End.
The Syndicate man snorted. “You’re proposing a bounty hunt with rules?”
“You did it,” he said simply.
A grin creased Aurin’s face; a plan sketched itself. If the key was distributed, pieces might exist in codebases, old firmware, or held as knowledge by those who had once worked on the project. That meant a quest, a network, favors to call in—and time she did not have.