Chapter 4
The digital clock on Clara’s kitchen microwave glowed 2:14 AM, but Maya was wide awake, sitting at the small wooden dining table with her laptop open. The screen cast a cool blue light over her face as she worked furiously, using a portable Linux drive she always kept tucked inside her backpack pocket. If her father’s firm, Apex Systems, was as secure as they claimed, then tracing the origin of the planted files would require more than standard consumer software; it required digging into the deep packet logs of the local subnet.
Clara walked in quietly, setting a fresh cup of black coffee beside the computer. "You should get some sleep, Maya. You can't fight a digital war on empty batteries."
"I can't sleep, Aunt Clara," Maya replied without looking up from the screen, her fingers flying across the keyboard with practiced precision. "Every time I close my eyes, I hear my dad telling me never to come back. I have to find the original transmission log before they scrub the local server backup."
Using a secure VPN tunnel, Maya accessed the shadow partition she had secretly maintained on the home network months ago—a precautionary backup system she had set up when she first noticed her brother snooping around her digital workspace. To her relief, the automated sync script had executed a minor partial backup right around the time the illegal file transfer took place.
Lines of code and hexadecimal addresses scrolled down the screen in a dense green cascade. Maya narrowed her eyes, tracing the timestamps. The files alleging corporate espionage had not been uploaded from her bedroom terminal at all. They had been routed through an internal proxy server connected directly to her brother’s desktop in the basement study, utilizing his administrative override credentials.
"Got you," Maya whispered, a triumphant smile touching the corners of her mouth. She immediately initiated a secure download of the routing logs, saving them to an encrypted cloud vault and backing them up onto a thumb drive attached to her keychain.
Suddenly, a system warning flashed red across her screen. An automated remote-wipe protocol had just been triggered on the home network. Someone at her parents' house was systematically scrubbing all lingering user access points, desperately trying to erase any residual evidence that might point away from her brother.
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Clara leaned over her shoulder, watching the warning lights blink out one by one. "They're covering their tracks," the older woman observed grimly.
"They're too late," Maya said, her heart pounding as she safely unmounted her storage drives. "I have the IP signatures, the hardware MAC addresses, and the exact timestamp. They can wipe the front door clean, but they can't erase the digital footprint."
