Leo blinked. He typed: USER: LEONARD VANCE. AUTHORIZED BY SYSTEM BREACH.

“Who are you?”

He plugged the Primer 7 into his data-slate. The device hummed, its surface warming under his palm. He expected a menu—options, settings, a dashboard of god-like power. Instead, a single sentence appeared on the slate’s screen:

The device sat on his desk, no bigger than a cigarette pack: the Primer 7. A sleek, titanium-gray brick that promised to rewrite the rules of neuro-programming. But it was useless without the activation key. And the key was buried under seventeen layers of quantum encryption.

His fingers hovered over the keyboard. The brute-force algorithm was ready. He called it “Persephone”—a little joke: bring something back from the dead. He hit Enter.