Chapter 5: The Leak

It began as a whisper.

Not a broadcast. Not a declaration. Just a fragment—misfiled telemetry, an anomalous power spike, a corrupted archival echo that should never have been accessible outside Bastion One’s deepest systems.

Zara saw it first.

She didn’t mean to. That was the problem.

The data didn’t announce itself as forbidden. It hid inside a routine systems sync, nested behind Altherian compression layers that responded—not to clearance—but to curiosity.

A schematic unfolded across her console.

Not a weapon.

A threshold.

Zara’s fingers froze above the controls.

“What the hell are you?” she whispered.

The Helion Core schematic wasn’t labeled as destructive. It wasn’t labeled at all. But the annotations—translated imperfectly through Solace’s filters—used a word that made her stomach drop.

Selection.

She dug deeper.

And found the truth no one had framed out loud.

The Helion Core did not defend everyone.

It preserved continuity.

Which meant—if activated under the wrong conditions—it could sacrifice entire systems to prevent something worse from spreading.

Zara leaned back slowly, pulse thudding in her ears.