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The glow of multiple monitors painted Elijah's face in shifting blues and whites, the kind of cold digital light that made a person look like they were perpetually haunting their own bedroom.
Which, honestly, wasn't far from the truth.
His chair — a catastrophically broken gaming throne that had survived three separate accidents and one incident he refused to discuss — spun a lazy half-rotation as he reached across the desk for a snack that had already been eaten. He stared at the empty wrapper for a moment with the deep philosophical resentment of a man who had been betrayed by his own past self, then tossed it aside and turned back to the screens.
To say Elijah was working would be a generous interpretation of what was happening.
To say he was busy would be technically accurate, in the same way that a man sleeping in a burning building was technically resting.
Three of his monitors were dedicated to the breach. The fourth was running a game — a chaotic, obnoxiously colourful parody of a platformer where a blocky little figure kept walking face-first into the same wall and dying — which he occasionally glanced at between keystrokes as if checking in on a friend. The fifth screen, the small one propped sideways at the corner of the desk, was doing something he hadn't looked at in twenty minutes.
He cracked his knuckles. Rolled his neck. Yawned so wide his jaw popped.
Then, with the energy of someone who deeply resented being good at things, he began pulling Halcyon apart from the inside.
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There was an art to it. Not that Elijah would have ever described it that way — he'd have called it messing around or poking at stuff or some other phrase designed to strip any dignity from the act. But what his fingers were doing across three keyboards simultaneously, the way his eyes tracked data streams the way other people tracked conversations, the quiet surgical patience of it all — that was something else. That was the kind of skill that didn't announce itself.
Halcyon's outer security was the digital equivalent of a very expensive locked gate in front of a house with all the windows open. Impressive at first glance. A headache for normal people. A formality for Elijah.
He slipped past the first layer without ceremony.
The second layer gave him a full forty seconds of mild interest before it, too, folded.
He was three nodes deep into Halcyon's architecture now, moving through their internal structures like a slow, unbothered tide creeping under a door. The security system assigned to this particular section of the server had one support — one designated watchdog protocol, a digital sentry meant to hold the line if something went wrong. It was, by all measurable standards, a sophisticated piece of programming.
Elijah looked at it the way a very tired cat looks at a very enthusiastic dog.
He didn't attack it. Didn't dismantle it with force. He simply reached around it with the kind of lazy, confident grace that came from doing something so many times it stopped feeling like effort. The watchdog kept barking at an empty room while he was already three doors down.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, the part of him that could have been impressed by his own ability was fast asleep.
The game on the fourth monitor dinged cheerfully. The little blocky figure had finally made it past the wall.
Progress, Elijah thought, though whether about the game or the breach was genuinely unclear even to him.
---
He was knee-deep in Halcyon's underbelly now, scrolling through the kind of data that made most people nervous just to look at, when something snagged his attention.
A file. Flagged internally. Heavy with the particular digital weight of something that had been looked at by too many important people.
He almost kept scrolling.
Almost.
The name attached to the file stopped him mid-motion like a needle dragged across a record.
Lucian Freeman.
Elijah's hand stilled on the mouse.
He knew that name. He knew it the way you know the name of a bad dream — not with fondness, not with nostalgia, but with the specific full-body recognition of something your nervous system had filed under threat long before your brain caught up.
He clicked it open.
The file unfolded across his centre monitor in dense, bureaucratic language — the kind of language that Mysterium used when they wanted to make something sound clinical rather than catastrophic. Mysterium. The organisation that wore the skin of legitimacy the way a well-tailored suit wore a man — smoothly, convincingly, right up until the moment you noticed the stitching was wrong.
The file described Lucian Freeman in the way governments describe people they've already decided the story about. Convict. Beyond ordinary classification. Someone whose particular set of capabilities had earned him a category that didn't have a polite name — just a designation, cold and bureaucratic, that essentially meant we don't fully understand what he is but we know we want him contained.
Elijah read through the dry, careful language of the file with his jaw slowly tightening.
Then he got to the part about the charges.
Double agent.
A breath left him slowly through his nose. The kind of breath that isn't quite a laugh and isn't quite disbelief, but sits exactly at the intersection of both.
The file stated — plainly, in language that expected him to accept it without question — that Lucian Freeman had been operating as a spy. For some foreign agency with a name that Mysterium had buried under a parody designation so sanitised it almost made the whole thing feel fictional. Almost.*The kind of agency whose name, when you stripped the bureaucratic paint off it, pointed east. Very far east. The kind of allegation that, when attached to a man's name, was designed to make everything else about him irrelevant.
Elijah leaned back.
"Bullshit," he said.
He didn't say it loudly. He didn't need to. It came out of him with the quiet, absolute certainty of a man who had looked at something and simply known it was wrong — the same way you know a room smells different before you can name what the smell is.
Because Elijah had seen Lucian Freeman. Had seen him in circumstances that didn't leave much room for comfortable interpretation. His mind went there without his permission, the way minds do when a name lands wrong.
The memory surfaced like something dredged from cold water.
Lucian Freeman's silhouette. That suit. heavens , that suit.
It hadn't been a suit the way suits were suits. It had been something constructed — something *made* — in a way that suggested its origin was not human in any straightforward sense. The design carried the fingerprints of something Elijah had come to associate with a very particular category of wrong: the lower entities. The kind of craftsmanship that looked like it had grown rather than been sewn. Dark, structured, wrong in the angles.
And the wires. Anchor-thick cables that rose across Lucian's shoulders and spread like the arms of something deep-sea and hungry — not violent in appearance, exactly, but present in the way that things with too much weight on them become present. They'd draped across him like intention. Like tethers. Like something was holding him down or holding something in, and neither option was comforting to consider.
Elijah's eye twitched.
He remembered standing there — wherever *there had been, that place he still didn't have adequate language for — and feeling something close to the very reasonable emotion of I would like to not be here anymore. And he remembered, with the specific texture of genuine relief, the moment that had *not* been his problem to solve alone.
Azaqor.
He didn't say the name out loud. He thought it with the careful gratitude of someone who understood exactly how close the alternative had been. That odd, impossible, robot-adjacent *whatever-it-was* had been there. Had handled it. Had given Elijah the gap he needed to still be sitting in this chair, in this room, with this terrible gaming chair and this empty snack wrapper and this four-monitor setup performing crimes against Halcyon's security infrastructure.
He exhaled.
"Right," he muttered to no one. "Right."
He turned back to the screen.
The file on Lucian Freeman was still open. Still accusing. Still wrong in that particular way that made his teeth feel tight.
He kept reading.
---
He almost closed it there. Almost filed it under *strange things I've encountered and chosen not to dwell on — which was a very large mental cabinet, growing larger by the week. But then his eyes caught the addendum. The secondary notation at the bottom of the file, the part that contained the logistical details. The administrative language. The part that said where Lucian Freeman currently was, and — buried almost casually in the last two lines like an afterthought —
Transfer scheduled. High-security relocation. Crestwood facility. Date of transit —
Elijah's eyes moved across the date.
He read it once.
Read it again.
Looked away from the screen for a moment, at the middle distance of his own room, where nothing in particular existed except the weight of what he'd just read.
Then he looked back, as if confirming that the words had not, in fact, rearranged themselves into something less alarming while he wasn't watching.
They had not.
The date on the screen was tomorrow.
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...Am I —
The thought began and didn't finish, because finishing it would have made it real in a way he wasn't quite ready for.
Am I — is this — is that —
"Psyche," he said out loud.
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