The FBI agent across the table had the eyes of a man who'd seen too many crime shows. That confident squint. That calculated lean-back. The manila folders arranged just so, creating artificial barriers in the negative space between us like some kind of psychological firewall.

  I catalogued it all. Pattern recognition—my superpower and my curse.

  "Alexandria Volkov," he said, pronouncing my name like it was evidence. "Also known as Hex. Also known as user_null_void. Also known as—"

  "I get it. I have aliases. Very criminal of me." I rattled my handcuffs against the metal table. The sound echoed in the windowless room, flat and dead. "Can we skip the dramatic reading of my username history? I've been awake for forty-three hours and your coffee tastes like motor oil filtered through a gym sock."

  Special Agent Whatever-His-Name-Was didn't smile. They never did. His jaw worked—microexpression delta: 0.3 seconds, indicating suppressed irritation—before he opened the first folder with practiced precision.

  "You think this is funny?"

  "I think the security on your field office network is funny. I think the password 'Password123!' is hilarious." I leaned forward as far as the cuffs allowed. "I think the fact that you stored case files in a folder literally named 'Secret Files' is proof that the FBI's IT department is either criminally incompetent or running the world's longest inside joke."

  His knuckles went white on the folder edge. Anger at 73%. Frustration at 82%. And that third variable I still couldn't quite parse.

  Fear.

  Not of me. Of what I represented. The cracks in the system he'd built his whole identity around protecting.

  "Sixteen banks, Ms. Volkov." He slid a photograph across the table. "Thirty-two million dollars in collective losses. Fourteen thousand victims who trusted their money would be safe. Families. Retirement accounts. A woman who lost her daughter's college fund."

  I looked at the photo without touching it. Security theater. He'd already shown me this six hours ago, and twelve hours before that. Repetition was supposed to wear down my resistance, make me crack.

  Except I'd spent my entire childhood watching my grandmother get ground down by systems that didn't care about her. I knew how to wait them out.

  "I didn't steal money," I said, keeping my voice level. "I exposed vulnerabilities. I proved their security was theatrical. I gave them a gift wrapped in public humiliation."

  "A gift." He barked out something that might have been a laugh. "Sixteen banks had to spend millions upgrading their security because of you."

  "You're welcome." I met his eyes. "How many customer accounts would've been actually drained if I hadn't shown them their infrastructure was held together with duct tape and prayers? I'm not the villain here. I'm the canary in the coal mine, except instead of dying quietly, I hacked the mine's ventilation system and posted the schematics online."

  "You violated federal law—"

  "I performed unauthorized penetration testing. The fact that it's only illegal when I do it is a feature, not a bug. Those banks pay security firms millions for the same service. I just didn't send an invoice."

  The distinction mattered, even if he'd never understand it. In his world, there were clear lines: legal and illegal, right and wrong, authorized and unauthorized. Binary thinking for binary people.

  My world had more nuance. Every system had vulnerabilities. Every rule had exceptions. Every wall had a way through if you were clever enough to find it.

  "The banks aren't pressing charges," I added, watching his reaction. "You know why? Because that would mean admitting in court that I was inside their systems for weeks. That I had root access to their entire infrastructure. That a twenty-six-year-old woman with a laptop made their multi-million-dollar security look like—"

  The lights died.

  Not a flicker. Not a brownout. The fluorescent tubes cut to black like someone had yanked reality's power cord, plunging the windowless interrogation room into absolute darkness.

  My laptop—confiscated, evidence-tagged, sitting on the table between us in a sealed plastic bag—began to hum.

  The sound started low, almost subsonic, then climbed in pitch like a server farm spinning up its cooling fans. Except my laptop wasn't plugged in. Wasn't even turned on. It had been powered down and bagged as evidence eight hours ago.

  "That's not—" The agent half-stood, his chair scraping concrete. "It's not even—"

  The screen flared to life.

  Pure white light erupted from the laptop, impossibly bright in the darkness, bright enough that I had to squint against it. Not the Windows login screen. Not any OS I recognized. Not any OS that should exist.

  Pure white text on black background, scrolling up the screen:

  EMERGENCY PROTOCOL ACTIVATED

  CRITICAL ERROR DETECTED IN PRIME REALITY INSTANCE

  BACKUP CONSCIOUSNESS REQUIRED

  SCANNING FOR COMPATIBLE SUBSTRATE...

  My sleep-deprived brain tried to process what I was seeing. Prime reality instance? Backup consciousness? This was either the most elaborate prank in FBI history or I was hallucinating from exhaustion.

  Except I could feel something. A pressure in the air, like the moment before a thunderstorm, electricity raising the hair on my arms.

  The text continued:

  SCANNING...

  SCANNING...

  MATCH FOUND: VOLKOV, ALEXANDRIA

  - PATTERN RECOGNITION: EXCEPTIONAL

  - SYSTEM ANALYSIS: EXPERT-LEVEL

  - ADAPTABILITY: HIGH

  - MORAL FLEXIBILITY: ADEQUATE

  - SURVIVAL INSTINCT: STRONG

  - COMPATIBILITY: 87%

  INITIATING CONSCIOUSNESS TRANSFER...

  "What did you—" The agent reached for his gun, which was stupid because I didn't do this. I was handcuffed to a table. I couldn't even reach my own laptop, let alone hack it from inside an evidence bag while it was powered off.

  I watched the screen because that's what you do when reality breaks—you try to understand the vulnerability before it exploits you.

  The text scrolled faster, error messages flooding the display:

  WARNING: USER NOT FOUND IN DESTINATION DATABASE

  WARNING: NO VALID CLASS ASSIGNMENT AVAILABLE

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  WARNING: INTEGRATION MAY RESULT IN UNDEFINED BEHAVIOR

  WARNING: SYSTEM INSTABILITY LIKELY

  WARNING: CONTINUING ANYWAY BECAUSE WE'RE OUT OF OPTIONS

  INITIATING EMERGENCY TRANSPLANT IN 3... 2... 1...

  GOOD LUCK AND/OR SORRY

  "Good luck and—what the fuck—"

  The screen went supernova.

  Not metaphorically. Actual light, actual heat, expanding from the laptop in a perfect sphere that swallowed the table, the agent, the handcuffs, the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the entire world.

  I felt myself coming apart. Not painfully—more like decompiling. Every atom, every electron, every bit of data that made up Alexandria Volkov being parsed and prepared for transfer.

  I had time for exactly one thought:

  Whoever wrote this exploit is either a genius or completely insane.

  Then the world compiled error and crashed to black.

  Consciousness returned in fragments.

  First: the feeling of steel around my wrists. Still handcuffed.

  Second: the absence of the table. My hands were locked together, but the chain connecting them to the interrogation table was just... gone. The handcuffs floated in space, suspending my wrists in mid-air like the universe had forgotten to load the furniture.

  Third: I was standing. On cobblestones.

  I opened my eyes.

  Medieval architecture stretched out before me. Not movie-set medieval or Renaissance-fair medieval. Actual medieval—weathered stone buildings with real structural damage, thatched roofs with actual rot, narrow streets that smelled like a historical accuracy nightmare of human waste and unwashed bodies.

  A market square. Vendors behind wooden stalls. People in rough-spun clothing haggling over vegetables. A fucking sundial serving as public art in the plaza center.

  And above each person's head, floating in my vision like the world's worst augmented reality implementation:

  [NPC: BAKER]

  Level: 7

  Status: BUSY

  Threat: NONE

  [NPC: GUARD CAPTAIN]

  Level: 23

  Status: PATROLLING

  Threat: MODERATE IF PROVOKED

  [NPC: PEASANT CHILD]

  Level: 1

  Status: HUNGRY

  Threat: NONE [PROTECTED_BY_CHILD_SAFETY_PROTOCOLS]

  I stared at the labels. At the levels. At the status fields.

  My brain—running on forty-three hours without sleep, recently transported through what appeared to be an inter-dimensional exploit, still processing the fact that I was no longer in FBI custody—tried to divide by zero and caught fire instead.

  I started laughing.

  Not funny-laughter. The kind of laugh you make when your reality's exception handler fails and your consciousness starts executing random instructions. High-pitched, slightly manic, the sound of someone whose sanity was running low on RAM.

  "Oh," I said to no one and everyone, my voice echoing off stone walls. "Oh, you have got to be kidding me."

  A guard turned. His nameplate swam into focus above his head:

  [NPC: CITY WATCH - UNIT #3847]

  Level: 15

  Status: INVESTIGATING DISTURBANCE

  Threat: ACTIVE

  He pointed a spear at me—an actual spear, with an actual iron tip—and as he did, text materialized around the weapon:

  [ITEM: STANDARD-ISSUE PIKE]

  Damage: 2d6+2 PIERCING

  Durability: 47/50

  Special: NONE

  Quality: COMMON

  My brain catalogued the information automatically. Six-sided dice. Plus-two modifier. Forty-seven durability out of fifty maximum. Common-tier loot.

  I was in a video game.

  Or a world that ran like a video game.

  Or I was having the most elaborate psychotic break in the history of sleep-deprivation-induced hallucinations.

  "You there!" the guard called, his voice rough with the accent of someone who'd never heard of dental care. "Halt and identify yourself!"

  I looked down at my hands. Still cuffed. Standard FBI restraints, steel links connecting the rings around my wrists. Except the chain that should have connected them to the table just... ended. In nothing. In empty air.

  Text flickered into existence above the handcuffs:

  [ITEM: FBI STANDARD RESTRAINTS]

  Durability: MAXIMUM

  Special: LOCKED [REQUIRES KEY OR LOCKPICK DC 20]

  Quality: GOVERNMENT ISSUE

  Object Reference: TABLE_INTERROGATION_ROOM_3 [ERROR: OBJECT NOT FOUND]

  I blinked. Read it again.

  Object not found.

  The handcuffs were still trying to reference the table from the interrogation room. But that table didn't exist in this... runtime environment. This world. This system.

  Which meant the pointer was dangling.

  Which meant—

  I searched above my own head, looking for my nameplate. My level. My status.

  Nothing.

  No text. No data. No system information.

  The guard advanced, his spear lowered, his boots heavy on the cobblestones. Other guards were noticing now, hands moving to weapons, the crowd backing away from the crazy woman laughing in the middle of the market square.

  I yanked at the handcuffs experimentally.

  The metal rings stayed locked around my wrists—those were real, those had durability and lock DCs and quality ratings. But the connection to nothing?

  One sharp pull.

  ERROR: OBJECT REFERENCE NOT SET TO INSTANCE OF OBJECT

  CONSTRAINT RELEASED

  The invisible chain snapped like a broken reference. The handcuffs remained locked around my wrists, but I could move my hands freely now, no longer tethered to a table that existed in another dimension.

  "I said halt!" The guard's face was red now. "Identify yourself or be detained!"

  I raised my hands, steel cuffs glinting in the sunlight, and watched his spear tip waver. Watched uncertainty flicker across his face—probably not standard procedure to encounter someone who appeared from nowhere, wore strange metal restraints, and laughed like a crazy person.

  "Halt?" I said, my voice steadier now, my brain shifting into the mode it always did when facing a problem I could solve. "Identify myself?"

  The guard's muscles tensed. I saw it happen, saw the micro-movements that preceded action, saw him prepare to charge—

  And beneath him, beneath his leather armor and skin and medieval authenticity, I saw more.

  Lines of code.

  Hundreds of them. Thousands. Scrolling past my vision faster than I should be able to read, except I could read them, my brain parsing the syntax like a native language I'd somehow always spoken:

  FUNCTION: guard_patrol_behavior()

  IF target_status = HOSTILE THEN

  EXECUTE melee_attack_pattern_basic()

  weapon_damage = CALCULATE(weapon_stats + strength_modifier)

  IF attack_succeeds THEN

  APPLY debuff_intimidated(target)

  ENDIF

  ENDIF

  END FUNCTION

  I could see his AI. His behavior script. The literal code that governed how he thought, how he moved, how he decided what to do next.

  The guard charged.

  And I saw exactly how to break him.

  "Sure," I told him, watching the attack pattern queue like reading a fighting game's input buffer. "I'll identify myself."

  I smiled. Not a friendly smile. The smile of someone who'd just found a zero-day exploit in reality itself.

  "I'm the null pointer exception you idiots forgot to handle."

  His spear thrust forward, the attack animation executing perfectly, following the script, predictable as compiled code.

  I sidestepped—barely, graceless, no combat training but I could see where the attack would land—and his spear punched through empty air where I'd been standing.

  The guard stumbled, off-balance, his AI trying to process the failed attack.

  More guards were coming. I counted five, no, seven, spreading out to surround me, their behavior trees branching, their threat assessments updating.

  I was in a world that ran on code.

  And I was the only one who could see it.

  The guards closed in, weapons raised, and I felt something inside me shift. Not panic. Not fear.

  Excitement.

  Every system has vulnerabilities.

  Every rule has exceptions.

  Every wall has a way through.

  And I'd just found the biggest exploit of my life.