Chapter 4: Sisterly Signal

The adrenaline coursing through me was a cold burn, making my fingers tingle. Marcus’s backdoor codes, hidden in a decade-old forum thread, connected to a trail of vanishings. This was bigger than a missing $4 million. Much bigger. My burn phone felt heavy in my hand.

I knew confronting Nina Kovac was a bad idea. Marcus had too much leverage inside Aegis. My best bet, my only bet, was Clara. My younger sister, a whirlwind of independent research and a deep distrust of corporate secrecy. She’d spent years in obscure online communities, tracking everything from lost crypto wallets to whispered rumors of shadow corporations. She was exactly the kind of person who could connect these dots.

I found a quiet corner near the vault’s outer wall, away from the server hum. The acoustic tracer in my watch was still running, its faint vibration a steady thrum against my skin. I activated my custom shortwave transmitter, a miniaturized device disguised as a spare power bank, tucked into my toolbox. It was designed to send small, encrypted bursts of data over short distances, bypassing Aegis’s comprehensive network monitoring.

My fingers flew, converting the pastebin link, the hex codes, and Marcus’s name into a tight, compressed data packet. I added a cryptic message: “CipherSeeker77, Aegis 2012, Cook County. Confirm receipt.” I knew Clara would recognize the alias and the context. She’d know what to do.

I aimed the shortwave antenna towards the ceiling, hoping it would punch through the concrete and steel to the open air. It was a risky move. Any signal anomaly could trip an alarm. But I had to take it.

A tiny green light flashed on the transmitter, indicating successful transmission. A wave of relief, cold and momentary, washed over me. Now, the waiting game began. Clara, if she was monitoring her frequency, would pick it up.

A few minutes later, my burn phone vibrated. A text message, encrypted, from an unknown number. “Frequency payload received. Confirming aliases. Cook County is a long trail. Stay safe, Julian.”

Clara. She’d understood.

I pocketed the phone, the digital ghost of CipherSeeker77 now in my sister’s hands. The implications of her message hit me. “Cook County is a long trail.” That meant she was already seeing the pattern, the disappearances. Marcus wasn’t just a stooge; he was a silent killer, methodically eliminating anyone who got too close to Aegis’s secrets. This wasn’t a setup; it was a cleanup, and I was the next target.

The thought sent a shiver through me. Marcus had brought me in not because I was the best, but because my specific skills made me the perfect patsy to frame and then eliminate. The “memory-wiped” daily reports I was supposed to be generating? They weren’t just for showing compliance; they were acoustic recordings, raw data Marcus could then weaponize, turning my innocent work into evidence against me or, worse, into intel for Don Vane.

I looked at my watch, the subtle hum of the tracer a constant companion. It was almost time for the shift break, the brief window when the Floor 4 biometric locks went into a temporary maintenance mode, creating a tiny gap in their impenetrable security. My next move had to be precise, timed perfectly. I knew there was a restricted subterranean server core, a place where the real physical data of Aegis Vaults was held, away from the digital facade. If there was more to uncover, it would be there.

But I had to resist the urge to snoop around Marcus’s desk first. That was a rookie mistake, a temptation I couldn’t afford. The subterranean core. That was the real prize.