He typed:
Leo had built it.
Leo’s hallway feed flickered. A figure in a gray coat, no face visible, stood outside his door. Not moving. Just there . ultraviolet proxy
The screen of Leo’s battered laptop flickered, then resolved into a deep, ultraviolet-hued interface. No logos, no search bar, just a pulsing cursor and the word at the bottom of the void. This wasn’t the kind of proxy you found on some forum’s pinned thread. This was ultraviolet —layered, encrypted, folded in on itself like origami made of shadow. He typed: Leo had built it
He had three seconds. He could sever the tunnel—vanish into the clean web, delete the proxy, pretend he’d never touched the sun. Or he could accept the ghost’s help and dive deeper than anyone had gone before. Not moving