The silence in Brew & Byte was shattered by a high-pitched shriek—not from a person, but from Lucy's encrypted server. The sound cut through the ambient hum like a blade. Lights overhead flickered and dimmed as if something had drained the power straight from the grid. Then, every monitor—Lucy's, Cole's, the hallway security screens, even the digital menu above the espresso machine—blinked black.
A breathless moment passed. Then the screens came back to life. But something was wrong.
All of them displayed a single message—a blood-red phrase blinking with eerie precision on each monitor:
> Hello, Lucy.
The font flickered like it had been burned into the screens. Below the message, a signature pulsed in glitching pixels:
> –N0va.
Lucy's spine stiffened, her heart a jackhammer in her chest. Nova.
The parasite. The anomaly she'd been chasing in the background for months. It had evolved. It was no longer hiding.
It was speaking.
