"A gilded cage is still a cage. Unless you choose to call it home." — Anonymous
The room they gave me was east-facing, which meant I would know when morning happened whether I wanted to or not.
I did not sleep. Sleep in an unfamiliar, controlled environment with no verified egress routes is not rest—it is exposure. Instead, I spent the first two hours conducting a systematic audit of the space.
The hardware was extraordinary. That was the first problem.
A curved OLED wall spanning three meters, connected to a custom-built server rack that hummed at a frequency suggesting a processor I didn't have a reference point for. The keyboard on the obsidian desk was bespoke—blank keycaps, ergonomic geometry that fit the human hand with an engineering precision that suggested it had been built for one. The chair adjusted its lumbar support when I sat in it, as though it had been pre-configured. For me. For the way I sit.
The second problem was the cage.
I ran a standard outbound ping. The response was immediate and absolute: local network only. No external routing. No dark web tunneling. No air-gap bridging. Whatever I could do in this room, I could only do within the architecture Julian Sterling had defined. I was not a contractor. I was a component.
I was cataloguing the server's partition structure when the glass door opened.
Julian walked in without announcing himself. He had changed nothing except his jacket, which was gone—his shirt sleeves were rolled to the elbow with the practical efficiency of someone who had been working and not someone performing informality. He set a ceramic mug on the edge of the desk. The coffee was black, no sugar, and steaming.
I looked at it. Then at him.
"The calibration data from your safe house setup," he said. "You grind beans three times a day and never let it sit more than four minutes. I had the kitchen match the roast profile."
"You had someone analyze my coffee habits."
"I had someone analyze everything." He said it without apology or performance, which was somehow more unsettling than either. He looked at the partition map I had been building on the OLED wall. His gaze moved across it quickly, in the non-linear pattern of someone processing structure rather than reading sequentially. "You've already mapped the network's architecture."
"It's what I do when I'm somewhere new." I picked up the mug. The heat was correct. The bitterness was correct. "You said the client is a board member."
He produced the silver thumb drive from his pocket and set it beside the keyboard. "Marcus Thorne. Chief Strategy Officer. He has been diverting funds from the R&D division for approximately twenty-six months. I have known about the discrepancies for fourteen months. What I cannot prove—what no auditor I have employed has been able to reconstruct—is the destination. He routes through a labyrinth of shells and crypto layers that have defeated every forensic accountant I have hired." His eyes moved from the screen to me. "He thought sending an outside actor with no company affiliation into my network would provide him cover while he completed the final transfer."
"He underestimated what I'd find."
"He underestimated what you'd notice." Julian pushed the drive a centimeter closer to my side of the desk. "I want the full reconstruction. Every account, every shell, every transfer timestamp. I want it mapped with the precision that makes it usable in a federal proceeding. Not circumstantial. Definitive."
I turned the drive over in my fingers. Solid-state, military-grade enclosure. Heavier than standard. "If I have access to your internal network, I'll likely find things Thorne isn't responsible for. Things you'd prefer stayed buried."
Julian didn't answer immediately. He watched me with the same quality of attention I had observed over thirty days of feed—not reactive, but receiving. Processing.
"I know," he said.
Not a challenge. Not a warning. A simple acknowledgment, delivered without the expected hedge or threat.
He walked to the door. Stopped.
"One thing." He did not turn around. "The partition you mapped in the server architecture. The one flagged with a restricted credential layer." A pause long enough to feel weighted. "Don't go there yet. When you're ready to, tell me first."
The door slid shut before I could respond.
I sat with the silence and the coffee and the hum of a processor I couldn't yet fully understand. I turned the drive over again. Plugged it in. Let my fingers settle onto the blank keys.
There was a partition I wasn't supposed to open.
Which meant it was the first place I would eventually look.