REVERSE ENGINEERING

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Settle in. The workshop is awake. ⚙️

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The workshop had been dark for four minutes and twenty-seven seconds.

Morgan had counted every one.

Not because she was calm. Her fingers were still cold, her breathing stayed stubbornly shallow, and her heart was pounding too loudly for her to forget her own body. Counting was just a way to keep fear from taking up every bit of space.

Four minutes and twenty-eight.

"The external network is physically isolated," she said, kneeling in front of the open panel. "The tracker shouldn't be able to transmit anything else."

T.O.N.Y.'s voice came through the pendant's tiny speaker, reduced to a metallic whisper.

"'Shouldn't' is a word engineers use right before something blows up."

"Are you trying to make me feel better?"

"I'm trying to uphold the family tradition."

Morgan rested her forehead against the breaker cabinet for a second. She knew it wasn't her father making that sarcastic remark. It was a model trained to respond the way he would. Even so, hearing that cadence in the dark stirred a longing so tangible it made her ribs ache.

She stood and went back to the workbench. She switched on the auxiliary power. With no internet connection, the monitors were running only on the internal network. The gray octagon was still frozen on two screens, like a spider crushed an instant before it could strike.

"I can extract the code's signature," Morgan said. "If it left a trail, I can find out where it came from."

"Not from here. The intruder used a chain of disposable relays and erased the intermediate addresses. The only point left intact was the final bridge: an MIT authentication node."

"So they used my enrollment to get to the cabin."

"Or they used the cabin to confirm you'd be at MIT. We still don't know which was the primary objective."

Morgan opened the side compartment on the matte acetate glasses she would be taking to campus that morning. She'd built them during the summer program: discreet augmented-reality lenses with no Stark logo, capable of projecting formulas and circuit diagrams directly into her field of view. Nothing military. Nothing that would warrant a clandestine organization's interest.

Until that night.

"I can put a stripped-down copy of you in here," she said. "Just the interface, local analysis, and short-range communication. The core stays in the pendant, disconnected."

"Moving an instance of me onto a device you're taking straight to where the intruder is waiting is a bad idea."

"So is going without you."

"There's that hereditary stubbornness."

Morgan connected the glasses to the isolated console. Instead of copying the entire T.O.N.Y. matrix, she created an encrypted bridge that could open for a few seconds, then close after each packet. Between isolating the system, making the transfer, and running the checks, the work took more than three hours. She tested it three times, found a flaw, generated a new key, and tested it twice more.

At 3:17 a.m., a small golden dot lit up in the right-hand corner of the lenses.

"Mobile interface active," T.O.N.Y. announced. "Processing capacity reduced to nine percent. My charm, fortunately, is still at a hundred."

Morgan took off the glasses.

"I'm not telling my mom yet."

"Terrible decision."

"Were you programmed to obey?"

"I was programmed to advise. That distinction exists so you can make your own mistakes."

"Great. Then this is my first."

Her phone was lying facedown. Morgan picked it up, opened her conversation with Pepper, and typed that she needed to talk about the gift. She deleted the sentence. If she told her about the intrusion, she'd have to tell her about the voice, too; she still couldn't describe one without feeling she'd lose the other.

She sent only: "I'm going with the driver in the morning. I'll let you know when I get there."

T.O.N.Y. didn't comment. The absence of disapproval was more unsettling than another joke. Morgan knew she'd just given her mother a piece of the truth, chosen to hide the rest.

She turned off the workshop lights, tucked the pendant under her T-shirt, and covered Dum-E again. On her way out, she stopped at the door and looked at where the hologram had been.

"When I get back, we're going to talk about Project Chrysalis."

"When you get back, we're going to start with the phrase 'when I get back.'"

Morgan closed the door.

* * *

Morgan slept in fits and starts in the back seat during the drive. By the time the driver dropped her off near campus, the coffee she'd picked up on the road was cold. She let her mother know she'd arrived and put her phone away before the reply came.

Cambridge looked as though it had been built to convince freshmen that no one there ever slept. Bicycles crossed the sidewalks, delivery drones swerved around trees, groups gathered around campus maps, and students debated equations before they'd even finished their coffee.

MIT had tightened security for the start of the semester. For Morgan, that meant an inconspicuous Stark Industries car parked two blocks away, two agents keeping their distance, and an agreement with the administration barring photographers from academic buildings. Even so, a few people turned their heads as she crossed the courtyard.

She heard her own name twice.

The third time, she put on her headphones without playing any music.

"Your heart rate's gone up," T.O.N.Y. reported.

"I know."

"Want me to pull up the least crowded route?"

Morgan stopped in front of a flight of steps. She could go around the building and enter through a side door. No one would judge her for it. No one except herself.

"No. I'm going through the courtyard."

She counted five windows in the building to her left. Four trees. Three benches. She breathed in. Breathed out more slowly. Then kept going.

"Stark!" a voice called from near the fountain. "You going to pretend you don't know us now that the semester's officially started?"

Maya was sitting on top of a concrete table in a grease-stained denim jacket, holding three cups of coffee. She'd met Morgan during the second week of the summer program, when she'd taken apart a malfunctioning robotic arm without permission and challenged the "Stark heiress" to find the problem before she did. Morgan had found it. Maya had corrected her solution. They'd been friends ever since, though the word didn't come easily to either of them.

Leo sat on the bench beside her, surrounded by two portable screens and an open package of donuts. He specialized in materials chemistry, spoke softly around other people, and talked far too fast once he started explaining polymers.

"I got you one with no sugar," Maya said, offering her one of the cups. "Because you look like you spent all night fighting with a motherboard."

Morgan took it.

"It was a productive discussion."

"Did the motherboard apologize?"

"We're still negotiating."

Maya pulled her backpack off the bench so Morgan could sit down. Attached to the zipper was the lopsided keychain the three of them had printed at the end of the summer program. Leo had insisted it was a calibration error; Maya had decided it was a boat.

"You still carry that around?" Morgan asked.

"Someone has to remember you get your measurements wrong, too."

Morgan took a sip to hide her smile. She liked that, at this table, one of her mistakes could just be a joke.

Leo looked up from his screen.

"Did you see the power outage on the research network at three this morning?"

Morgan's cup stopped halfway to her mouth.

"What outage?"

"The central cluster went offline for forty-eight seconds. Officially, it was maintenance. Except the log shows a scan focused on the enrollment servers and private lab credentials."

T.O.N.Y. brought up a subtle alert in the lenses.

"Ask which department got the most traffic," he murmured in her ear.

"Which department got the most traffic?" Morgan repeated.

Leo zoomed in on a graph.

"Systems engineering. Then biotechnology and adaptive materials. Someone was looking for a very specific combination."

Maya pushed a donut toward him.

"And you found that out because you spend your nights hacking into our own university's servers."

"I didn't hack anything. I checked the diagnostic dashboard our research team has access to."

"That's what hackers with campus IDs say."

Morgan tried to smile, but the golden dot in the lenses turned red.

"We've got a local transmission," T.O.N.Y. said. "Same compression as the attack on the cabin. Low power. The transmitter is close."

She set her coffee on the table.

"How far?"

"Sixty meters and closing."

"Morgan?" Maya asked. "Is something wrong?"

"Maybe."

The lenses mapped the courtyard, tagging devices but no faces. Phones, watches, tablets, drone sensors. One by one, the ordinary signals disappeared from the scan until only three dots remained.

Forty meters.

One signal came from a maintenance cart. Another from a campus camera. The third was moving among the students.

Thirty meters.

Morgan saw a young man in a dark jacket cross the courtyard with a tablet under his arm. He didn't look nervous. He wasn't looking around. He walked like someone who knew exactly where he was going.

Twenty meters.

"The relay's on him," T.O.N.Y. warned. "And it's started querying the pendant."

Morgan felt her stomach tighten. Her first instinct was to run. Her second was to call security. Then came a third, colder thought: any digital communication could alert the intruder.

"Maya, turn off Bluetooth on your phone," she said.

"What?"

"Now. Leo, close your screens and disconnect from the network."

Her tone made them both obey before asking questions.

The young man stopped less than fifteen meters away. He tapped the tablet. In the screen's reflection, Morgan recognized the gray octagon.

"He's initiating an activation call," T.O.N.Y. said. "I don't know what for."

A high-pitched buzz came from overhead.

Maya looked toward the engineering building.

"Do you guys hear that?"

Small black objects began detaching from the roof's metal framework. First five. Then twenty. Then so many they looked like a piece of shadow coming apart in the sky.

The young man looked up and smiled at Morgan.

"H.I.V.E. protocol," T.O.N.Y. reported. "Maguna, get your friends out of here."

The swarm dove toward the courtyard.

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