While Ironhand was speaking with Emily Corduroy on the other side of the city, Elizabeth was working.
The difference was that Emily's laboratory was filled with machines.
Elizabeth's apartment was filled with documents.
Newspaper archives covered the table.
Corporate reports occupied one corner.
Dozens of open browser windows illuminated the room with a pale blue glow.
Coffee sat untouched beside her keyboard.
She hadn't noticed.
Her attention was elsewhere.
Specifically—
on the list Ironhand had mentioned the previous night.
Potential allies.
People capable of helping them reach Faith Industries.
Elizabeth had spent most of the morning researching names.
Most were exactly what she expected.
Experienced professionals.
Experts in highly specific fields.
People with enough skill to attract attention and enough common sense to avoid it.
One name, however, kept drawing her back.
Emily Corduroy.
Elizabeth leaned back in her chair and stared at the collection of files scattered across her screen.
The more she researched Emily, the stranger the story became.
On paper, Emily Corduroy was one of the most accomplished engineers in Connection City.
Head Engineer of Keytech Technics.
Personally mentored by William Keytech.
Widely considered one of the brightest scientific minds of her generation.
None of that was unusual.
The unusual part was everything before it.
Or rather—
the lack of it.
Elizabeth opened another archive.
Nothing.
Another.
Still nothing.
Six years ago, Emily Corduroy effectively didn't exist.
No academic records.
No school registrations.
No university applications.
No competition results.
No public achievements.
Nothing.
Then, seemingly overnight, she appeared.
Elizabeth scrolled through another article.
Six years ago.
First place in a regional technology competition.
Five years and eight months ago.
Winner of a citywide engineering challenge.
Five years and six months ago.
Winner again.
Then again.
And again.
By the end of the second year, Emily's name had become impossible to ignore.
Every competition she entered seemed to end the same way.
She won.
Sometimes narrowly.
Usually not.
Elizabeth opened another archived interview.
A younger William Keytech stood beside a teenage Emily Corduroy.
The headline read:
"A Mind Worth Watching."
Two years later, William officially brought her into Keytech Technics.
Two years after that, she became Head Engineer.
At an age where most engineers were still learning from their superiors.
Elizabeth stared at the screen for several seconds.
From a practical perspective, Emily Corduroy was almost the perfect candidate.
A genius engineer.
A trusted employee of Keytech Technics.
Someone respected throughout the city's scientific community.
More importantly—
someone who could potentially gain access to places ordinary people never could.
If Ironhand was serious about infiltrating Faith Industries during the Winter Gala, having Emily on the inside could be invaluable.
She possessed the technical knowledge to understand whatever Faith was hiding.
And she possessed the status necessary to move through circles that would be closed to everyone else.
The more Elizabeth looked at her file, the more useful Emily appeared.
Which only made the missing years more troubling.
People like Emily didn't simply appear out of nowhere.
Not in Connection City.
Not anywhere.
Yet somehow, six years ago, she had.
Elizabeth opened another database.
No parents.
No childhood records.
No teachers.
No photographs from before six years ago.
It was as if someone had taken the first two decades of Emily Corduroy's life and erased them.
Elizabeth tapped her fingers against the desk.
"How?"
The question escaped her before she realized she had spoken aloud.
How did someone become one of the greatest engineers in Connection City without anyone noticing?
How did someone teach themselves enough advanced engineering to outperform university graduates before ever stepping inside a classroom?
And perhaps most importantly—
why was there almost nothing about her before she appeared?
Elizabeth opened another article.
Then another.
And another.
The result never changed.
Awards.
Interviews.
Research achievements.
Competition victories.
Everything after her arrival was documented in obsessive detail.
Everything before it was a void.
A blank space.
An empty page.
Elizabeth narrowed her eyes.
People could hide records.
Corporations could bury scandals.
Governments could erase identities.
But making an entire childhood disappear was something else entirely.
That took effort.
Deliberate effort.
Which meant one of two things.
Either Emily Corduroy was hiding her past.
Or someone with considerable resources had hidden it for her.
Neither possibility was comforting.
Elizabeth finally closed the files.
The mystery fascinated her.
But at the moment, it wasn't the mystery she was trying to solve.
Faith Industries remained the priority.
Emily Corduroy could wait.
For now.
She created a note beside Emily's profile.
Potential ally.
Potential insider.
Further investigation required.
Then she moved on to the next name.
Yet even as new files appeared on her screen, part of her attention remained trapped by the same question.
Not how Emily became a genius.
Not how she became Head Engineer.
But how someone could arrive in the center of Connection City with no past—
and somehow convince everyone to stop asking where she came from.
The next file proved considerably easier to find.
Unlike Emily Corduroy, Brick Birking had never tried to stay out of the spotlight.
In fact, he seemed to enjoy it.
Elizabeth typed his name into the archive database.
Thousands of results appeared instantly.
News articles.
Security reports.
Corporate statements.
Government announcements.
Interviews.
Opinion pieces.
For nearly a decade, Brick Birking had been one of the most recognizable criminals in Connection City.
Elizabeth opened the oldest article she could find.
The headline alone was enough to catch her attention.
TWELVE-YEAR-OLD SUSPECTED IN THALOS CORP SECURITY BREACH
Elizabeth raised an eyebrow.
Twelve years old?
She continued reading.
At the time, Thalos Corporation had been preparing to unveil one of its most ambitious technologies.
A prototype based on dimensional compression.
The details remained classified even now.
Most information regarding the technology had been heavily censored.
But one fact remained public.
The prototype had been stolen.
By a twelve-year-old boy.
Elizabeth stared at the article.
"You're kidding."
Apparently not.
Further investigation only made the story more absurd.
The theft had never been fully explained.
No one knew exactly how Brick had entered the facility.
No one knew how he had bypassed security.
And no one knew how he had escaped.
Only that he had succeeded.
And that things became significantly worse afterward.
Elizabeth opened another file.
Then another.
And another.
The pattern quickly emerged.
Every few months a new headline appeared.
A vault emptied.
A corporate warehouse breached.
A supposedly impenetrable facility infiltrated.
Each job larger than the last.
Each more impossible than the one before it.
Over time Brick stopped stealing because he needed money.
If he had ever needed money at all.
Yet one detail appeared repeatedly throughout the reports.
A second figure.
Elizabeth noticed it first in a blurry security photograph.
Then in witness statements.
Then again in corporate investigation files.
A masked individual.
Always present.
Always unidentified.
The descriptions rarely matched.
Some witnesses claimed the figure was taller than Brick.
Others insisted they were smaller.
Even the security footage never provided a clear answer.
The mask changed.
The clothing changed.
Sometimes the figure appeared beside Brick.
Sometimes several rooms away.
But somehow they always appeared in the same places.
The same heists.
The same impossible break-ins.
Nobody knew their name.
Nobody knew where they came from.
And nobody could even agree on whether the mysterious accomplice was a man or a woman.
Only one thing remained consistent.
Whenever Brick Birking appeared—
the masked figure was usually somewhere nearby.
Corporate investigators eventually gave up trying to identify them and simply referred to the individual by a nickname.
The Ghost.
Elizabeth opened another file.
Then another.
And another.
The pattern remained unchanged for years.
Brick.
The Ghost.
Brick.
The Ghost.
Until six years ago.
Elizabeth frowned.
The reports abruptly changed.
The Ghost stopped appearing.
No explanation.
No public incident.
No betrayal.
No arrest.
Nothing.
One day the mysterious accomplice was there.
The next, they weren't.
Brick continued operating alone.
The heists continued.
The headlines continued.
But The Ghost never appeared beside him again.
Six years ago, they had simply vanished.
Elizabeth searched through several investigative reports.
Corporate analysts had noticed it.
Police investigators had noticed it.
Journalists had noticed it.
None of them had discovered why.
The disappearance remained one of the city's unanswered mysteries.
No confirmed sightings.
No verified records.
No body.
No identity.
Just absence.
As if the person had simply stepped out of the story.
And never returned.
Elizabeth leaned back slightly.
For someone nobody knew anything about, The Ghost had left behind a surprisingly large shadow.
She stared at the screen for a moment longer.
Then her attention returned to the main subject.
Brick Birking.
Captured.
Pandora.
The city's most secure prison.
A place people didn't leave.
Ever.
Elizabeth exhaled slowly.
Ironhand wanted him out.
And somehow, that was supposed to be part of a plan to infiltrate Faith Industries.
She opened a new file.
PANDORA ARCHIVE SEARCH
Her fingers paused above the keyboard.
If she wanted to understand Ironhand's plan, she needed to understand the place he was trying to break into.
Because breaking into Faith Industries was one thing.
Breaking someone out of Pandora was something else entirely.
Pandora… was not a prison.
At least not in any official sense.
There were no maps pointing to it.
No confirmed coordinates.
No registered facility under that name in any governmental or corporate database.
No records of construction, ownership, or jurisdiction.
Because according to every official source—
Pandora did not exist.
And yet, every reference to Brick Birking's final capture ended the same way.
Transferred to Pandora.
A place that wasn't listed anywhere, but was spoken of in the same tone as a prison.
Or worse—
a place people refused to define at all.
Some called it a containment site.
Some called it a disposal zone.
Some insisted it was nothing more than a myth built to explain disappearances that couldn't be publicly acknowledged.
But every version agreed on one thing:
No one ever came back from it.
Not because escape was impossible.
But because, officially, there was nothing to escape from in the first place.
Elizabeth stared at the search results for a moment longer.
Then slowly leaned back.
"…So it exists," she muttered.
Not as a place.
As a warning.