Norman sat in front of a collection of storage slabs - the ones that they had managed to safely extract from the Yaskh ziggurat.

The Senator's study had a mechanism to read from these slabs. Norman hadn't been able to bring the device with him, but he did manage to sneak out a copy of the instruction manual and design document for the device that had been present in the library.

Using them, over the last two days, he had been trying to reconstruct the device. However, it had proven to be a daunting task. Besides the fact that Norman's familiarity with hardware engineering was very limited, he was having a very hard time focusing. The scene of Flavia's laser obliterating Kiri's head kept replaying in his mind.

He would get up in the morning, and his half-asleep, addled mind would continue to wonder for several minutes why Celine wasn't yet making a ruckus. Then he would wake up and remember. She would never need to be fed again.

He would take a shower, and instinctively open the door gently, taking care to ensure that he didn't slam the door against the cat - who, for some reason, loved to loaf on the floor mat right outside the washroom, notwithstanding the numerous cat beds that Norman had tried to get her used to. And then his mind would remind him - he was never going to see her loafing again.

Each reminder felt like a stab driven deep into his chest, shredding him bit by bit each time.

He had surrendered before the Nightwyrms. Why hadn't he done the same when Flavia pointed her gun at Kiri? He didn't have the answer. He would do it if he could relive that moment again. But the laws of physics didn't work that way.

He was pulled up from his self-loathing by a doorbell ding.

"Hey Norman, you alright?" The first thing Garvin noticed was the pale expression on Norman's face.

"Yes, just haven't been sleeping too well." He couldn't even recall how many times he had reused that excuse in his life.

Garvin had agreed to help him with decoding the Yaskh storage plates. Norman hoped that the brilliant computer scientist would be able to crack open the information in a lot less time - this was his specialty, after all.

He was happy to let him have all the credit for decoding Yaskh storage devices - no solution had yet been published publicly. The work that the Senator had commissioned had likely been done through private channels with strict confidentiality clauses. Of course, they would mention nothing about the manual they had recovered when publishing it.

As he walked Garvin through the details of his explorations so far, Garvin pulled out an array of probes and auxiliary instruments. The moment Norman saw the half-open suitcase, the first thing his mind pictured was Celine settled inside it. His throat tightened, and his words faltered. Every glance at some half-empty box in the room, some bit of empty space on the shelves in his apartment, some vacant corner in the room felt like a slap on his face. For the choices he had made.

"You alright, man?"

Garvin knew nothing about Kiri. Or Celine. Or anything he had done. Norman did need someone to talk to, but Garvin was hardly the right person.

"Yes, please forgive me. Got distracted." That was all he said, and he continued with the elaboration.

After Garvin had enough information to work with, he walked out to his balcony and took some deep breaths to calm himself. Trying to push down the memories of the time he had spent here with Arianna, gazing at the breathtaking view of the asteroid belt from so up close.

Norman didn't know how long he was just gazing into the floating bits of rocks in space when Garvin called him back. "Hey, your secondary backup device is getting full. Your tablet is saying it may have to pause syncing soon."

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"What? I don't have a secondary..." Norman paused. Realization dawning, he said, "Garvin, can we find out where this storage device is?"

"What, you lost your backup device?" Garvin was confused.

"No, I don't think it is my device." Kiri had not just copied over the research on his tablet. Why settle for a one-time sync when you could keep milking the cow? She had configured her own machine as a backup device so that whatever Norman did would eventually get synced to her storage.

"Holy..." Garvin realized the implication, "We need to notify the Academy at once..."

"Hold on... wait. If what I am thinking is right, we may have a much bigger opportunity here."

Garvin was not too excited about being detracted from the storage investigation he had come over for, but after some convincing, he did agree to set that aside for a bit. Sure enough, after some poking and prodding, the backup device was found to be in the same apartment complex. Kiri lived two apartments down.

"Can we somehow access the paired device?" Norman asked.

"That would violate so many rules..." Garvin's shocked expression faltered when he looked at Norman's face.

"What do you think about the prospect of helping the Protectorate track down the most thorny group of rebel insurgents?" Norman asked.

"She was linked to Helicon? How do you know this?" Garvin's cheeks were flushed with astonishment.

"I have had my doubts for a while. But before we talk to the Protectorate, we need concrete proof."

"Fair enough," Garvin was visibly uncomfortable with the prospect of hacking into another student's device, but at the same time, the idea of delivering something as huge as the location and plans of an entire rebel group excited him. Like many other Academy students, getting into the Protectorate had been his life-long dream.

They devised a virus, disguised as an innocuous document, that got synced to the target device as part of the continuous backup. The moment the target device tried to read its metadata to catalog it, the programming in the virus got activated, and it altered the access keys on the system, enabling Garvin and Norman direct shell access to the device.

Over the next few hours, Garvin explored the assortment of numerous esoteric utilities installed on the device, trying to find something that could count as evidence.

But it turned out to be a much more cumbersome affair than they had anticipated. Kiri was borderline paranoid. Almost all her own data was passphrase-protected.

After many attempts, they stumbled upon an encrypted relay application. Launching the relay, they were connected to a small pool of users on a live chat interface. Garvin suspected that this group acted as an intermediary who would, through a chain of other intermediaries, relay relevant messages to the cosmic Farthaark network.

Farthaark was one of the few communication channels that the Protectorate had yet not been able to tap into. The mechanism was ancient and operated at an immense scale, with a huge number of relays all over the galaxy - each one independently verifying the signature of messages flowing through them.

What the Protectorate had instead done was seal off most of the Farthaark gateways within the empire. But some still remained active in the far outskirts, where the Protectorate's presence was not yet as strong. And it seemed that people had developed alternative solutions to broadcast messages to Farthaark through intermediaries without needing to have direct access to a gateway.

Norman suddenly noticed something on the corner of the screen, "What is that red indicator?" There was a small timer in red, that blinked every second as the count decremented.

It took Garvin another hour to decipher the source of that countdown. I think this system is configured to wipe itself along with all its private keys unless the owner enters a verification passphrase. Damn, Kiri was too smart for her own good.

"What is our best course of action?" Norman was frustrated now.

"We can suspend the device. The counter will get suspended too," Garvin unhelpfully offered. There were only two minutes left. No reasonably strong passphrase could be brute-forced within that duration.

"But then we lose access to the chat room as well."

"Unfortunately, yes."

Rattling his mind, Norman had an idea: "How about inviting someone else to the room? While logged in as Kiri, can you invite me in?"

After tinkering with the highly unintuitive interface for the next couple of minutes, Garvin concluded that this was indeed doable. Norman had already installed the relay software on his device. The software was not publicly available, but they were able to recover the installer for the latest iteration from Kiri's trash.

"Great, now all we need to do is create a new identity. I guess you don't want to use your real name?" Garvin smirked.

"Of course not. Can you see if Nazaar is available?"

"A rather odd choice. Why do I get the feeling I have heard this name before?" Garvin asked as he sent out the invitation to Norman's device.

Of course, to Norman, the name had been intimately familiar for a long time. "He was the last known Yaskh scribe. A vast majority of Yaskh compendiums we have recovered were authored by him."

The scribe had never raised a weapon to harm anyone in his entire life. But little did Norman know at that point that the name he had chosen on a whim on that random evening would eventually pave the way for millions to associate that name with the endless pain, suffering and destruction that his ambition would leave behind in its wake.