The City Of Cenopolis

Chapter 6: First Encounter with Alana

The fluorescent lights of the FBI office flickered as Alana scrolled through streams of data on her screen, her eyes sharp and focused. Nexus Corp’s system activity had been routine for weeks—until today. The sudden spike in their internal server traffic caught her attention, a brief surge of data that wasn’t part of the usual flow.

Her fingers danced across the keyboard, pulling up the activity logs. It didn’t take long to see what had triggered the anomaly. There it was—an unauthorized intrusion, subtle but traceable. Someone had hacked into Nexus’s servers. Most agents would have flagged the breach and reported it up the chain of command. But Alana wasn’t most agents.

She leaned back in her chair, her mind turning. This wasn’t just some ordinary hack. Whoever was behind it had used a zero-day exploit to slip past Nexus’s defenses. That kind of sophistication wasn’t something you found in your average cybercriminal.

Instead of flagging the activity, she quietly began to dig deeper. She traced the intrusion, using her FBI tools to follow the digital breadcrumbs left behind. The trail led her to two individuals: Eli and Luke. Her eyes narrowed as their profiles came up on her screen. They were Nexus employees—or at least, they had been. Something about them had pushed them to breach their own company’s security.

Interesting.

Alana stared at their profiles for a long moment, her instincts telling her there was more to this than a simple data breach. She felt the familiar pull of curiosity, the itch to know more, to understand why these two men had risked everything to get inside Nexus’s system. But she wasn’t going to report them. Not yet.

No, Alana had other plans.

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For the next week, Alana followed them, observing from a distance. She watched as they went about their daily routines—Luke, the more outgoing of the two, moving confidently through the city, and Eli, quieter, always looking over his shoulder, as if he could feel the weight of their actions bearing down on him.

She had been careful to remain unseen, using the FBI’s vast surveillance resources to keep tabs on them. Through it all, she pieced together the fragments of their lives, learning their habits, their patterns. One place in particular stood out—the coffee shop they frequented almost daily.

It was the perfect place to make her move.

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It was a chilly afternoon when Alana finally decided to approach them. She had waited long enough, learned enough to make her entrance seem natural, casual. The coffee shop was busy, the hum of conversations filling the air as customers came and went.

Alana spotted them immediately—Luke and Eli sitting by the window, talking quietly over their drinks. Eli looked tense, his eyes darting around the room every few seconds, while Luke appeared relaxed, leaning back in his chair as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

Perfect.

Alana took a deep breath, steadied her hand, and made her way toward them. As she approached their table, she deliberately nudged her coffee cup just enough to send it tumbling over the edge, spilling the dark liquid onto the table with a splash.

“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry!” Alana exclaimed, her voice light and apologetic as she grabbed a napkin to clean up the mess. “I’m such a klutz. Let me help you with that.”

Luke glanced up, smiling politely. “No worries. It happens.”

Eli, however, stiffened, his eyes narrowing as he watched her with a cautious gaze. He didn’t say anything, but the suspicion was written all over his face.