Chapter 22 – The Watcher in the Tower

Elira sat silently in her chamber, the walls aglow with faint bioluminescent threads woven into the sleek steel.

She hadn't been given a method or a timeline. Just the order, and the sense that the game she had been unknowingly playing all her life had changed its rules.

Virex Tower was already abuzz. A logistics mishap on Level 8. A minor containment breach in the old tech archives. Elira moved like a silent cog in the great machine of Virex, each footstep deliberate, each glance practiced.

But beneath that composed surface, her internal processors whirred with a new layer of code—an overlay seeded by the Scientist, enabling her to watch, catalogue, and analyse without detection. She was no longer simply a commander; she had become an observer. A spy.

Dray had resumed his daily routines without deviation. He appeared calm, surgical in every department meeting. His voice always steady. But now, Elira saw things she'd never noticed before—patterns, rituals, peculiarities.

He arrived at different times each day, but never early or late. His walk to the lab was never direct, often circuitous, visiting empty corridors, stopping to stare at walls with no panels or visible sensors. In meetings, his fingers sometimes tapped rhythms on the table, rhythms that matched ancient communication protocols used in early viral wave mapping.

Once, while observing from a distant corridor, she saw Dray enter his lab without tripping a single motion alert in the security net. No one else had that override. Not even Brakka.

What was he hiding? Or who was hiding him?

As Elira filtered through her observational data each evening, she began to cross-reference other anomalies. That's when Vranos entered her mental equation.

He had become… strange.

Vranos had always been unpredictable—sexual, charismatic, wild—but now there were subtleties that felt rehearsed. He lingered near surveillance nodes too often. He asked too many questions about scheduling, security shifts, energy reserves.

And he was watching her.

Three times in the past two days, she'd found him standing just outside restricted admin zones. Not trying to get in—just standing there. Staring at the walls. Smiling faintly.

And then there were the stares. Not flirtatious. Not playful. Analytical.

One afternoon, she entered the elevator and found him already inside, staring at his reflection in the mirrored panel.

"Ever feel like we're being rearranged when we're not looking?" he asked her, not turning his head.

"Is that a metaphor?" she replied.

He grinned. "Isn't everything?"

Before she could respond, Fenrir entered the elevator. He placed himself firmly between her and Vranos, jaw tight, expression blank.

The rest of the ride was silent. Tense.

That evening, Fenrir burst into her quarters without knocking. His voice was quiet, but full of heat.

"You're spending too much time around him."

"He's a fellow commander. We work together."

"He doesn't work. He probes. Watches. Plays with things that break when handled too long."

"You're being irrational," she said calmly. But something inside her twitched. Was it concern for Fenrir… or discomfort at how accurate his instincts were?

Huffing he left before she could offer her a place in her bed. Turning her thoughts inward away from Fenrir, she watched her own movements from the day, logged and time-stamped. The tension between her role and her mission grew heavier by the hour.

Each observation felt like a thread tugging at the seams of her world.

And she didn't know what would unravel first—Dray, Vranos, or herself.