The Greek night air was cooling as we descended the limestone steps, the sound of distant sirens beginning to wail like a funeral dirge for the man we left behind. My father was alive, but as the police cruisers rounded the bay, he was officially a man without a country, a name, or a future.
"You're becoming a dangerous woman, Jessy," Yuri said as we reached the skiff. He didn't sound worried; he sounded mesmerized. He tossed the hard drive he'd grabbed onto the bench seat. "Cairo's authorities are not known for their hospitality toward financial predators."
"He liked numbers more than people," I said, staring at the receding white villa. "Now he can count the bars on his cell."
But as the skiff cut through the dark water back toward the mainland, the gravity of our next move began to settle. We weren't just fleeing a crime scene; we were heading into the mouth of the beast. The "Fractured Grace" code was still pulsing in the UNI's Manhattan servers—a digital tether that could never be truly cut until the source was annihilated.
The Manhattan Blueprint
Twelve hours later, we were back in the air, the Atlantic a grey desert beneath us. The jet had become a tactical hub. Yuri had pulled the data from the hard drive I'd spared from the laptop—it contained the high-level security protocols for the UNI Global Headquarters in New York.
"This is it," Yuri said, spreading a holographic map across the table. "The building is a fortress. Sixty stories of glass and steel. The server core—the 'Brain'—is located in a sub-basement five levels below the subway lines. It's built to withstand a surface-level nuclear strike."
"They'll have biometric scanners," I noted, tracing the lines of the ventilation shafts. "Retinal, fingerprint, gait analysis. Even if we get past the guards, the building will know I'm there the second I step into the lobby."
"It won't just know you're there," Yuri countered, his eyes dark. "It will try to 'Sync.' The moment your signature enters the building's local network, the Phoenix Protocol will attempt to upload the final 'Fractured Grace' sequence. You won't just be infiltrating the building; you'll be feeding it."
"Then we don't go in through the lobby," I said. I looked at the map, finding the weak point my father had highlighted in his private notes. "There's an old pneumatic mail system that connects to the city's underground infrastructure. It's narrow, it's filthy, and it hasn't been used in thirty years. But it bypasses the primary biometric filters."
Yuri leaned back, a grim smile touching his lips. "It's a suicide mission, Jessy. If they catch us in those tunnels, they won't even need to kill us. They'll just seal the vents and wait."
"I've been dead for three years, Yuri. A few more hours won't hurt."
Mission: The Final Deletion PhaseMethodObjective InfiltrationSubterranean Pneumatic TubesBypass Tier-1 Biometric Security.The BreachManual OverrideSecure the Level B5 Server Room.The ExecuteBiometric HandshakeTrigger a system-wide "Hardware Purge."The ExitStaged Building EvacuationBlend into the chaos and vanish.
As the Manhattan skyline began to pierce the clouds, I felt the code in my blood hum in anticipation. The UNI thought they were waiting for their god to come home. They didn't realize I was coming to burn the temple down.