Jace

The game window froze mid-battle, my character stuck in an endless animation loop. Shadow_Harpy’s character vanished completely, leaving me alone in the Cathedral of Endless Night.

After a few seconds, the game crashed to the desktop. No error message, no warning—just gone, like someone pulled the plug.

I tried rebooting the game, but it refused to launch. Damn. Shadow_Harpy was probably wondering what happened. We had been in sync tonight too, our combo attacks flowing smooth as water.

There was something almost magical about finding a gaming partner who matched your rhythm perfectly.

Shadow_Harpy was one of the best players I’d ever partnered with—read my moves before I made them, and anticipated every strategy. Plus, she actually got my nerdy references, which was rare enough to be worth noting.

Over the past year, she’d become a constant in my life, even if I only knew her through chat windows and combat strategies.

Sometimes I wondered what she was like in real life, but there was something comfortable about the distance, about having one relationship that wasn’t complicated by reality.

I ran a quick diagnostic on my system, but everything checked out normal. Must have been server issues. With a sigh, I shut down my computer and stretched, my shoulders cracking from too many hours hunched over keyboards.

My apartment felt too quiet suddenly, the way it always did when I stopped working. Maybe I should get a pet. A dog maybe, something to fill the silence.

My ex’s picture caught my eye as I was heading to bed—her red hair bright even in the dim light, green eyes laughing at some joke I couldn’t remember anymore.

Three months since she’d left, and I still hadn’t thrown the damn thing away. It was like bad code you knew you needed to remove but couldn’t because too many systems depended on it.

With more force than necessary, I slammed it face-down on the nightstand. Tomorrow. I’d trash it tomorrow.

Just like I’d said yesterday, and the day before that.

But as I lay in bed, it wasn’t my ex I was thinking about. Instead, my mind drifted to warm brown eyes and a smile that lit up like someone had unlocked a special achievement. Harper Wells. My new intern, who’d shown up this morning with a backup power cord and enough enthusiasm to power the whole building.

I shouldn’t have been thinking about her at all. Office relationships were messy enough without adding a mentor/intern dynamic to the mix.

Besides, I wasn’t looking for anything right now. Not after my ex. Not after discovering that three years of my life could disappear as quickly as a corrupted save file.

But I still caught myself wondering what games Harper played, besides the obvious. The way her eyes had lit up when she saw the Beyond Her Shadow displays. . . that kind of passion was rare. Real. Like finding a perfectly elegant solution in a sea of brute-force code.

And yeah, okay, she was gorgeous in a way that had nothing to do with trying and everything to do with being completely herself. The kind of gorgeous that made you forget what you were coding mid-line.

Sleep wasn’t coming any time soon, so I pulled up the project files for Revelations on my tablet. Might as well get some work done if I was going to be awake.

The sequel was darker than the original—we were pushing boundaries with the shadow mechanics, letting players explore the gray areas between light and dark.

Victoria had been pushing for more immersive gameplay, wanting to blur the lines between player and avatar in ways that sometimes felt. . . unsettling.

The test builds were promising, but something felt off about the whole thing. Like we were missing some crucial piece of code that would make everything click.

The shadow physics weren’t behaving quite right in the new engine. They moved almost too naturally, responding to inputs we hadn’t programmed. I’d spent weeks trying to track down the anomaly, but it was like chasing a ghost in the machine.

I must have drifted off eventually because my alarm startled me awake at six. My tablet was still on my chest, displaying an error log I didn’t remember opening.

I dragged myself through a shower and into clean clothes, stopping for coffee on the way to the office. The barista knew my order by heart now—triple shot Americano, extra hot.

Necessary fuel for days that started before the sun.

It was early—the fog still haunting the streets, the building mostly empty—but I liked it this way. Gave me time to think without the constant buzz of questions and meetings and deadlines.

The security guard barely glanced up as I badged in, used to my early arrivals.

Harper’s desk was still dark when I arrived. Of course it was—normal people didn’t show up two hours early.

Her workspace was still mostly bare, though I noticed she’d already added a small potted succulent next to her monitor. The sight made me smile despite my exhaustion.

I powered up my system and dove into the code, trying to track down that nagging sense of wrongness in the new shadow mechanics. The building gradually woke up around me, humming with electricity and early morning conversations.

The office slowly came to life. Greg from animation wandered past, already arguing with someone on his phone about particle effects. His man bun was messier than usual, suggesting another all-nighter tweaking shadow animations.

Jonathon from the writing team shuffled in looking like he’d spent the night tweaking the script again, and clutching his thermos as if it contained the secrets of the universe.

But no Harper.

I checked the time. 8:45. Still early. No reason to worry. Plenty of people didn’t show up until nine. I forced myself to focus on the screen, on the lines of code that still weren’t quite right.

The shadow rendering was giving me trouble—there was a subtle glitch in the way it moved, almost like it was anticipating player inputs before they happened. Seriously, what the hell?

Layla from IT stormed past my desk, muttering about people who didn’t know how to treat their equipment properly. She’d been extra protective of her “babies” lately, ever since the power fluctuations started.

Couldn’t blame her—we’d gone through more hardware in the last month than the previous six combined.

“Jace.”

I knew that voice, and the exact frequency of danger in its sweet tone. I looked up to find Margo perched on the edge of my desk, perfect as always in her designer clothes and perfectly styled hair.

She was wearing the perfume she knew I used to love, a calculated move that made my jaw clench.

“Where’s the script?” She examined her manicured nails, painted a deep red that reminded me of warning signs. “I need it for implementation.”

“Still in editing,” I said, keeping my voice neutral. Professional. “I’ll send it over when it’s ready.”

“Hmm.” She shifted, her hip brushing my keyboard, deliberately invading my space the way she always did. “Your new intern seems. . . interesting.”

There was a threat in there somewhere. Margo didn’t do casual observations. Every word was carefully chosen, like perfectly placed lines of code designed to achieve a specific outcome.

“Harper’s qualified. Talented.”

“Oh, I’m sure she is.” Margo’s smile was as sharp as broken glass. “Just like that last intern was ‘qualified.’ What was her name? The one who had that unfortunate accident with the test build?”

She traced a finger along the edge of my desk. “Technical work can be so. . . unpredictable.”

My hands clenched under the desk. “Harper’s different.”

“That’s what I'm worried about.” Margo leaned closer, her perfume bringing back memories I’d rather forget. “Just be careful, Jace. She’s not what she seems. Something about her feels wrong.”

I stayed silent.

“Watch your back,” Margo said, standing and smoothing her skirt with precise movements. “We wouldn’t want anything to happen to your promising new intern. After all, you have such bad luck with the women in your life.”

I watched her walk away, her words settling like shadow-code in my mind. What exactly did she mean by ‘wrong’? And why did I have the unsettling feeling she knew something I didn’t?

The lights flickered overhead, and I saw Victoria standing in the doorway, watching our exchange with those strange glass eyes of hers.

She was perfectly still—too still, like a character model frozen between animation cycles. The shadows around her seemed deeper than they should have been, moving against the natural light from the windows.

My monitor glitched, lines of code scrambling into nonsensical patterns before righting themselves. A familiar error message popped up: “Shadow physics calculation failed: unexpected behavior in matrix.”

The same error I’d been chasing for weeks, appearing every time we tried to implement the new shadow mechanics.

When I looked back at the doorway, Victoria was gone, leaving nothing but shadows behind. But the cold weight in my stomach remained.

Something was wrong with this project, and had been wrong since we started pushing the boundaries of what our engine could do. The shadows didn’t behave like normal game physics anymore—they moved with purpose, with intent.

And now Margo’s warning about Harper. . . I pulled up the power consumption logs for our section, checking the timestamps.

The surge when Harper had plugged in her laptop was bigger than I’d realized, affecting systems that shouldn’t have been connected.

Almost like something had piggybacked on the power grid, spreading through our network like a virus.

Maybe I was being paranoid. Too many late nights staring at code, too many cups of coffee, too many unresolved feelings clouding my judgment.

But in this business, paranoia often meant you were finally paying attention to the right bug in the system.