Server 9-Chapter 44: THE DOG IN THE DARK

Jax’s safehouse was a basement underneath a tattoo shop.

She knocked on the back door — three fast, two slow. A slot opened. A pair of yellow eyes looked out, looked at Jax, and looked at the rest of us. The slot closed. Locks clicked. And the door swung open.

The man behind it was short and broad, with his arms covered in tattoos and a shotgun resting against his hip. He looked at Jax and grunted.

"Friends," Jax said.

He looked at me. At Sarah. At Maya’s rifle. At Tiny, who barely fit through the doorway. Then he stepped aside without a word and pointed down.

We went down.

The basement was bigger than I expected. Concrete walls. A low ceiling. Old couches lined the sides, their fabric torn and stuffing spilling out. A table stood in the center, covered in maps and food wrappers. A single light hung from a chain above, swaying whenever someone walked heavily on the floor above.

It smelled like ink, sweat, and cold concrete. But it was off the grid. No cameras. No sensors. And no screens with my face on them.

Good enough.

"Are we safe here?" Maya asked. She set her rifle down on the table but kept her metal hand near it. Ready.

"Safe enough," Jax said. She dropped onto one of the couches and put her boots up. Tiny settled behind her like a wall. "The owner owes me a favor. A big one. He won’t talk."

"How big a favor?" Sarah asked. She was stood near the stairs, studying the room and checking for danger.

"I saved his daughter from a Triad press gang two years ago," Jax said. She popped her gum. "And he owes me for it."

That was enough for me. We didn’t have time to be picky.

Glitch was already setting up. He pulled three screens from his bag and lined them up on the table, pushing aside the food wrappers. His fingers moved fast — plugging in cables, booting up feeds, pulling maps. The kid worked like he was running out of time. Which he was. We all were.

"Okay," Glitch said. He leaned back and pointed at the center screen. "Here’s the plan. And before anyone says anything — yes, it’s crazy. But crazy is all we’ve got."

A map glowed on the screen. The vault district. Underground. Three levels deep.

"We go in tonight," Glitch said. "After midnight. The Triad patrols are thinnest between two and four in the morning. Shift change. That gives us a two-hour window."

"Two hours to break into a vault with four layers of security," Maya said. Her voice was flat. Not scared — just honest.

"Two hours and the best hacker in the city," Glitch said. He pointed at himself with both thumbs and grinned.

Nobody laughed. But Jax blew a bubble.

"Walk us through it," I said. "Simple. Step by step."

Glitch nodded. He tapped the screen and a path lit up in green — our way in.

"Step one — getting down there. Jax gets us through the market district to the old bank entrance. It’s sealed, but there’s a service tunnel on the east side. An old air vent. Tight, but we’ll fit."

"Tiny won’t fit," Jax said.

"Tiny stays topside with Maya," I said. "Overwatch. If things go bad up here, they hold the exit."

Maya nodded. She picked up her rifle. Put it down. Picked it up again. Her version of agreeing.

"Step two," Glitch continued. "The first layer. Guns and drones. There are turrets on the walls, and patrol drones on a loop. I can blind the drones from here — feed them fake images so they see empty hallways. The turrets are harder. They run on their own power, not connected to any network I can reach from outside."

"I’ll handle the turrets," I said.

"With what?" Sarah asked. She looked at my right arm. She didn’t say anything else. She didn’t need to.

"My left hand still works," I said. "I touch them. I drain them. And they shut down."

"And if there are too many?" Sarah pressed.

"Then I drain them faster."

Sarah looked at me. I could see the math running behind them — chances, risks, costs. She didn’t like the outcome. But she nodded anyway.

"Step three," Glitch said. "The second layer. The corridor. There are pressure plates on the floor, gas in the walls. One wrong step and the whole hallway fills with knockout gas. I can map the pressure plates with a scanner — show you where to step. But you have to be careful. Real careful."

"And Cerberus?" I asked.

The room got quiet.

Glitch swallowed. "Step four. Cerberus is at the end of the corridor. Right before the vault door. Whatever it is — whatever I saw in the blueprints — it’s the last guard. The big one."

"It’s alive," I said. Everyone looked at me. "I saw it through Network Sense. It’s not a machine. Not just a machine. It thinks. It feels. It’s hungry." 𝘧𝑟𝑒𝑒𝘸𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝓁.𝘤𝘰𝓂

"Hungry for what?" Jax asked from her couch. For the first time since I’d met her, she wasn’t chewing her gum. She was listening.

"Code," I said. "Data. It eats the information flowing around it. Like a guard dog that feeds on the thing it’s protecting."

"So it’s like you," Maya said quietly.

The words landed like a punch to the gut. Not because she was being mean. Because she was right.

A thing that eats code. A thing that guards a vault by feeding on the data around it. A thing that was built to consume.

Like me.

"Not like me," I said. But the words felt wrong as soon as i said them.

"Can you beat it?" Sarah asked. Straight to the point. No comfort. No softening. Just the question that mattered.

"I don’t know," I said. "I’ve never fought something that feeds the same way I do."

"Then we need a plan for Cerberus that doesn’t depend on brute force," Sarah said. She turned to Glitch. "What do we know about how it was made?"

Glitch shook his head. "Nothing. It’s not in any database I can find. Malachi built it off the books. No blueprints. No specs. Just the name on a security map."

"Then we go in smart," I said. "We get past the first three layers as quiet as we can. Save our energy. When we hit Cerberus, we figure it out on the spot."

"That’s not a plan," Sarah said. "That’s just hoping."

"Best I’ve got," I said. "Unless you have something better."

She didn’t answer. Which meant she didn’t.

"There’s one more thing," Glitch said. His voice changed. The grin was gone. The nervous energy was gone to. He sounded serious. "The vault door. Layer three. It has a handprint lock."

"I know," Sarah said. "I’ll handle it. My old codes might still—"

"It’s not your handprint it needs," Glitch cut in. He looked at the screen. Then he looked at me. "The vault is keyed to Malachi’s biometrics. His handprint. His alone. No back doors. No overrides. No shortcuts."

The room went dead silent.

"Then how do we open it?" Maya asked.

Glitch pulled up a file on his screen. A technical drawing of the lock — a flat panel with a hand-shaped outline carved into it.

"The lock reads three things," Glitch said, counting on his fingers. "One — the shape of the hand. Two — body heat. Three — the energy signal of the person touching it. Like a fingerprint, but deeper. It reads who you are at a code level."

"And only Malachi’s code opens it," Sarah said. Her face was pale.

"Only Malachi’s code," Glitch confirmed.

Everyone looked at me.

I knew why. I knew what they were thinking before anyone said it. The idea sat in the room like a bomb nobody wanted to touch.

"No," Sarah said. She shook her head. "Absolutely not."

"He hasn’t even said anything yet," Jax pointed out.

"He doesn’t have to," Sarah said. "I can see it on his face. He wants to eat Malachi’s code signature from the lock and copy it. Use the Devourer to fake the handprint."

"Can he do that?" Maya asked.

"Targeted Devour," I said. "Command Eater. I eat the code that tells the lock what to look for. Then I feed it back what it wants to see."

"You’ve never done that before," Sarah said. Her voice was sharp. Scared. "You’ve eaten kill commands. You’ve eaten power from machines. But you’ve never eaten a security code and spit it back out as a fake identity. That’s not eating — that’s pretending to be someone else at a code level. If you get it wrong—"

"If I get it wrong, the vault stays locked and we go home empty," I said.

"If you get it wrong, the lock could fry your nervous system," Sarah shot back. "You’d be feeding foreign code directly into your brain. Malachi’s code. The code of a man who has spent ten years learning how to kill with data."

"It’s not like I have a choice," I said.

The words came out harder than I meant them to. But they were true. We had no other way through that door. No back doors. No overrides. No shortcuts. Just me, my broken hand, and the thing inside me that ate what it shouldn’t.

Sarah stared at me. The guilt was back behind her eyes — that same guilt from the cargo bay, from the Jasmine confession. The look of a woman who kept watching me walk toward things that could kill me and couldn’t find a way to stop it.

"Three hours," I said. "Everyone rest. Eat something. Check your gear. We move at midnight."

The room broke apart. Maya took a corner and started checking her rifle. Again. Jax closed her eyes on the couch, Tiny standing guard. Glitch pulled a ration bar from his bag and bit into it while scrolling through security feeds.

Sarah walked to the far wall and stood there alone. Back straight, Arms at her sides, and staring at concrete.

I sat down on the floor and leaned against the wall. My right arm lay across my lap. I tried to move my ring finger.

It didn’t move.

Two fingers down. Three to go.

I closed my eyes.

Behind them, in the dark, I could feel Cerberus. Deep underground. Pulsing. Breathing. Feeding.

Hungry.

I flexed my left hand.

Yeah. Me too.