CHAPTER 281: UNTRACEABLE HANDS

The elevator doors hadn’t even fully opened when I saw him.

Anthony slipped through the gap before the brass edges finished parting, eyes already scanning the lobby. Dark jacket, boots laced loose, twin blades slung across his back like the handles were born there. He looked out of place among the polished tile and ambient string music playing softly from the overhead speakers—like someone who’d walked off a warzone and into a museum. It was the first time I saw him look so serious and without his usual Hawaiian shirt.

His eyes locked on me.

"Boss."

I exhaled. Just once.

"You alright?" he asked, crossing the marble in three long strides.

"Physically, yes." I reached into my coat and pulled the burner from my inner pocket. "Mentally? We’ll get there."

We turned away from the lobby’s open space, stepping into the narrow side hall beside the security office. Soundproof. Private.

He leaned against the wall, arms crossed, waiting.

I handed him the phone.

The screen was still open. The photo stared up at him—grainy, low-light, timestamp visible. His gaze tightened the moment he saw it.

"Where was this taken?" he asked.

"Inside the building," I said. "Camera L-42 from what the guards told me. Hallway just outside the penthouse elevator."

Anthony’s jaw ticked. "That’s a restricted lens."

"I know."

He stared at the photo a moment longer. "Does the timestamp match when you were actually there?"

"Down to the second."

He didn’t speak for a while. Just stared. Processing.

Then: "Start from the top."

So I did.

I told him everything. Jacob. His girl that we thought was in danger. The attic ladder. The footprint in the soil. The polaroids—dozens of them, taken over weeks, maybe months. A stalker who didn’t want money or leverage. Just... time. Just proximity.

I explained how I’d traced the trail back to nothing so far, but how we had possible leads via the footprint and hopefully fingerprints on the polaroids. Then the message. The picture. The gut-deep certainty that this wasn’t just about some family in Sector 47.

It was about me.

About all of us.

He stayed silent throughout, but his face said plenty. It shifted from interest, to concern, to something sharper. By the time I finished, he was holding the phone like it might bite.

"You said the security team ran diagnostics?" he asked.

I nodded. "No sign of tampering. No intrusion logs. No internal rewrites. The system’s clean."

"And the camera that took this?"

"No signs of external access," I said. "But the image exists. Same angle. Same time. The feed should’ve logged it, but there’s nothing."

Anthony exhaled slowly, then shook his head.

"That’s not possible."

"That’s what I said."

"No—seriously," he said, standing straighter. "These buildings run on semi-isolated servers. Even if someone could find a backdoor into the outer layers, you’d need biometric access for any of the core systems. Decryption keys, a real-time relay patch, and at least three internal clearance points. I don’t even have that level of access."

I rubbed the bridge of my nose.

"Then how did they do it?"

He looked back at the image.

"They didn’t," he muttered. "Or rather, they shouldn’t have. This photo’s an impossibility. It’s like someone recreated your security system down to the lens specs just to fabricate this shot."

I didn’t say anything right away.

But my mind was already turning.

My eyes narrowed.

"Unless they didn’t need to break in," I murmured. "Unless the System let them."

Anthony gave me a look. "You think the System gave them the image?"

"Not directly," I said. "But I’ve seen stranger things. Instinct once predicted my whole future as an astronaut while other skills like Thermal Perception straight up give things that aren’t humanly possible. The System can’t physically alter your body, but it can mentally, such as making you imagine things a certain way or force a gut feeling that happens to be right."

He was listening now. Deeply.

"I’ve also read about hacking jobs in my free time," I said. "Rare. Usually low-rank. Assigned to fringe candidates for covert tasks. Most of them got killed or conscripted after the NovaCore leaks though some still exist."

Anthony nodded grimly. "Right. Blacklisted professions. The kind they quietly retire because they’re too useful to fall into the wrong hands."

I opened my Database.

My vision dimmed for half a second as the skill activated, scanning archived news articles, declassified records, buried forum threads, and independent research papers. I filtered for "government system breach," "hacking job," "clearance override," and "unauthorized data acquisition."

Most results were useless.

But one—

I tapped it.

The screen in my head lit up.

Archive: Kevin Mitnick – Cyber Infiltration Incident – Level 3 Security Violation – Case 412-E

The article was old. 30 years. Almost scrubbed from public view.

Kevin Mitnick. Job: Data Thief (S-Rank).

Under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t have even made it through job certification. But the System had assigned it anyway. His skills allowed him to intercept data packets, mimic restricted clearance, and even bypass login timestamps by writing temporary authentication shadows—ghost entries invisible to standard security checks.

He wasn’t even a programmer, per se.

He knew the basics, but nothing more.

Its just that his job let him do things regardless of whether he understood them or not.

I pulled out of the Database slowly.

Anthony raised an eyebrow. "Find something?"

I nodded.

"There was a breach in the past. A man named Kevin Mitnick. His job was Data Thief. He could bypass clearance logs. Create admin shadows. Mimic feed entries."

Anthony frowned. "That’s... bad."

"Yeah."

"Is he alive?"

"No."

"Damn."

We stood in silence for a beat.

Then I looked back at the camera.

"The photo was pulled from our system," I said. "It was intercepted before it ever got stored. Or maybe duplicated while the feed was live. All that without a direct sign of login or entry."

"And the only way to do that," Anthony said slowly, "is with a hacking-type job."

I nodded once.

"That’s our suspect. It’s the only explanation."

He crossed his arms.

"Well, that narrows things down. Not many people have access to blacklisted job types anymore. Think you can find his easily?"

"I don’t know," I admitted. "But if he has skills like Kevin did, then we don’t just have a stalker or a voyeur."

"We have a ghost."

I turned toward the glass once more.

The city outside glittered with its usual sharp beauty—steel reflections, neon shimmer, automated cars gliding along rails without thought. A world run on precision.

And somewhere in that world...

Someone was watching us.

No—not someone.

A System-chosen ghost with the power to make even surveillance lie.

But jobs left fingerprints. Skill signatures. Behavioral trends.

I had enough to work with.

Now, I just needed to use what the System gave me.

I turned back to Anthony.

"Pull every record on hacking-related job titles. Get me a list of blacklisted individuals who survived NovaCore’s purge. Anyone who had access to shadow data. Hell, even if they weren’t born during the NovaCore leaks, I want to know about them."

He nodded.

"I’ll need clearance."

"You’ve got mine."

"And if the trail goes cold?"

I stared at the camera again.

"It won’t."