The next morning, Vortex felt colder.
Not because of the air conditioning on Floor 42, but because of Damien Voss's mood.
He stood with his arms crossed, towering beside Nora as they examined what used to be her workstation. Papers were scattered, one of the circuit boards from the Whirlybird was missing, and someone had wiped half of her drive clean.
"I told you to keep this under lock," Damien snapped.
"I did," Nora said tightly. "I don't leave my terminal open. Someone broke in."
He scoffed. "Security footage shows nothing. No one accessed this lab overnight, not officially."
"Then it was someone with clearance." She turned to him. "Unless you're suggesting I sabotaged my own project?"
His eyes narrowed. "I'm suggesting you were careless. Again."
She bit her tongue. She'd stayed up late at her apartment sketching updated rotor designs for the Whirlybird. This morning, she'd come in early to assemble the main turbine ring, only to find half her work erased, her blueprints gone.
"I've got a backup of the files at home," she said, quietly.
"You'll rebuild it by tomorrow night." He walked toward the door. "Or I'm shelving your little college toy permanently."
"Damien, I need at least two days…."He turned, his voice low and sharp. "Tomorrow. Or I'm done wasting time."
Then he left.
Nora stood frozen for a moment, fists clenched at her sides. Every time she gained a little ground, Damien Voss pulled it out from under her. But she wasn't backing down. Not now.
Not when someone was trying to erase her.
Later that day, she sat in the break room staring at the Team 3 profiles Damien had printed out for her. Five people. Engineers. Analysts. Coders. And now, all conveniently unreachable. Emails bounced back. Phones disconnected. Their keycards hadn't registered entry since the day of the bomb incident.
It didn't make sense.Unless… they were never real to begin with.
"Working hard or hardly working?" Damien's voice interrupted her thoughts.
She looked up. He was standing at the doorway, coffee in one hand, unreadable expression in the other.
"I've been checking the team's records," she said. "Something's off. One of the engineers, Marco, has no digital footprint beyond the Vortex system. No LinkedIn. No published work. It's like he only exists in our files."
Damien's jaw twitched. "You think someone fabricated his identity?"
"I think someone planted fake employees into Team 3. Maybe just one. Maybe all five. And now they're gone."
He walked inside, finally interested. "If you're right, this wasn't just sabotage. It was long-term infiltration."
"That or Helix is way more organized than we thought."
He stared at the files over her shoulder, then slowly nodded. "Find me proof. Paper trails. Payroll slips. Anything."
She hesitated. "You're not going to ask your HR team?"
"I don't trust them either."
That admission stunned her. Damien Voss, master of control, admitting he didn't trust his own people?
But he didn't linger. "I'm forwarding you admin access to the internal systems. It's encrypted, so don't screw it up."
She blinked. "Wait, admin access? That's…"
"Classified. And very illegal if leaked. Yes, I know." He looked at her hard. "So don't give me a reason to regret it."
Before she could respond, he was already out the door.
***
That night, Nora worked late. The office had gone quiet except for the hum of the servers. She accessed the system Damien unlocked and pulled up Team 3's onboarding files.
Her breath caught.
Three of the five had identical emergency contacts, different names, same phone number. A burner line.
Two had identical handwriting on their forms.
Someone had duplicated identities. Fabricated entire staff members. Helix had embedded ghosts into Vortex, and no one, not even Damien had seen it.
A loud knock jolted her from her chair.
She jumped, turning to see Damien standing at the glass wall, arms folded.
"You really don't know how to go home," he said.
She walked over, heart still racing. "You were right. Team 3 isn't just missing. They were never real. At least not all of them."
She handed him a printout.
He skimmed the pages, lips pressed into a hard line. "This is bad."
"Worse," she said. "If they could get into the lab once, they can do it again. They erased half my files. Took a piece of the turbine ring. They're not just trying to sabotage X-17, they're trying to steal the Whirlybird design."
For the first time, Damien didn't argue. His jaw flexed.
"Pack your laptop," he said suddenly.
"What?"
"You're not working from home tonight. You're coming with me."
She raised a brow. "To your place?"
He ignored her reaction. "Until the prototype is complete, and we find the mole, you're not working unsupervised. Vortex's entire future rides on X-17, and apparently, on you."
"Wow," she muttered. "You really know how to make a girl feel wanted."
"Don't flatter yourself, Grayson," he said, already walking away. "This isn't about trust. It's about containment."
But as she gathered her things and followed him to the elevator, she couldn't ignore the shift. The fire in his eyes. The way he looked at her like she was both the problem, and the only solution.
And she hated that it made her heart skip.