight laughs. “You’re a dork.”
Render salutes him. “Thank you.”
We wait.
The worst part of this work isn’t the violence. It’s the silence before it.
I can still smell River’s shampoo in the air—lavender and that warm something that makes my chest go tight. It’s probably my imagination, but I still smell it all the same. She’s on the other side of the wall, lying on the bed we made, unaware that a roomful of idiots who swore to protect her are trying to turn the internet inside out.
My phone buzzes with a single unread message from our masked thread.
RIVER: Practiced the stance. Thumbs outside. Don’t laugh.
I don’t reply. If I start, I won’t stop.
Instead, I stare at the Cathedral site and think about the way she looked up at me—at Mask—yesterday when I corrected her grip. Like she was cataloging my voice for later.
The modulator worked. Mostly.
I still heard myself under it.
I think she did too.
“Movement,” Ozzy says, breaking the quiet. “We’ve got a rat on Cathedral. New session. User string matches his pattern.”
Regent. I lean forward, every nerve ending standing at attention.
Arrow adopts my position, leaning forward as well. “Hold… hold… he’s reading the thread.”
Render nods. “Scrolling behavior’s hungry.”
Knight says, “Come on, take the bite.”
We watch his cursor hover over DM for link. He clicks into messages. Types. Deletes. Types again.
“Come on,” I whisper. “Do it.”
He doesn’t.
Arrow shifts in his chair. “He backed out.”
Ozzy says, “Chicken.”
Render exhales, long and deep. “He’s seen enough flame to know when the pan’s hot.”
Regent drops. The session goes idle.
My jaw aches from how hard I’m clenching. He’s slippery. Or someone warned him.
“Reset the cheese,” Arrow says, calm. “Make it stinkier.”
Render edits the thread title to: NEW: Uncut Interview. Private link. 10 min window.
We wait again.
A minute. Five. Twelve.
Then—
Ozzy says, “Ping. Different session. NovaPlay subnet. Fast fingers.”
My pulse spikes. “Regent again?”
“Negative,” Arrow says, eyes narrowing at the telemetry. “Signature’s wrong. This isn’t him. Different keyboard cadence, different TTL. But…” He pauses, frowning. “This device knows our internal routes.”
“Who?” Knight asks.
Render zooms the capture and drops a block of metadata on the main monitor. IP: 10.24.13.42. Subnet: HR/Finance VLAN. The tracer we embedded crawls upstream, following DHCP bread crumbs.
My stomach drops out. I know that number. Not the exact digits—IP leases shuffle—but the history behind them. Arrow starts peeling back the asset logs the way a surgeon peels back skin.
“Ninety days ago,” he narrates, “.42 belonged to a workstation on the Engineering floor. Desk C-17.”
“That’s River’s old desk,” I say, before I can stop myself.
“Was,” Arrow corrects. “Two months ago, IT reimaged and moved the tower to… HR.”
The room goes very still.
Knight exhales through his nose. “So someone in HR just clicked our bait pretending to be a Cathedral user, from River’s old IP lineage.”
Ozzy whistles low. “That’s not sloppy. That’s cocky.”
My hands curl into fists. “Who sits at that machine now?”
Arrow pulls a list. The new assignment sits on the screen like a stain. No name, just “HR Shared Workstation.” That covers a dozen staff. But the DHCP table shows one MAC address seen most often between 6 p.m. and midnight.
Render overlays badge access logs from the building—he shouldn’t have them; he does anyway—and cross-correlates late-night HR swipes with that MAC uptime.
Three names bubble to the top. He highlights them.
Justin, financials.
Aaron, compliance.
Shawn: developer
Tasha, People Ops.
Tasha.
I hear the name and see River’s face soften—the way it only does for a handful of people. I see a pineapple-print sleep shirt and a couch. I see a door opening at 1:42 a.m.
“Could be any of them,” Knight says quickly, like he can feel the way my chest just caved in. “We don’t jump.”
“Yeah,” I say, voice rough. My heart’s thudding in my throat. “We don’t jump.”
On-screen, the HR workstation session doesn’t hesitate. It DMs our bait account. The ask is efficient, practiced.
“Link. Now.”
Render sends the hook. A single-use URL to the “uncut interview” zip. Inside: our tripwire.
They click.
The tracer sinks in like a tooth.
Arrow says, “We’ve got ‘em. Payload deployed. Packet capture rolling.”
My console fills with data—their OS version, browser fingerprint, a mirrored cache of their Cathedral bookmarks. A hash we’ve seen before surfaces in the muck: a guild key that appears only on moderator decks.
Knight leans forward. “That’s a Cathedral mod credential.”
“They’re not just a lurker,” Ozzy says softly. “They’re staff.”
Rage blooms hot and stupid behind my ribs. River spilled her guts to HR while HR logged into a forum that exists to turn women like her into trophies.