Chapter 18: Jax Meets the System He Would Have Become

The maintenance port accepted his credentials on the third attempt.

Not because the credentials were wrong — they were perfect, a ghost-key Jax had constructed from the station's own authentication architecture, a forgery so fluent it was practically autobiography — but because the port itself was running a three-second lag that he hadn't anticipated, a buffer delay built into the system's response protocol that meant the connection wasn't refused so much as considered, briefly, before being allowed.

He noted that. Filed it.