The room Myotismon keeps for himself doesn't look like much from the corridor outside it, just another door in a building full of doors, the kind of place a person walks past a hundred times without ever wondering what's behind it. Inside is a different matter. Fog pools along the floor and never quite settles, thick enough to swallow footsteps, and the light in there isn't light so much as the absence of anything bright enough to call it that.
A lesser Digimon kneels near the far wall, one of Myotismon's own, the kind that exists mostly to run errands and occasionally to remind everyone else what happens when errands go wrong. It had missed a deadline. It won't miss another one, mostly because it won't be given the chance.
Myotismon doesn't raise a hand. He doesn't need to. The fog around the kneeling shape thickens, pulls inward, and when it thins out again there's simply less of the room occupied than there was a moment ago. He straightens his cape, unbothered, the way a man might straighten his tie after a phone call he'd rather forget.
The door opens. Pierce steps through it without hesitation, the fog curling briefly around his shoes before settling back into place like it recognizes him.
"You're early," Myotismon says.
"I'm on time. Early's for people who need the extra minutes to compose themselves."
"And you don't."
"Not for this."
Pierce doesn't sit, mostly because there's nothing in the room built for sitting. He stands the way he stands in every meeting that matters, weight even, hands loose at his sides, a man who's learned that stillness reads as confidence even when it isn't quite earned yet.
"Sitwell's roster pull went through clean," Pierce says. "No flags, no questions asked above his pay grade. I've got the names sorted by access level, ready whenever you want them."
Myotismon waves that off before Pierce finishes the sentence, a small gesture that makes it clear the roster was never the point of tonight.
"I didn't call you here for an update on Sitwell," Myotismon says.
Pierce goes quiet, the useful kind of quiet, the sort that isn't confusion so much as recalibration. He's dealt with enough men who circle a subject before landing on it that he doesn't bother filling the silence with a guess.
"EDEN," Myotismon says.
The word sits there a moment before Pierce responds, and when he does, his voice carries none of the surprise he'd have every right to feel.
"Cipher's company."
"Cipher's company," Myotismon agrees. "I've had my attention on it since before it had a launch date. Longer than you'd think, if I'm honest, though I rarely am."
Pierce lets that pass without comment. He's noticed by now that Myotismon says things like that the way other men clear their throat, less a statement of fact than a way of testing whether the room's still paying attention.
"I want to know what it is," Myotismon says. "Not what the press releases say it is. What it actually is, underneath."
"That's going to be harder than it sounds."
"Everything worth having is."
Pierce shifts his weight, the closest thing to a tell he allows himself. "Cipher hasn't explained the tech to anyone. Not Stark, not the other kids he runs with. Whatever's under the hood, he built it and he's kept it to himself. There's no thread to pull because nobody else has one either."
"Then you'll have to make one."
"That's not a small ask."
"I didn't ask for a small one."
Something in the fog shifts, and Pierce, who's spent his career learning to read a room before the room finishes deciding what it wants to be, understands that the conversation has moved somewhere he isn't fully welcome yet.
"Can I ask why," Pierce says, "specifically this. There's a dozen companies doing flashier things with worse security. If this is about Cipher, there's easier ways to get to him than his side project."
Myotismon doesn't answer right away. When he does, his voice has dropped into something quieter, the register he uses for things he isn't yet ready to say plainly.
"Its shape is wrong," Myotismon says. "Not wrong the way human technology is usually wrong, clumsy or slow. Wrong the way something is wrong when it's borrowed from somewhere it shouldn't have come from. I've seen that architecture before, Mr. Pierce. Not here."
Pierce doesn't ask where. He's learned already that some doors, even opened a crack, aren't meant to be pushed the rest of the way.
"I don't need you to understand what I think it means," Myotismon says. "I need you to find out how it works before anyone else notices what I've already noticed."
"So the actual assignment."
"Study it. Learn how it runs, who guards it, where it bends before it breaks. Nothing loud. Nothing that leaves a mark anyone would think to trace back to you, let alone to me."
Pierce nods slowly, already turning the shape of it over. "My seat gives me reach into places that don't ask questions when a Council office starts pulling information. I can work from there without anyone blinking."
"Good. Then use it. And use patience alongside it. Whatever you're picturing right now, some quick, clean extraction, put it out of your head. This isn't a smash-and-grab. It's a study."
"Understood."
"I hope it is." Myotismon's gaze doesn't waver. "You've seen what happens to the ones who mistake my patience for permission to move slowly on their own terms rather than mine. I'd rather not have to explain the difference to you twice."
Pierce holds still under that, doesn't flinch, doesn't offer up a promise he doesn't need to make out loud. He's watched Sitwell fold in on himself under less pressure than this, watched him start agreeing to things before he'd even finished hearing them, and Pierce has built his entire career on being the man who doesn't do that.
"You'll get your results," Pierce says. "Clean ones."
Myotismon's mouth curves, not quite a smile, closer to approval filtered through something colder. "See that I do."
The meeting ends the way these meetings always end, without either of them announcing it, Myotismon's attention already drifting somewhere Pierce isn't invited to follow. Pierce straightens his jacket and lets himself out, the fog parting for him on the way through the door the same way it had let him in.
The hallway outside is ordinary in a way that feels almost aggressive after the room he just left, fluorescent and flat and smelling faintly of carpet cleaner. Pierce walks it without hurrying, turning the assignment over the way he'd turn over a case file, looking for the seam that tells him where to start pulling.
EDEN isn't a black box. That's the first useful thing he settles on. It's a public company with public filings, a board, investors, a paper trail that exists whether Cipher wants it to or not. Whatever's actually running underneath the product, the business wrapped around it still has to answer to people who ask ordinary questions, and ordinary questions are the kind Pierce has spent two decades learning how to ask without anyone noticing he's asking them.
Stark Industries is the loose thread worth tugging first. Not because Stark himself is careless, he isn't, but because a partnership that big generates paperwork that big organizations generate without thinking twice, contracts and disclosures and quarterly filings that nobody reads closely except the people paid to. Pierce has been one of those people before. He can be one again.
He doesn't reach for his phone yet. There's no rush in this, not the kind Myotismon would frown at, and rushing now would only mean doing the work sloppily before he's even mapped out where the work actually starts.
By the time he reaches the elevator, the plan isn't finished, not close to it, but it has a shape now, a first door to knock on that won't draw a second glance from anyone watching. Slow. Deniable. Exactly how he prefers to work, and exactly what he told Myotismon he'd deliver.
The elevator doors close. Somewhere behind him, in a room that doesn't look like anything from the outside, something is still deciding what else it isn't ready to say plainly yet.
***
Donate Power Stones to support this novel
Advance chapters in patreon.com/Najicablitz