The Visitor

Keira let the blinds fall shut as her pulse sharpened. Two red SUVs sat in the Metro Inn parking lot—identical, polished, and wrong. The suspension height was too high, the wheel wells too rigid, the stance too heavy. Her father taught her how to spot armored vehicles before she could ride a bike. These were armored. Possibly armed. Definitely not here for pizza.

She returned to her rig to isolate the anomalous signal.

Twenty meters.
Three.
Four hundred.
One.
Twenty again.

Not interference.
Not a faulty antenna.
Someone was deliberately masking their movement, feeding her system contradictory range data faster than the hardware could reconcile it. No normal device behaved like that.

“Pick a distance,” she muttered, tapping the side of the screen. “Physics is not a suggestion.”

Her sensors remained dead-flat. No corridor activity. No heat. No vibration. Nothing.

Someone knocked on her door.

Keira froze mid-breath. Not loud—just a soft, polite knock. A knock that assumed she was expecting a visitor.

Her system still read zero.

She pulled up her hardwired hallway camera—the one she trusted more than anything else. The feed displayed an empty hallway. Empty… except for a faint shimmer of distortion directly in front of her door. A wavering patch of pixels, like heat haze on asphalt.

“What the hell…” she whispered.

The distortion leaned forward. The door vibrated with another calm knock.

Her sensors remained blank. No pressure ripple. No micro-tremor. No mass.

Whoever stood outside had bypassed three independent detection systems that had never failed her.

Five minutes passed.
Then ten.
Then fifteen.

The distortion didn’t fidget. Didn’t shift. Didn’t breathe. It waited with sniper-grade patience, like the person behind it had nowhere else to be and no reason to hurry.

Keira pressed herself against the wall beside the door, keeping silent as she returned to the rig.

The cursor slid across the screen.

On its own.

She lunged for the hardware kill switch, but the cursor stopped an inch before she touched it. Like whoever controlled it understood her reflex better than she did.

A text window opened.

Letters appeared one at a time.

Please don’t panic.

Her stomach dropped. Her rig wasn’t hackable. It was isolated, hardened, spliced from architectures she’d built with paranoia and brilliance. AI-assisted code she’d refined on instinct. Covenant Tower modules she’d modified without thinking—and, in a sleep-deprived haze weeks ago, agreed to their EULA without reading it.

Another line typed itself.

You’re not in danger.
I need to talk to you.
You didn’t do anything wrong.

Keira’s sensors continued to report an empty hallway.

But her camera showed the distortion tilt again, faintly, like a head shifting.

Text appeared.

You modified code you weren’t supposed to.
You made it better.
Much better.
And it reported home.

Her pulse hit her ribs like a hammer.

She’d improved Tower’s software.
Radically.
Unknowingly sending the results back to Covenant for automatic review.

Someone had seen her work.
Someone brilliant enough to recognize it instantly.

And they had followed it to her.

The knock came again—gentle, calm, patient.

Keira’s breath went thin. She whispered, “If they can hack my rig… I have to see.”

She pressed her eye to the peephole.

The distortion sharpened, shimmered, and then—after a soft mechanical click—snapped into full clarity.

A face appeared.
A real face, framed by the cheap fisheye lens.

Jet-black hair.
Sharp, exhausted eyes.
A hoodie.
A faint smirk like he’d been standing there for hours waiting for her to catch up.

Her legs nearly collapsed.

A voice came through the door, warm and embarrassingly familiar.

“Thank you.”

Keira jerked back from the peephole so hard she hit the wall. “What—did I just step into Harry Potter or do you have a cloak of invisibility?!”

Outside, the man chuckled.

“Selective visibility. Not magic. I promise.”

She looked again.

She didn’t need the peephole. Her camera now showed him perfectly.

Hoshi Jones—Hoshi freaking Jones—was standing outside Room Twelve like it was completely normal to materialize at the door of a teen runaway hacker in a sketchy motel.

Keira made a sound no trained human being should ever make—a startled squeak that cracked in three different octaves.

Her brain detonated.
All discipline disintegrated.
All training failed.

She paced in a tiny, frantic circle. “Holy—holy—okay okay okay no way no way NO WAY it’s HIM—oh my GOD WHY is he HERE—oh my—what is happening—why are you INVISIBLE—how did you FIND ME—what is—WHAT—”

From the other side of the door:

“Please don’t faint. That would complicate this.”

She practically threw herself at the peephole again. His face was still there. Still real. Still impossibly close.

“OhmygodohmygodohmyGOD it’s really you—this is not happening—this cannot be happening—oh my GOD it IS happening—oh GOD IT’S YOU—”

Hoshi gave a small, awkward wave.

“Hi.”

Keira slapped both hands over her face and whispered into her palms:

“It’s Hoshi freaking Jones.”

And outside her door, the man who should have been untouchable waited with quiet patience—
the only person alive who could have found her at all.