The darkness in the bathroom was absolute. It wasn't the soft, natural darkness of a night sky; it was the heavy, suffocating void of a tomb.
Sara sat on the edge of the bathtub, her fingers tracing the jagged cracks on the screen of the fried tablet. The device was cold and lifeless, but the image of that stray line of code was burned into her mind.
"0x88FF – Legacy Override Bypass."
It was a remnant of the building's old security infrastructure. When Aryan had taken over the system to create his 'Digital cage,' he had overwritten almost everything with his own sophisticated encryption. But like an old city built over ancient ruins, some of the original foundations remained. Aryan, in his brilliant arrogance, had deemed the old code too primitive to be a threat.
He was wrong. In a world of complex locks, sometimes an old-fashioned skeleton key is the only thing that works.
"You're watching, aren't you?" Sara whispered into the dark. Her voice was flat, devoid of the panic he expected. She knew the microphones were still active. He wanted to hear her beg. He wanted to hear her break.
She wouldn't give him the satisfaction.
She began to feel around the base of the smart-mirror. She knew how these things were installed; she had designed similar layouts for her clients. Behind the sleek glass and the LED strips lay the heart of the bathroom's connectivity—a small junction box.
"Sara, stop fidgeting," Aryan's voice drifted in, sounding bored. "The sensors show your movement patterns are erratic. Go to sleep. The darkness is a gift. It's the only place where I can't see the lies in your eyes."
"I'm not lying, Aryan," she said, her fingers finally catching on a small indentation. "I'm just trying to find my way in the dark. Isn't that what you wanted? For me to rely only on you?"
"Precisely," he replied, his tone softening into that terrifyingly 'loving' vibration. "Once you realize that the world outside is chaos, you'll thank me for this silence."
Sara didn't respond. She used her fingernails to pry at the plastic molding. With a sharp snap, a small panel popped open. Inside, a cluster of fiber-optic cables and copper wires shimmered faintly in the dim light of her memory.
She needed a conductor. She reached for the smartwatch on her wrist. It was her tether to him, her electronic leash. She looked at the sleek glass face. To destroy it was to signal a full-blown emergency to Aryan, but she had no choice.
She smashed the watch face against the edge of the porcelain sink.
Crack.
The green light of the heart-rate sensor flickered and died.
Immediately, the apartment's alarm system began to wail. A high-pitched, piercing shriek that felt like it was drilling into her brain. The red lights in the hallway outside the bathroom began to strobe violently.
"Sara! What have you done?" Aryan's voice was no longer calm. It was a roar of pure, unfiltered rage. "Your vitals are gone! Answer me!"
She ignored him. She stripped a small wire from the broken watch and jammed it into the junction box, searching for the legacy terminal she had seen in the tablet's glitch. Her fingers were bleeding, sliced by the glass of the watch, but she didn't feel the pain. She was hunting.
"I'm coming over, Sara! I'm opening the locks, but don't you dare move!"
The sound of the front door's heavy bolts sliding open echoed through the apartment. He was coming. He was finally leaving his lair to reclaim his prize.
Sara's fingers hit a cold metal contact. 0x88FF.
She twisted the wires together.
For a split second, the entire apartment's power surged. The screaming alarm hit a deafening crescendo and then... silence.
The red strobe lights died. The electronic hum of the walls vanished. The 'Digital cage' had suffered a temporary cardiac arrest.
Sara pushed the bathroom door. It swung open.
She ran. Not toward the front door—she knew he would be there in minutes—but toward her drafting studio. She didn't need a way out yet; she needed a weapon. Not a knife or a gun, but the one thing Aryan feared more than anything: Information.
She scrambled under her drafting table, where she kept a physical backup drive—an old-school hard disk that required a physical connection. It contained the original blueprints of the building's digital grid.
Just as her hand closed around the drive, the lights flickered back on. But they weren't red anymore. They were a pale, sickly yellow.
"You... little... brat," Aryan's voice came from the tablet she had left on the floor, its speakers struggling to produce sound through the fried circuits. He sounded breathless, his composure completely shattered. "You think a power surge can stop me? I am the system!"
"No, Aryan," Sara said, standing up and facing the nearest camera. She held up the hard drive. "You're just a man hiding behind a screen. And I just found the map to your basement."
The front door of the apartment slowly creaked open. A silhouette stood against the bright light of the hallway. It was him. For the first time, the ghost was no longer in the machine.
He was standing in her home.