She was freefalling in absolute nothingness. Not just emptiness or darkness. Absence of input. Void. Nothing existed, except movement at a speed she was unable to relate to anything. The sensation occupied her entire consciousness consuming all her thoughts with its vastness.

  Then it stopped. Abruptly. As if someone flipped a switch. Zara exploded into a flash of teal light. She was no longer moving. Myriads of floating luminous particles filled the space around her. They held a hint of a landscape. The moment Zara strained her attention, trying to make things out, the particles started moving. Gradually, they clustered into rough geometric shapes composed entirely of teal and cyan bits of light. Everything existed in shades of luminous cyan against pitch black void that wasn't data. The more Zara focused on the shapes the denser and better defined they became. It was as if her very concentration was rendering translucent architecture into existence. Maintaining concentration at such a high level was strenuous, but the moment she allowed herself to relax, the glowing landscape around her started dissolving. Forms became mere suggestions. Suggestions melted into shapeless chaos.

  She concentrated again. She needed to get her bearings. Millions of tantalising luminous points slowly reformed into surfaces. Even though Zara was unable to make them commit fully, structures roughly resembling the factory layout finally emerged around her. As she studied them, she realised that corridors were data conduits. Passages through the Maelstrom subnet.

  She then directed her thoughts at the rough approximation of 'here I am'. She flexed her intention and it responded. This wasn't exactly movement, but a shift in position that happened because she wanted it to.

  Remembering Raven's instructions - 'follow the heaviest data traffic upstream' - she willed herself to progress along the widest corridor. Countless dots around her were constantly changing the intensity of their glowing – the data was flowing. The streams converged in one direction, upstream through the blocky geometry, deeper into the subnet's architecture. She followed. Passed through what felt like junction points, intersections where data streams merged and split, always chose the thickest stream.

  The structures changed as she moved deeper. Denser. More complex. The translucent walls grew thicker, more opaque, the data flow was running faster. Zara felt excitement. The disembodied emotion rang overwhelmingly clear. Zara's progressing speed increased.

  Then she felt the ICE.

  A change in the data environment. The architecture ahead thickened into something deliberate – no longer the crude suggestion of industrial geometry, but a barrier that felt solid. Dense nearly opaque blocks stacked and interlocked, data flowing through them lit up, and occasional segments went dark, others continued their flow unobstructed.

  The ICE didn't attack. It assessed. Zara felt it the way she'd feel eyes on her back in a bad neighbourhood. She knew the moment she tried to traverse the blocks, the countermeasure would probe her, try to determine whether she was traffic or threat.

  She stopped her advance immediately. Held still. Watched.

  The loops had a rhythm. Regular cycling – probe, assess, reset. Zara could tell the switch between the phases by how the speed of the flowing data changed and how its glowing intensified or dimmed. Then she noticed something. At the end of each cycle there was a moment when the barrier's density fluctuated. As the ICE released the data, for the tiniest moment, it became translucent. That was the point when she needed to land her strike.

  Zara conjured the thought about the breach protocols loaded in her deck. Almost like drawing a weapon. She pictured the code coiled like a spring, ready to deploy the way she'd press a trigger, except the release would be prompted by her very intent.

  She felt the image solidify in her consciousness. When she was ready, she waited for the cycle to reset several times, making sure she got the exact right moment. Then she deployed.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  The breach protocol contacted the ICE structure and kept going, leaving a scorched hole in its wake. Nothing elegant. The construct shuddered, data flows getting disrupted. The entire barrier's geometry flickered. The ICE fought back. It was already restructuring, trying to compensate, closing the breach. For a stretched second Zara thought it wasn't going to work. The breach was right in front of her, but she was never going to cover the distance in time.

  But there was no movement. Only intention. No speed. Only intensity. So she willed herself through with all the might of her resolve. A moment of total disorientation followed as her avatar almost dissolved, passing through the breach. She felt the particles representing her self scattering. The transition rendered by the algorithms was too fast. Zara was too new for something like that. Her brain was struggling with the abrupt loss of any form it had learned to process. She felt as if she was simultaneously reduced to a single pixel in space and expanded to the size of a universe.

  Then it was over. She found herself behind the ICE. Inside the security node's architecture. Clean. No alarm triggered. The ICE was already finishing repairing itself. Likely filtered whatever happened as a minor glitch or a fluctuation of data volume. Zara knew enough about hacking to feel reasonably safe now.

  The node was a bustling hub of connections. Chrome Serpent kept it simple – every hardwired system in the facility was feeding into this central point. Camera feeds running in parallel streams. Turret control loops. Door locks.

  Zara reached for the systems. Found the interfaces – access points where her deck could interact with the hardware controls. Cameras first. She found their data streams and severed them with raw intention, pulling the connections apart the way you'd yank wires from a junction box. The streams went dark.

  Turrets next. Their control loops were more complex, with layered authentication and automated targeting protocols. Zara fumbled with controls trying to figure out what parameters to adjust. Nothing made sense. Zara's anger flared, pure and unobstructed by meat. And before she even realised what was happening, another breach protocol deployed, forcing its way through the authentication layer and flipping the targeting systems to standby. The loops went dormant. Zara experienced a surge of surprise overtaken by a spike of unrestricted joy.

  She got so excited with her new superpowers that she almost forgot about the door locks. But some movement caught her attention. She realised that there were some barely visible slim streams of data still flowing, meaning some status reports were still looping through the node. Those were much simpler. Zara scrutinised the streams, spotted the master control and opened everything at once. A cascade of disengaging locks rippled through the subnet.

  Done.

  Zara knew it was time to surface. Raven's instructions were simple and clear 'get in, disable, surface.' Despite all her first timer enthusiasm she was getting tired. It was becoming harder and harder to concentrate on surrounding structures. The longer she stayed the more she risked getting stuck in a quagmire of poorly rendered architecture. The security node was cracked, the systems down. Her crew could move.

  She started progressing back towards the point she accessed the subnet. The ICE let her pass in the opposite direction without as much as a handshake. Which was a blessing because she noticed the walls flickering. She was trying not to look now, hoping it might ease the neural load. She got so engrossed in projecting herself toward the surfacing point that she almost missed a shift in the data behaviour. It wasn't the security systems, those were dormant now. It was a sudden change in the subnet's ambient traffic that didn't match what she'd been seeing until now. New patterns rippled through the data flows, propagating through the architecture from somewhere outside the security gates, progressing rapidly towards the central node. Something was definitely happening. Some command was triggering in the subnet's deeper layers.

  Then it hit her. A silent shriek overwhelmed her momentarily, slowing her advance. Suspicious data streams swelled into a vicious torrent threatening to drag her in the wrong direction. ALARM.

  Unfair! She didn't trip, didn't trigger anything. Zara was adamant that whatever it was, it came from the outside. Except it didn't matter. The surrounding architecture was changing, cyan glow pulsing through gradients of intensity faster and faster. The whole subnet was reeling. Zara had to use every bit of her remaining will just to keep pressing herself forward towards the access node. She could already feel it close. The instructions were clear: wish herself through, feel the pull and submit.

  Her system was struggling with processing, no longer able to render the Net structures reliably. The pulse of the fluorescent shapes around her increased to a rapid throb. Segments of the architecture were collapsing and rising again, fragments of the floor disappearing, threatening to let her fall through into the dark dataless void beneath.

  She felt a faint pull. Reached towards it. The pull intensified. She surfaced.