Coruscant had always made more sense from below.
The towers and monuments belonged to somebody else, impressive things built by people with enough credits to worry about skylines and architecture. Down here, beneath the traffic lanes and polished districts, everything was exposed. Power conduits ran behind cracked walls, old access tunnels intersected newer construction, and networks had been layered over one another so many times that nobody seemed entirely certain what was still connected to what.
Vess liked it.
She sat crouched atop an old ventilation housing across from the ruined temple structure, one boot planted against the metal while a compact cyberdeck rested across her knee. Her dark hair had been pulled back into a tight ponytail, keeping it out of her face while lines of data moved across the small display in front of her.
L0ck3d_G405T.
Vess had found the scavenger hunt almost by accident.
Almost.
She'd been following something else entirely when the first breadcrumb crossed one of the boards she still frequented, buried beneath enough garbage that most people probably wouldn't have given it a second look. The handle had changed, but she knew that name. Anyone who spent enough time in the right corners of the HoloNet knew that name.
That somehow made the puzzle more interesting.
"Come on, Ghost..."
Her fingers moved across the deck, following another trail through Coruscant's infrastructure. The puzzle was good. Better than good, actually. Each discovery led naturally into the next, leaving just enough exposed that someone less suspicious might believe they'd found something they weren't supposed to.
Vess knew better.
Allyson had been teaching her that too.
The last month had involved considerably less time sitting behind a terminal than Vess had expected when Allyson first started teaching her. Moving without being heard. Watching without being noticed. Learning how much information people freely gave away when they didn't know someone was listening. Controlling her presence in the Force until it no longer announced her arrival to anyone sensitive enough to notice.
Most irritatingly, Allyson had been teaching her when to leave the cyberdeck alone; Vess was still working on that one. A route through an abandoned municipal subnet gave her another coordinate, which led to an old security archive, which in turn contained something that absolutely should not have been there. Each step drew her closer to the ruins ahead.
A faint smile touched her lips.
"Show off."
Vess closed the deck and slipped it into the bag against her hip before dropping from the ventilation housing. She caught the edge of a maintenance platform several metres below, swung beneath it and landed lightly on the next level before continuing toward the temple.
The obvious entrance wasn't particularly interesting, so she ignored it. Instead, Vess followed the side of the structure until she found an old maintenance conduit running behind one of the ruined walls. Her fingers brushed across the access panel beside it, feeling the faint current still moving through circuitry that should have been dead years ago.
There you are.
The panel resisted her first attempt.
Vess frowned.
Her second attempt opened it.
"Rude."
She slipped inside.
The passage beyond was narrow, dusty, and considerably older than most of the infrastructure surrounding it. Vess moved carefully, following the remnants of the internal network whenever the physical path became less obvious. Ghost had left traces everywhere once she knew what to look for: tiny inconsistencies in ancient systems, a door receiving power when nothing around it did, a security node responding to requests nobody had made in decades.
Then she found something Ghost hadn't left.
Traffic.
Vess stopped.
Someone else was inside.
Her first instinct was to open the deck and trace it.
Her fingers had already reached halfway toward the bag before she stopped herself.
Vess stared at her hand.
She could practically hear Allyson.
"...Fine."
Her hand fell away.
Instead, she looked around.
An old security camera occupied the corner behind her, its housing nearly indistinguishable from the ruined architecture around it. Vess's gaze followed the conduit disappearing into the wall, then moved toward another farther along the passage.
She'd walked straight through them.
That was annoying. More importantly, if the other person had access to the same system, they might already know she was here. Vess stepped out of the camera's field of view and disappeared.
Vess drew the Force inward, suppressing her presence until it faded into the background noise of Coruscant rather than standing apart from it. Her breathing slowed as she moved, boots finding the places where broken stone wouldn't shift beneath her weight. She stayed outside the obvious sightlines of the remaining cameras and left the deck where it was.
No reason for whoever was ahead to know where she'd gone after that last camera caught her.
It still didn't come as naturally as slicing did. That was probably why Allyson kept making her practice it. Vess continued deeper into the ruins, no longer following the easiest path. She used broken walls and collapsed passages instead, occasionally stopping simply to listen before moving again. Eventually she heard movement ahead.
Then a voice.
"Alrighty, where are you keeping the good chit, Ghost?"
Vess stopped behind the remains of an interior wall. She sounded younger and alone, unless someone else was considerably quieter. She waited. A month ago, she probably would have been on a rooftop nearby harassing the poor girl until she gave up.
Now Vess remained exactly where she was. She leaned just far enough around the broken stone to catch a glimpse of the girl without exposing herself, studying her for several seconds before withdrawing again.
Cyberdeck.
That explained the network traffic. Vess's eyes narrowed slightly with interest. She stayed hidden, curious now, and watched to see what the girl did next.
Allyson Locke
) was going to lead to a stash of things any technomancer could dream of. 
