Chapter 2

The auctioneer, Jake, felt a chill run down his spine. He was a man who prided himself on his ability to read a room, to control a crowd, and right now, the room was telling him to be very, very afraid. The woman at the foot of the stage radiated an aura of danger he had only ever encountered in whispered stories about black-ops wet work.

Her gaze swept over him, and he felt like a bug under a microscope. He instinctively took a step back from the podium.

"Security!" Mark finally shouted, his voice a little too high-pitched. "Get her out of here! Who let this crazy woman in?"

But the security guards were hesitant. The ones who had tried to stop her were groaning on the floor, and the rest seemed to understand that approaching her would be a catastrophic mistake.

Ava ignored Mark. She ignored the gasps and whispers of the crowd. Her focus was entirely on Lily.

"I' m not a thief," Lily said, her voice gaining a sliver of strength now that her mother was here. She pulled against her restraints, the glowing cuffs flaring slightly. "That code is mine. I wrote every single line of it."

Her words were met with a wave of derision from the crowd.

"Sure you did, sweetheart," a man with a thick gold watch shouted from the front row. "And I' m the king of England."

"Shut up and let them sell it!" another voice yelled. "I want to buy the predictive analytics module!"

Chloe laughed, a shrill, unpleasant sound. "Oh, Mark, she' s still trying. It' s almost cute, in a pathetic sort of way."

Mark puffed out his chest, regaining his confidence from the crowd' s support. "You hear that, Lily? No one believes you. You' re a fraud. You have nothing."

The men in the front rows started making lewd comments, their eyes raking over Lily' s humiliated form.

"After they sell the code, what are they selling next?" one of them sneered.

"I' d bid on her," his companion chortled, "She looks like she could use a real man to teach her a lesson."

The comments were ugly, dehumanizing. Each one was a fresh cut into Lily' s already shattered pride. She flinched, her head bowing in shame. Despair was closing in on her, a suffocating darkness. But then she looked at her mother, at the unyielding strength in Ava' s stance.

A spark of defiance ignited within her.

She would not break. Not in front of her mother.

Lily lifted her head, her eyes burning with a new fire. She looked directly at Jake, the auctioneer.

"You want to auction something of value?" she said, her voice clear and loud, ringing through the silent hall. "Forget the code. Auction me."

A confused murmur rippled through the crowd. Mark and Chloe exchanged a bewildered look.

"What are you talking about?" Mark scoffed. "You' ve gone insane."

"No," Lily said, her voice steady. "I' m making you a better offer. My knowledge. My skills. My very essence as a creator. It' s all encoded in my DNA, in my very being. Mark is trying to sell cheap copies, fragments of my soul. I' m offering the source."

She held up her bound right arm. "We' ll start the bidding. The prize for the first winning bid? You get to remove this restraint."

She then held up her left arm. "The second winning bid gets this one. And so on. But the price isn' t money."

A tense silence fell over the hall.

"The price," Lily declared, "is one of my creations. A true masterpiece, not the stolen scraps Mark is peddling. Something none of you have ever seen before. One creation for each restraint. You win the bid, you get my creation, and you get the 'honor' of unchaining me, piece by piece."

Mark burst out laughing. "Creations? You have nothing! I seized all your assets, all your labs, all your research! You' re a penniless fraud with nothing to your name!"

"Are you willing to bet on that, Mark?" Lily challenged, her eyes locking with his. "Or are you afraid? Afraid that even now, broken and shamed, I am still more than you will ever be?"

The crowd was hooked. This was better than a simple auction, it was a high-stakes drama.

Jake, the auctioneer, saw an opportunity. The woman at the foot of the stage hadn't moved, but he felt her silent approval. This was his chance to get back in control, to turn this chaos into a legendary event.

"A fascinating proposal!" Jake announced, his showman' s voice booming once more. "A challenge has been issued! The house recognizes the new terms. We will auction the removal of the first restraint. The bid is not in dollars, but in a claim to a new, secret creation from Lily Thorne! Do I have a bid to start?"

For a moment, there was silence. The idea was absurd. Then, a wiry man in the third row, a notorious venture capitalist known for risky bets, raised his paddle.

"I' ll bid," he said, a greedy glint in his eye. "Let' s see what the little fraud has up her sleeve."

"We have a bid!" Jake shouted. "The bid is to claim the first secret creation! Going once, going twice..."

No one else dared to challenge it.

"Sold!" Jake slammed his gavel. "To the gentleman in the third row! Now, Miss Thorne, your end of the bargain. Present your creation."

Mark sneered. "This is ridiculous. She' s bluffing."

Lily closed her eyes for a moment. She focused, and a small, almost invisible earpiece she had designed herself, one that had survived Mark' s sweep, activated.

"System, execute Protocol Phoenix. Release asset one."

A moment later, a detailed schematic flashed onto the main screen behind her, overwriting the block of her code that was previously displayed. It was an elegant, revolutionary design for a quantum encryption key. It was a device so advanced it would make every current form of digital security obsolete overnight.

The hall erupted in gasps. Every tech expert in the room recognized the design for what it was. It was impossible. It was brilliant. It was worth billions.