The Thorne Heiress Unveiling Shadow novel Chapter 14

The server room was plunged into a silence so profound, it felt like the air had been sucked out of the room. Every single person—from the junior tech in the corner to Chase himself—stared at Evelyn, then at Peter.

Peter's face, already pale, turned a ghostly white. The third protocol layer... the recursive logic... that was his signature design, a complex piece of coding he was famously proud of, a design he had lectured about at cybersecurity conferences. It was, in his mind, perfect, an impenetrable fortress. To suggest it had a flaw was not just a technical critique; it was a personal insult.

"That's... that's impossible," he stammered, but his hands were already flying across his own keyboard, his arrogance warring with a dawning, sickening dread. He ran a deep-level diagnostic, one he hadn't thought to run before because he was so certain of his own work's infallibility. The results flashed on his screen. The room watched as every last drop of color drained from his face. His shoulders slumped. His mouth hung open in horrified disbelief.

She was right. The loophole was there, plain as day, a fatal, elegant flaw he had never seen.

Before anyone could process the implications, before Peter could even form an apology, Evelyn moved. She walked calmly to an open terminal, the one a junior analyst had just abandoned in despair. She didn't ask for permission. She simply sat down, placing the soup container neatly on the floor beside her, and adjusted the chair. Her posture was perfect, her back straight.

Chase opened his mouth to say something—to stop her, to question her, he wasn't sure what—but the words died in his throat. He was about to witness a miracle.

Evelyn's fingers touched the keyboard, and then they began to move. It wasn't typing. It was a performance. Her hands danced across the keys with a speed and precision that seemed to defy human limits. There were no wasted movements, no hesitation. It was a fluid, unbroken stream of action, a symphony of creation and destruction conducted on a standard keyboard.

The code that poured onto her screen was unlike anything the seasoned professionals in the room had ever seen. It wasn't the blocky, utilitarian code they wrote, which was like building with bricks. Hers was elegant, minimalist, almost poetic in its structure, like weaving with strands of light. It was brutally efficient, each line a perfect, lethal strike against the enemy malware.

The panicked, chaotic atmosphere in the room shifted. The frantic shouting and cursing died down, replaced by a spreading, awestruck silence. One by one, the other members of the IT team abandoned their own terminals. They gathered in a semi-circle behind Evelyn, their faces a mixture of confusion, disbelief, and profound reverence. They were watching a master, a prodigy, a god at work. Peter stood frozen, his own hands hanging uselessly at his sides. He felt like a child who played with building blocks watching someone construct a skyscraper in minutes. Everything he thought he knew about his field was being rewritten before his very eyes. Chase watched, his heart pounding in his chest. This was his sister. The quiet, reserved girl he had just met. The girl who had endured eighteen years of suppression and abuse. He was seeing her for the first time, not as a victim to be protected, but as a force of nature to be unleashed.