Helix Crown's lower levels were never truly silent.
Even at night, even between shifts, something always moved. Coolant flowed through hidden systems. Generators pulsed beneath the floors. Machines breathed in long, mechanical rhythms.
Tae-Hyun had learned to read those sounds.
Lately, they were changing.
He felt it before he saw it.
New personnel. Slight alterations in security paths. A different pacing in the way researchers moved through corridors. Conversations cut short when unfamiliar footsteps approached.
Someone was studying the system.
And systems studied back.
In Section C, two cameras had been replaced.
The new ones tracked differently.
Slower.
More deliberate.
He noted the shift times. The guards who lingered. The technicians who no longer joked when they thought no one important was near.
Helix was mapping something.
He suspected he knew what.
Dr. Seo confirmed it three nights later.
They met briefly in the old lab, the door closed, the lights dimmed.
"There's an internal task force," she said. "Small. Quiet. Reporting directly to the board."
"Official purpose?"
"Quality control," she replied. "They're reviewing anomaly reports. Looking for irregular biological events. Stabilizations. Spikes. Anything that shouldn't have happened."
His fingers curled slowly.
"C-21?"
"She's at the top of the list."
He exhaled.
"They're already building a profile," she continued. "They don't know what they're looking for yet. Only that something inside the system doesn't behave the way it should."
"And when they find a pattern," he said, "they'll look for a person."
"Yes."
She hesitated, then added, "They've requested expanded surveillance on sanitation and support staff. Anyone who moves between departments without oversight."
He met her eyes.
"Me."
"Eventually," she said. "If we're not careful."
They stood in the narrow space, the soft hum of equipment filling the quiet between them.
"We need to give them something else to study," he said.
She looked at him sharply. "You mean a distraction."
"I mean a pattern that isn't mine."
She considered.
"You want to manipulate the data stream," she said. "Create controlled irregularities elsewhere so the noise buries you."
"Yes."
"That's dangerous," she replied. "You'd be interfering more."
"I won't touch anyone," he said. "Not directly."
She held his gaze for a long moment, then nodded.
"I can seed minor discrepancies into archived trial data," she said. "Old projects. Non-active files. Enough to suggest instrumentation drift or long-term instability."
"And I'll stay quiet," he said. "No interventions. No absorption."
Her expression softened slightly.
"For how long?"
"Until we know more."
She exhaled.
"That may not be up to you."
Two nights later, Helix Crown's internal network glitched.
Only briefly.
Only in places no one outside the system would ever notice.
Archived regeneration data from three discontinued projects updated simultaneously. A statistical anomaly appeared in neural decay modeling. A long-dormant cell-viability file returned an unexpected stabilization curve.
Nothing dramatic.
Nothing obvious.
But enough.
Within hours, the underground floors shifted again.
More analysts. More silent observation. More attention directed toward the past instead of the present.
The pressure eased.
Slightly.
Tae-Hyun felt it in the way eyes passed over him instead of through him.
Dr. Seo noticed it in the questions that stopped being asked.
"You bought time," she said quietly during a late visit to the lab.
"For both of us," he replied.
She watched him for a moment.
"You're thinking like them."
He met her gaze.
"I was one of them."
The words lingered.
She turned back to the monitor.
"I pulled personnel histories from the early Helix medical division," she said. "From before the towers. Before the board expanded."
He stepped closer.
A list of names scrolled down the screen.
Doctors.
Program heads.
Oversight officers.
And at the top:
YOON JAE-SUNG.
"Your donor profile is referenced in thirteen sealed projects," she said. "Always indirectly. Always without identifiers. But the structural data is the same."
He studied the screen.
"They didn't build Devil's Heir around an idea," she continued. "They built it around you."
He nodded once.
"Yoon consolidated control over the medical branch two years after those trials," she added. "That's when the first underground facilities were commissioned."
He thought of the early days. The way Yoon had guided him into corporate leadership. The patience. The careful shaping.
He had never been elevated.
He had been relocated.
"I want access to Yoon's private development funds," he said. "The early shell structures. The ones that predate Helix Crown's public accounts."
Her fingers hovered over the keyboard.
"That's not something I can reach."
He looked at her.
"But you know who can."
She met his eyes.
"Maybe," she said. "If I'm willing to risk being noticed."
He was quiet.
Then, "I won't ask you to."
She studied his face.
The restraint.
The anger held under control.
The quiet certainty that he would proceed regardless.
"I didn't say I wouldn't," she replied.
She turned back to the screen and began typing.
Outside the lab, Helix continued to realign itself, unaware that two people were quietly learning how to bend its internal gravity.
And somewhere in the highest floors of the tower, Chairman Yoon was approving reports that described a system behaving strangely.
He read them with mild interest.
He had not yet begun to worry.