“Now we wait for the city’s automated validator to run its nightly scan,” Sterling said.

“By eight o’clock tomorrow morning, Julian Vance will be looking for a new engineer.”

“And a new partner,” Adrian added.

I looked at Julian.

He gave me a grim nod.

We quietly backed away from the door, our steps silent on the carpet.

We walked back toward the bright lights and the noise of the ballroom.

The warmth of the crowd felt artificial now.

I stood near the edge of the dance floor, my hands trembling slightly as I opened the server’s security log.

The modified blueprint had been successfully uploaded to the city database.

“Did you get it?” Julian asked, standing close to block me from the view of the guests.

“I got the log of the transfer,” I said, staring at the lines of code.

“But we need to prove where it came from.”

I scrolled down to the connection metadata.

The IP address used to upload the corrupted file was hidden behind a virtual private network.

But the digital footprint left behind was not entirely clean.