Prologue

Addison - 14 Years Ago, Age 11

One Step at a Time

 

Addison could have gone into school that day. Her throat wasn’t sore anymore, and the headache had faded to a dull, manageable echo. If she’d really wanted to, she could have pulled on her uniform, tied her hair back, and sat through English and maths and the long drag of the afternoon. But her mum had stood in the kitchen that morning with her arms crossed, looking at her carefully, and said, “One more day. Just to be sure.”

So Addison was on the sofa instead, wrapped in the faded blue blanket that smelled like washing powder and warmth, her socked feet tucked underneath her, watching one of her favourite films, enjoying the familiarity as it played out in front of her.

She shifted on the cushions, reaching for the mug of hot Lemsip her mum had left on the coffee table, and took a sip. It tasted too sweet, but in a nice way.

The front door opened. Addison didn’t move. Nathan’s laugh carried down the hallway first, followed by the heavier thud of a bag hitting the floor.

“Addi?” her mum called. “Nathan’s home.”

Addison rolled her eyes. “I know,” she said, just loudly enough to be heard.

Footsteps slowed near the living room door. Someone leaned against the frame, shoulder to the wood, not coming in properly, as if they weren’t sure if they were allowed.

“You skiving, shorty?” Nathan asked.

“I’m ill,” Addison corrected, giving a theatrical cough, even though she felt the smile pulling at her mouth.

Nathan snorted and disappeared to find food.

The other person stayed.

Addison glanced sideways and saw Sebastian properly then. Tall, blonde, coat still on, rucksack slung over one shoulder. He eased it down by his feet instead of letting it drop, pausing there as if he wasn’t sure where to stand.

 “Hi, Addi.”

“Hi,” she said, sitting up a bit.

“Your mum said you’re off school.”

“Just today.”

Sebastian smiled, the small, polite sort. “Lucky you.”

He came in then, careful and respectful in the way grown-ups were in other people’s houses, as though he didn’t want to knock anything out of place. He sat at the other end of the sofa and pulled his laptop from his bag.

Nathan had said once that Sebastian studied computers. Properly. Not just games or typing stuff like at school. Real systems. Coding. Addison didn’t fully know what that meant yet, but she liked the sound of it.

“What’s this?” he asked, nodding at the television.

Addison looked back at it. A man in black was climbing a cliff, muttering to himself.
“It’s The Princess Bride,” she said. “It’s good.”

Sebastian tilted his head, looking at the TV for a moment.

“Yeah? What’s it about?”

“Do you really want to know?” Addison paused the film with the remote, unwilling to go into detail if he was just being polite.

He nodded at the television. “I do.”

“Well,” she said, brightening, “it’s a bit like a fairy tale, only with sword fights, a giant, an evil genius, a horrible prince, oh, and a happy ever after.”

“Sounds interesting.”

“Do you mean that, or is that code for ‘what a load of rubbish’?”

Sebastian laughed, “I mean it. If you want my opinion, more films need giants and evil geniuses. Personally, I think Sound of Music would have been much better with a giant chasing Maria around that mountain.”

Addison snorted and settled back into the sofa, the blanket warm around her legs. “Well, if you’re serious, I can start it from the beginning?”

“OK, go for it,” he said, putting his laptop away. “I’ll work afterwards; I could do with a break.”

The film rolled on. There was no phone checking, no sighs, no restless questions about whether there was anything else on. He stayed, leaning back with one arm stretched along the back of the sofa, laughing in the right places.

At some point Nathan came back through with plates of sandwiches and crisps, setting them down on the coffee table in front of them.

“Mum said help yourself to these. There’s more food in the fridge if either of you want it.”

He dropped into the armchair, propped his feet on the pouf, opened his laptop and began tapping away.

By the time the credits rolled, Addison had eaten a fair share of the food and was feeling a lot less tired.

“That was… actually very good,” Sebastian said, sounding faintly surprised.

“Told you,” she said.

Nathan smirked. “You should be glad she didn’t put on a musical. I half expected Calamity Jane to be queued up next.”

“Hey,” Sebastian said, “don’t knock Doris Day.”

Nathan burst out laughing, shaking his head. “Don’t encourage her.”

Addison grabbed a cushion and threw it at his head with unerring aim. “Just because you’re at university doesn’t mean you’re always right.”

“Sorry, Sis, I’ll try to stop being right all the time. I know that can get on your nerves.”

Snatching an apple from the table Addison bit into it with unnecessary force.

Sebastian reached down for his laptop, opened it up and balanced it on his knees. “Right. I probably should do some work before I get sidetracked into another movie.”

“What do you do?” Addison asked, the question slipping out before she’d thought about it.

Sebastian paused. “Work-wise?”

She nodded.

“I write code,” he said, picking up his laptop again and sitting back down. “I build things that don’t exist yet.”

Addison frowned. “Like games?”

“Sometimes,” he said. “More often systems. Rules. Problems that need solving.”

He turned his laptop so she could see the screen, lines of unfamiliar symbols scrolling into place.

“It’s like puzzles,” he went on, more to himself than to her. “You give the computer instructions, and if you’re careful enough, it does exactly what you asked. And if you’re not…” He smiled, a small one. “It tells you very clearly that you’ve messed up.”

Addison peered closer; the letters swam meaninglessly on the screen. “How do you know what to tell it?”

Sebastian glanced at her, surprised, then thoughtful. “You learn,” he said simply. “One step at a time.”

Chapter One

Addison - Now

Under the Threshold

 

By the time Addison reached the glass doors of Keystone Tech, she was already on her second deep breath.

The building was all glass and pale stone, the type of place that didn’t need to shout about what it was. No slogans. No gimmicks. Just a discreet sign set into the wall and a steady stream of people moving in and out with quiet purpose.

She adjusted the strap of her bag on her shoulder and stepped inside.

Reception was quiet but not empty. A low hum of voices, keyboards and phones. Everything was neutral. Grey, wood and glass, arranged with the kind of restraint that suggested decisions had been made and then left alone. Nothing fought for attention. No colour shouted to be noticed.

She gave her name to the receptionist, trying not to sound like this was the biggest day she’d had in a long time.

“I’m starting today,” she said. “Junior developer.”

The woman smiled. “In that case, welcome to Keystone. I’ll let Claire from HR know you’re here. If you take a seat, she’ll come and get you and take you to your new desk.”

Addison perched on one of the chairs by the window, her knees bouncing despite herself. She’d completed two rounds of interviews months earlier, one technical and one panel, and passed with room to spare. In February, she’d handed in her notice, worked her month, packed up her desk with methodical efficiency and left without a flicker of regret.

Claire appeared a moment later, bright-eyed and warm, her lanyard swinging slightly as she walked. Addison remembered her from the interviews.

“Addison, great to see you again,” she said, smiling. “I’m really pleased you accepted our offer.”

As they walked, Claire pointed out the building layout, where to find coffee and which lifts were faster if Addison was in a hurry. She didn’t rush or overexplain, simply treating Addison like someone who belonged there.

“The exec team are on five,” Claire said as they passed the lifts. “No need to go up there unless you’re summoned. Your team’s on four. Here’s your pass, just tap it on the panel and the lift will open. You’ll need it to get in and out of every floor in the building.”

Addison smiled at that. Perfect.

The development area was quieter than she’d expected, focused rather than hushed. Desks were arranged in clusters, not in rows. A few people wore headphones; others leaned together in low discussion. Whiteboards were already filled with diagrams and half erased notes.

Claire led her to a desk in the middle of the room.

“This is yours. No hot‑desking. Set it up how you like.”

She waited while Addison put her bag down, then added, “Let me take you to Mark Whitaker’s office. He’s the team leader. You met him in your interview, but this way you’ll know where he sits.”

They walked to an office in the corner. The door was open, so Claire knocked lightly on the wall.

“Mark, Addison’s arrived. I’ll leave her with you, if that’s okay,” Claire said. Then she turned back to Addison, holding out her hand for a brief shake. “Any issues or questions Mark can’t answer, just drop me an email. Welcome to Keystone. I’m sure you’re going to fit right in.”

“Take a seat, Addison,” Mark leaned back as he spoke, one hand idly straightening a photo frame on his desk. Two children grinned back at her, mid‑chaos, his wife’s hand caught half‑blurred in the edge of the shot. He glanced at it once, briefly, and smiled before turning back to her.

“I know Claire will have shown you around,” Mark said, settling back in his chair. “So let’s talk about what we’d actually like you to look at first. We’ve got an internal security event correlation tool. It does the job, but…”

He hesitated, then turned his monitor slightly so Addison could see.

“We catch the obvious stuff. Big spikes, known patterns, the usual. What we’re not great at is the slow creep, things that look harmless on their own but start getting interesting when they’re stitched together.”

Addison leaned forward before she quite realised she was doing it. “So you’re correlating on volume, not context?”

Mark’s eyebrows lifted. “That’s a very concise way of putting it.”

“It’s a common trap,” she said, already scanning the screen. “If your rules engine treats each alert as a standalone event, you’ll either drown in noise or miss the interesting stuff entirely. Especially if someone knows how to stay under your threshold.”

Mark smiled then, not a big one, just enough. “That’s exactly what we’re seeing. I was hoping you might say that.”

Addison grinned. “That sounds like a dream project for me. I was fully prepared to be put on the help desk for a few months until I proved myself.”

“That might have been an option,” Mark said, “except for two things. One, you’re far too good a coder to be stuck on a help desk. And two, I spoke to one of your former managers, who said you had… limited patience with people who pretended to be tech savvy.”

“Oh,” Addison said, her cheeks warming. “He may have a point.”

Mark raised an eyebrow. “Be honest, did you tell your old team lead you’d staple his password to his head if you had to reset it one more time?”

Addison grimaced. “In my defence, he’d forgotten it twice already that day. And I’d just fixed some of his code that he then took credit for, so I wasn’t exactly in the best frame of mind. Also, to be clear, I didn’t actually do it, despite the temptation, so I deserve some brownie points for restraint.”

Mark laughed. He deliberately leaned forward, picked up a purple stapler from his desk, weighed it thoughtfully in his hand, then slid it into a drawer.

“Just in case,” he said. “I’ll keep that out of reach for now.”

Addison groaned inwardly as the colour in her face deepened.

“Listen,” Mark said, settling back. “We’re a pretty relaxed bunch on this floor. The team work well together, help each other out, and like bouncing ideas around. Sebastian Fairfax has built a company that lets nerdy coders like us work in the way that suits us best.”

Addison looked up at that.

“He’s one of the best coders I’ve ever met,” Mark went on. “Genius level stuff. But he never wanted a company that forced people to work in isolation or feel like they were stuck in a sweatbox. So if you’ve got ideas, I want to hear them. And for the record,” he added lightly, “I promise not to take the credit.”

By mid‑morning she was already elbow‑deep in code, headphones on, her usual playlist of Alexis Ffrench, Max Richter and Einaudi helping her focus. The work absorbed her completely: complex without being messy, the kind of problem that rewarded care and attention.

Over the course of the day, members of the team stopped by her desk to introduce themselves. Everyone seemed friendly and relaxed. Compared to her last job, where stress levels were permanently through the roof and taking a break from your desk was treated like a personal failing, the atmosphere here felt like a dream.

On Wednesday afternoon, she broke something.

Not catastrophically, just enough to make the code stop behaving the way it should. Addison frowned at the screen for a long moment, pushed her headphones back, and retraced her steps. The logic was sound. The output wasn’t. Somewhere, something subtle was folding in on itself.

She hovered over the problem longer than was comfortable, weighing whether to flag it or keep pulling at the thread. At her last job, this would have earned her a raised eyebrow, maybe a comment about timelines. Here, no one seemed to be watching.

Mark drifted past her desk a few minutes later. “Everything all right?”

“I think so,” she said. “I just want to check something before it becomes something else.”

He nodded, already moving on. “Shout if you need another pair of eyes.”

She didn’t.

Ten minutes later, she found it. A small, elegant conflict between two assumptions that had never been meant to meet. She fixed it, ran the test again, and watched the system settle. Nothing dramatic. Nothing broken. Exactly as it should be.

Addison put her headphones back on and felt herself exhale.

At the end of Thursday, she’d stopped carrying everything back and forth in her bag. Her notebook stayed on the desk now, spine squared to the keyboard; her headphones hung from the monitor instead of being stuffed into her pocket. She caught herself reaching automatically for her mug without looking, fingers finding the chipped edge of the one she’d already decided was hers.

She realised, with quiet acceptance rather than excitement, that the desk no longer felt borrowed.

By Friday afternoon, the days had slipped into a steady rhythm she hadn’t questioned once. She’d started recognising people by the sound of their footsteps, who preferred to work in silence and who thought best out loud. When someone suggested drinks after work, Addison said yes without overthinking it, partly to celebrate the new job, and partly because, somehow, she already felt at home.

The bar was busy by the time the team got there, music threading through the low conversation. It smelled of fried food and spilled beer, all dark wood and low lighting, the kind that caught on the pale glow of phone screens every time someone checked a message. They managed to grab a table, and Addison slid into a seat with the rest of the team, shrugging off her jacket and looping it over the back of the chair.

A waitress appeared to take their order and, a few minutes later, drinks were set down in front of them.

“To Addison,” Hannah said, raising her glass. She was one of the other coders, dark hair scraped into a messy bun and apparently living permanently in yoga pants, though her nails were always immaculate, red polish unchipped and deliberate. “Who survived her first week.”

The others joined in, and Addison took a sip of her white wine, smiling at the four people sitting around the table with her. Apart from Hannah, there was Steven, who wore plain black T‑shirts and jeans and looked pleasantly unremarkable until someone mentioned, in a conspiratorial whisper, that he’d paid his way through university modelling for romance book covers. The kind where the hero wore an open shirt and a jacket, his face turned just far enough away to remain anonymous. Addison made a mental note to ask him about it when she knew him better.

Phil was well-built, with a remarkable full beard and hair a little overdue for a cut. Fiona, or Fee as she preferred, was smaller than Addison and clearly immune to the concept of matching. A yellow tank top, dark green skirt and purple tights. On anyone else, it would have been chaos; somehow, on her, it worked.

“So,” Fee said, leaning forward slightly, “have you seen the big boss yet?”

“Here we go,” Phil muttered, shaking his head and rolling his eyes at Steven, who huffed out a laugh.

“Who?” Addison asked. “Sebastian Fairfax?”

“The one and only,” Hannah said, letting out a theatrical sigh. “I see him every day.”

Addison blinked at that. She’d been there a full week and hadn’t seen him once. Not on their floor, not drifting through the building, nowhere.

“I must have missed him.”

“Hannah,” Fee said dryly, “have you still got his photo as your screensaver, you lunatic?”

“Hey, don’t rain on my parade. I’m manifesting,” Hannah replied, already pulling out her phone and turning it towards Addison.

Sure enough, there was a photo of Sebastian, not looking at the camera, completely unaware he was being photographed. It had been a few months since Addison had last seen him; he looked the same: tall, dirty blonde hair, strong jaw with a hint of stubble; there was no sign of the dimples though on the image. Those only came out in very special circumstances.

“You’re going to manifest yourself into getting arrested as a stalker if you keep that up,” Phil said, lifting his beer for a sip.

“I can’t help it,” Hannah said, glancing back at her phone before placing it screen down on the table. “The man’s not only gorgeous; he’s frighteningly intelligent. It’s basically my catnip.”

“So,” Fee said, turning to Addison, “have you met him?”

There was no way Addison was admitting she’d known Sebastian since she was eleven, or that he was her brother’s best friend. That would open a whole, deeply inconvenient can of worms. Lying wasn’t her strength, so she opted for diversion.

“He wasn’t involved in my interview process,” she said. “I’d remember if he had been.”

“No, he doesn’t get involved in recruiting at our level,” Fee said. “No need. He trusts his team to get it right. The senior execs aren’t really involved in our day‑to‑day work, thank God. Some of them are… hard work.”

Steven, Phil, and Hannah spoke at the same time.

“Helen Price.”

Addison raised her eyebrows. “Who’s Helen Price?”

Hannah let out a short laugh. “Oh, I tried to say good morning to her today in the lift.”

She straightened in her chair, fixed her expression into something blank, and said flatly, “Is this about the firewall exceptions you emailed me at 08:42?”

Fee snorted into her drink.

“That was the exact time I sent it,” Hannah added. “By eight forty-six, we were in the lift and she’d already read the whole thing.”

Steven shook his head. “Get her on code and she’s brilliant. But socially?”

Hannah lifted her glass. “Like being replied to by a very bored chatbot.”

“Painful,” Fee said with feeling.

“Fortunately, she doesn’t leave the top floor much, so you may go weeks without seeing her, if you’re lucky,” Steven said.

After that, the conversation drifted back to the projects they were all working on, and to Addison’s quiet relief, Sebastian didn’t come up again. She really liked her new colleagues, and the last thing she wanted was to make anyone uncomfortable by admitting how well she knew the CEO or, worse, have anyone assume that was the reason she was there.

 

Some lines are worth crossing.

Read more in Against the Code.

Available now on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited.