I dropped into the chair at the primary terminal and began typing faster than I ever had.

I didn’t try to block their attack. I didn’t raise the firewalls or sever the connections. That was defense, and the Vances had built their empire on the assumption that everyone else would always play defense.

“What are you doing?!” Rachel yelled, pacing. “They’re going to breach the mainframe! They’re framing you for a federal cyber-attack!”

“I’m not stopping them, Rachel,” I said, eyes locked on the scrolling code. “I’m changing where the data goes.”

I didn’t fight the malware burrowing into my system. Instead I grabbed the heavy data packet — my father’s dossier, the ghost contracts, the ballistic reports on the defective armor, Maya Ellis’s sworn testimony, the proof of my father’s assassination — and, using a back-door routing protocol I’d designed years ago, I tethered that payload to the tail end of their own exfiltration.

They wanted to suck the data out and burn the servers down? Fine. I’d let them pull it out. I was just changing the destination address.