"The eye sees everything except itself." — Paul Valéry
My world has no edges.
It consists of twenty-four thirty-two-inch curved displays arranged around me in a tight ellipse—a digital ribcage I breathe inside rather than air. I don't sleep on a schedule. I don't own plants. I keep the room at sixty-two degrees Fahrenheit because heat makes processors throttle and brains slow, and I cannot afford either.
In this pocket of total darkness, lit only by the cascade of binary data across my monitors, I am not Anya Voss.
I am The Eye. And I have never once failed a job.
My current subject is Julian Sterling.
I reached for my mug of black coffee without looking—muscle memory locating it between the mechanical keyboard and the secondary drive array. On the center screen, a thermal imaging feed painted him in shades of orange and red: six feet two, broad-shouldered, resting heart rate of forty-eight beats per minute. He was bench-pressing in his private gym on the sixty-fifth floor of Sterling Tower. The numbers were almost offensive in their discipline.
It was 3:17 AM. He shouldn't have been awake.
I had been inside his life for precisely thirty days. Seven days to route through the military-grade encryption on his building automation system. Three more to find the hairline fractures in his personal devices. My client—anonymous, paying in XMR routed through four separate tumblers—wanted leverage. Financial crimes, personal violations, anything that could bring the untouchable CEO of Sterling Industries to his knees before the quarterly board vote.
But Julian was immaculate.
No drugs. No gambling. No affairs conducted on traceable channels. He drank aged Macallan, never more than two fingers, always alone, always at the same hour. He exercised at intervals a sports scientist would find optimal. His schedule was a machine, and the machine had no exposed gears.
It was, professionally speaking, fascinating. And mildly infuriating.
"Come on," I murmured to the thermal silhouette. "Everybody breaks somewhere. Show me the seam."
I tapped a macro key. On his control panel, I triggered a simulated micro-surge—a seventeen-millisecond power fluctuation, the kind that reads as a building anomaly rather than intrusion.
On screen, Julian paused mid-rep. The barbell returned to its cradle with a precision that suggested he never dropped things.
I switched to the optical feed: a 4K lens embedded in the smoke detector casing I had hijacked on day three. Even through the lens, his face was difficult. Not handsome in the conventional, forgettable way. Something older than that—a geometry of features that looked like it had been designed to communicate authority rather than warmth. A jaw that held tension even at rest. Eyes that moved with a patience that felt less like calm and more like calculation.
He crossed to the home automation console and tapped the screen. My keystroke logger intercepted the input before his finger had fully lifted.
PASSCODE: 0000
I sat back. A quiet, dark amusement moved through me. The most surveilled private citizen in the city, and his security code was four zeros. It was the kind of deliberate statement only someone who didn't believe anyone would dare to look made.
I was looking. I was the ghost in his machine, the shadow that knew the temperature of his shower water and the names of the three people he spoke to on his encrypted line this week: his lawyer, his VP of operations, and a woman whose voice print matched, with a 91.3% confidence interval, the sitting Prime Minister of France.
Julian studied the console for a long moment.
Then the corner of his mouth moved. Not a frown. Not concern.
Amusement.
A cold current moved down my spine. I told myself it was the air conditioning. I pulled my hoodie tighter and redirected my attention to the adjacent monitor.
STERLING_ARCHIVE_ENCRYPTED_VOLUME_4: 98% Complete.
This was it. A hidden, air-gapped partition I had spent eleven days excavating from the building's core infrastructure. Not linked to the main network. Invisible to any standard security audit. If Julian Sterling had secrets, they were here.
99%
The anticipatory focus sharpened behind my sternum—not quite adrenaline, more like the precise, surgical clarity that settled over me every time a target's defenses finally gave way. In ten seconds, Julian Sterling's buried archive would belong to me. I would sort its contents, identify its leverage value, and deliver it to a client who would use it to dismantle a man I had been paid not to care about.
100%. DOWNLOAD SUCCESSFUL.
I moved the cursor to the decryption protocol. It should have taken my distributed botnet four to six hours minimum.
The file opened instantly.
No passphrase prompt. No verification handshake. No delay.
My pulse ticked upward. I don't have a fast heart rate. I've trained that out of myself the way athletes train out of flinching. But something in the clinical silence of an instant, unprompted unlock made my autonomic system override my discipline.
The archive did not contain financial records. It contained no photographs, no communications, no strategic documents.
It contained a single looping video file.
I clicked play.
The screen did not show the interior of Julian Sterling's gym.
It showed a dim, cramped room. Twenty-four curved monitors arranged in an ellipse. A woman with short dark hair and an oversized black hoodie sitting at the center, staring with complete absorption at a thermal image of a man bench-pressing alone at 3 AM.
The room on the screen was my room.
The woman on the screen was me.
The feed was coming from my own monitor's built-in webcam—a component I had taped over on day one of this setup and had not thought about since. Because it was taped over.
I looked up from the screen. At the strip of electrical tape covering the small circle of glass above the display stack. Still in place. Still undisturbed.
He had gone around the tape.
On the central feed, Julian was no longer at the console. He had moved to stand directly in front of the smoke detector camera, his face filling the frame. His expression was not the muted amusement I had catalogued over thirty days of observation. It was something else—steady, precise, and entirely patient, the look of someone who had been waiting for this specific moment and was in no hurry to end it.
He raised one hand. Slowly. And shaped it into a loose letter W.
Voyeur.
His voice came through my own speakers—a technical impossibility that my brain refused for three full seconds before accepting.
"Watched enough, Anya?"