Josh leaned back in his chair, the cool, clinical air of the medical building nothing like the chaos of the digital world he occupied after hours. It had been a long day of lectures, anatomy reviews, and rounds, but his mind wasn’t on any of that right now.
It was on the network
There was a shift in the back of his mind, a subtle ripple in the data he’d been watching for days. Something had changed in the campus network, a quiet disruption that was hard to ignore. Like a wrong note played on a piano that lingered, lingering just long enough to make him pause.
Josh Whitlock
Who’s poking around in my system? ( he thought )
His fingers itched to check his secondary accounts, his encrypted backups. He accessed his private server and took a quick look at the activity log. There it was—someone had been mapping the network, tracing its nodes with a precision he rarely saw.
He smirked
Whoever it was, they were good.
But not good enough.
He ran a quick traceroute. A name flashed before his eyes. Yumeko Albert.
His grin faded just a little.
Of course it’s her.
He had suspected for a while that she was sharper than she let on. The quiet girl who avoided attention, who kept to herself. The one who didn’t need to be loud to stand out.
But now? She’d found his code. And what was worse, she was curious. Too curious.
He leaned forward, fingers tapping against the desk.
If she thought she was going to crack this without consequences, she was in for a surprise
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