PROLOGUE
NYXIA
Before the cold, there was a decision.
Not the kind you make with time, with all the information, with the luxury of weighing what you gain against what you lose. The kind you make in the only second that exists before the next second is no longer yours.
I had one thing NEXIS wanted to erase.
Not my skills. Not my years of work inside their system. Not the data I’d accumulated on their internal architecture.
I had a door.
A door buried in the foundational code of the most powerful system that had ever existed on the broken Earth. A door someone had built before NEXIS existed, before I was born, before any of the people who controlled the current world had made their first choice about control.
A door that had been waiting for decades.
I didn’t have the tools to open it. I knew that. I’d spent two years trying to find them, and the closest I’d gotten was understanding exactly why I didn’t have them—and what kind of person would.
Someone who built from the outside what I knew from the inside.
Someone who’d been alone long enough to construct what no one else could build in company.
Someone with eyes the color of cold metal and the stare of a system that hasn’t yet encountered the variable it can’t process.
I didn’t know he existed. I couldn’t have known.
But I knew he had to.
So I climbed into the pod.
Sealed the hatch.
And waited.
✦
What nobody tells you about waiting inside a cryogenic pod is that time doesn’t disappear.
You dream.
Not normal dreams. Dreams built from the last data your brain held before the system slowed everything down to the edge of alive: fragments of code, access patterns, the sequence 0-7-1 repeating in loops that weren’t random.
Nineteen months of dreaming about a sequence I didn’t yet know someone was wearing tattooed on their wrist two meters from where I slept.
The universe has a precision that sometimes looks like cruelty.
And sometimes looks like exactly the opposite.
