🖥️ Codebreaker - Meet Jen Syd
Some heroes storm castles. Jen hacks them.
👓 Who is Jennifer Syd?
She’s not a fighter. Jen’s not a mage. She doesn’t carry a sword, blast fireballs, or bench-press monsters.
Instead, she fights with:
A laptop (a MacBook, of course).
A bad attitude (typical “should try harder” on her report card).
A sleeve of neon code inked under her skin (it’s what she did instead of studying at school).
Jen Syd is better known online by her handle, GENOCIDE (it’s a Gamertag play on her name, don’t panic) is the one who finds the monsters before they find you. And she found one particular monster well before The Three Faces of Fate starts.
In a city where gods have faded and monsters walk the waterfront, you’re going to want someone who can read the signals. Someone who can dig into the ones and zeroes and figure out what’s coming next.
Jen’s that someone.
Just don’t ask her to throw a punch.
🎧 Her Theme: Codebreaker
Where Astra’s theme is forged in fury, and Aidan’s in memory, Jen’s theme is electricity.
It’s fast, glitchy, alive with spark, fear, and fight.
“Codebreaker, threads unwind / Truth in chaos, no place to hide.”
She’s the ghost in the system. The hacker who can’t save the world with fists or fire… but maybe, just maybe, can save it with knowledge.
📖 Preview: The Ghost in the Machine
Today’s chapter finds Jen doing what she does best:
Stealing secrets.
Breaking rules.
Accidentally stumbling into a situation way bigger than she’s ready for.
By the time this is over, she’s going to realise three terrifying truths:
The monsters are real.
The world is way more broken than she thought.
You can’t debug your way out of a redcap ambush.
📖 Read Chapter 2 below, featuring illegal tooth-theft, Irish professors who are definitely hiding something, and the armoured vigilante you met last week (she is not here to make friends).
Chapter 2
The Hardcover Workshop welcomed Jen home. She hunched through the doorway, welcomed in by the smell of books and machine oil. The place was humming. The workshop side was full of wannabe mechanics and engineers, and the bookstore cafe housed their exhausted counterparts. Steam erupted as Harmony frothed a cappuccino for a weary soul.
She flashed Jen a quick smile. Jen smiled back, shrugged her Pacsafe a little higher on her shoulder, and cruised past the counter and toward the workshop area.
She didn’t know anyone here, and intended to keep it that way. Jen had a room upstairs, but took pains to not be seen. Last time I was known, everything went to shit.
She slung her pack onto an empty desk equipped with charging ports, a screen bolted to a monitor stand, and an orderly row of tools on the rear partition. Ignoring the tools, Jen pulled her MacBook from the pack, jacked it into the screen, and gave it a little juice.
Then she fished a tooth from her Pacsafe. Swiping it from the prof had been easy while he was helping her down from the stage. No one expected pickpockets to be so ordinary, and also they probably didn’t expect them to steal broken teeth that might well be biohazards.
She spun the tooth between her fingers. A rusty red cap clung to the root where whoever gave it up lost some blood to the bargain. Jen fingered her teeth, touching incisors and molars, then fetched a headband magnifier from the tools. The Hardcover Workshop was a place for any maker. Coders? Sure. Machinists? You bet. Jewellers? Got you covered. Harmony was an old friend who believed in the cause, man, like the creation of marvels was a human’s natural purpose, and she didn’t mind what you made as long as you got to it.
Jen flicked the lamp on and examined the tooth through the headband magnifier, then opened a fresh browser tab. Types of teeth, she typed, and Uncle Google helped her out. Sure enough, incisors, canines, premolars, and molars. Jen looked back at the tooth through the magnifier.
The tooth wasn’t like any of the photos. It was crooked, larger, and sharper. It looked like what you’d get if molar mated with a canine and produced a bastard offspring that was long, sharp, and had multiple points.
Sure. Back to Uncle Google. She typed: Types of wolf teeth. Nope, it didn’t look like those. Tiger teeth. Nah.
“What the hell is this?” she asked no one in particular.
“I could make that,” said Harmony. She couldn’t be accused of sneaking up, because the workshop area was far from quiet. She held a coffee on a saucer.
Jen resisted the urge to scream. “Hiya.”
“Hiya,” Harmony agreed. “Sure is a weird prop, though.”
“Prop? Like, for a movie?”
“Like. Where’d you get it? No, don’t tell me.” Harmony put the coffee in front of Jen. “Thought you might want some witch’s brew.”
“Want? No. Need? Yes.” Jen took a sip, then swivelled to face Harmony. “I… borrowed it.”
“I said not to tell me.”
“From my new environmental studies lecturer.”
“What part of this is not telling me?”
“He’s Irish.”
“Oh, God. You’ve got a crush.”
“No. I mean, that’s not what this is about.” She held up the tooth. “He had a couple of these in his bag. Environmental studies is not the same as making movies.”
“Side hustle.”
“Hmm.” Jen tossed the tooth back on the workbench.
“Jen,” Harmony said. “Remember our little talk about not getting involved?”
“Yes,” Jen said.
“Are you getting involved?”
“No,” she lied.
“I see.” Harmony pressed her lips into a line. “Just make sure he’s worth it.”
“All the people I help are worth it,” Jen said. “It’s my super power.”
“Your super power is being a minor-league criminal who just happens to major in environmental science. Oh, and accidentally helping people while committing cybercrime.”
“I commit ordinary crime, too.”
“Oh, God,” Harmony said again. “This is why I drink.” She looked back at the bookstore. “Ah, a customer. A life of service awaits.”
“If you made coffee that sucked, it wouldn’t happen this way.”
Harmony gave her a flat stare, then headed off. Jen took another sip of her excellent coffee, then tapped the tooth again. She muttered, “You’re not human, are you?”
The tooth didn’t have a lot to say on the matter, so Jen turned back to Uncle Google. Uncle Google wasn’t much help. Hmm. “What about the prof?” She spent about as long as it took her to finish her coffee to find absolutely nothing on Aidan Douglas. No Twitter, sorry, X. No Insta. Too young for Facebook, but she tried that anyway. Nothing on LinkedIn, but that was good in a way, as it was full of virtue signalling corpo wage slaves, and she didn’t want her Irishman to be one of those.
Threads? Nope. Bluesky? Nada. She looked on ValTech’s site, and couldn’t find his profile on the faculty list, but that wasn’t unusual. New lecturers could take a while to leave a paper trail.
Jen trolled the general Internet. There was an article in the Valhaven Observer about a volunteer group he ran a few years back. She found him in the police database—ssh, don’t tell Harmony—five years back for drunk and disorderly. He’d apparently been on a bender, wearing sackcloth and raving, which might be standard Irish behaviour for all Jen knew.
Nothing else. The man was a ghost prior to five years ago.
“I hate field work,” she said to the tooth. The tooth had no opinion on the matter.
* * *
Which is how she’d ended up tailing Aidan from ValTech to the waterfront. He’d taken the metro, which made following him trivial enough. Jen was used to not being noticed. Too skinny. Too ordinary. Just another face in the crowded morass of commuters.
The winter air packed quite a punch. The waterfront was warmer than deeper in the city, but Jen always felt the cold. It reminded her of home.
The prof cruised past the wharves and the big ships moored there, strolling past the end and onto the waterfront walk-slash-bike track. There were still a few people out for a jog or ride, so Jen could hang back and remain undetected. She glanced at a food cart promising the world’s best coffee, had doubts, and turned back to find Aidan gone.
He was right there. She scanned the people around, but there was no tousle-haired Irishman with an appropriately waterproofed jacket. She jogged away from the food cart and headed to the breakwater wall that served as a bastion for normalcy. This side, the sane. The other side? Deviants and swimmers.
She peered over the edge. There was a flight of steps concreted into the breakwater wall heading down to a nicely sanded beach. Jen looked at her Sketchers, thought about how long it would take to bang the sand out of them, and headed down the steps anyway.
On the beach, she couldn’t see any visibly Irishmen. There was an entirely fit man looking like he was cold but also trying not to show it as he towelled off. Jen strode towards him and said, “Did you see a guy come down here?”
“Friend of yours?”
“Professor. We’re doing field research.”
“Right.” The swimmer looked her up and down and clearly judged her sufficiently junior to be a student. “Went north.” He pointed up the beach.
Jen said, “Thanks,” and headed north. Her feet sank into the sand, promising more time cleaning shoes than she’d bargained for. Jen eventually reached one of the many stormwater outlet pipes leading from Valhaven to the sea. It was McMassive, the kind of thing you could stand up in without a lot of trouble. There were a few scraggly-looking plants struggling for life in the mud and muck, alongside a surprised Aidan.
“Hello there,” he said. “You took the tooth.”
“That’s a lie,” Jen said, then, “What tooth?”
He offered her a small smile. “Aye, spoken just like me fellow Irishmen and women.”
“Why are you here?”
Aidan gave her a raised eyebrow. “I’ve had me a fair share of purpose in life, to be sure.” His voice lowered, and he looked to the side as if he was remembering something. “But it’s been so long now that it feels like it’s gone past the bounds of time itself.”
“What?”
He brightened. “Well, here you are now. Take a look at these poor wilted plants. The water may be fresh, but still the plants are dying. It’s a right puzzle.”
Jen parsed that back through her mind. “I thought they spoke English in Ireland.” But she took out her phone and played the flashlight over the plants. He’s not wrong. They look sick.
“Le dúchas nóiméad óir le bheith ag dúchas.”
Jen gritted her teeth. “I don’t speak Irish.”
“Gaeilge.”
“Whatever. You’re saying the plants are dying. Fine. Why do you care?”
His open face turned sad. “Everyone should be minding the cares and worries of the world. But it seems like I’m here for a bigger share of the caring, if you know what I mean.”
“That’s not a healthy attitude to have.” The voice came from inside the stormwater tunnel. It echoed, made bigger than it was—right? No one sounds like that?—and they both startled, turning to face the black.
Then Aidan backed towards her, slow and steady, his hands out wide as if he were running interference. Jen didn’t mind, because the light from her flashlight showed what was coming. There were four of them. They looked human… ish; they had the regular allocation of one head, two arms, and two legs. But even the scattered light and shadow from her phone showed their skin wasn’t the colour of any human’s. It was a grey-green. They had slightly tapered ears, as if someone was trying to do a hot take on Spock, and Jen couldn’t help but think of Harmony and her props.
But those teeth weren’t props. They were far too many in each mouth. And they were just the kind of fangs she had in her Pacsafe. The very same one she’d stolen from Aidan. “Prof, what the—”
“Aye, hang on there, Jen! Tis not a safe place to be right now, so you best stay back where you are.”
“Um? Like, no kidding?” Stay or run? The four monsters—because that’s what they were! Actual, like, monsters!—approaching from the tunnel depths carried the material load-out needed to make Alan Ritchson look small. What could Jen do? She was small, skinny, and built for the cyber highway, not the sewers of Valhaven. “We’re going to die, aren’t we?”
“The hipster’s right. Stay back. This is about to be a war zone.” The voice came from the tunnel mouth. The speaker used a voice modulator to mask their voice. It had plenty of bass and menace, and Jen wondered if this was what peak fear felt like.
She turned. Nope, this is peak fear. At the tunnel mouth was a figure, legs braced wide, hair flowing in the cold winter wind about a metal faceplate. She wore banded metal armour, but to Jen’s glance it looked fresh-forged, shiny and new, nothing out of the Middle Ages about it at all. The woman at the tunnel mouth cut off their chance of escape, and she looked exactly the confident type that could break all of Jen’s bones without working up a sweat.
The woman strode toward Jen, who backed up right into Aidan. Aidan was trying to look at the newcomer and keep his eye on the four monsters. The woman strode right up to Jen, and then she was past her, standing between them and the monsters. Her hair flowed like it was alive. Everything about how she walked said strength and power. Aside from the armour, she had a gun tucked into the back of her belt. It had a weird look, with an oddly angled grip and a big barrel. The monsters couldn’t see it, and she hadn’t drawn it. “You guys should fuck right back off to where you came from.”
The monsters halted. One held a bat. Another, paired knives. The third had a nunchaku loosely dangling from one clawed hand. The last had a pistol. Jen didn’t know much about guns, but she knew it was ridiculous for a creature that could make Superman look like he should eat more protein to carry a gun. Like, it was a second level of unfair on top of the existing unfair?
“You,” said the one with the bat. Jen tried to make her brain work. What she should do was turn, run out the tunnel mouth, and back along the beach. Fast as she could, and damn the sand, until she scampered up the concrete steps and found that shitty food cart. But what she was doing instead was noticing the tiny details. All four monsters had dark red hats, either a beanie or a ball cap, and Jen remembered what Aidan had said. Redcap bastards. And while they wore jeans, T-shirts, and jackets like normal people, they were not normal people at all. What else had Aidan said? If you ever figure out how to take care of them, you’ll be right there alongside me.
Jen hadn’t worked out how to take care of redcap bastards, but she was here anyway.
The armoured woman said, “I don’t want to hurt you.” Then she paused, head tilted to the floor for a moment. “No, that’s a lie. I really, really want to hurt you.”
The monsters rushed her. Baseball Bat came first, his bat raised high. The woman stepped in, hands coming up to meet the bat’s handle before it began its downward strike. She kicked the monster in the knee, and wrenched the bat down as the monster staggered. The armoured woman did something Jen couldn’t see, then the bat came free. She swung, hitting the monster in the jaw with the bat. Its head twisted to the left with a horrible crack that made Jen want to be sick. More of those horrific teeth sprayed, blood and porcelain hitting the tunnel wall. The armoured warrior hadn’t stopped moving, swinging a mighty blow at Baseball Bat’s left kneecap, then the right. The creature didn’t make a noise, probably out already from the head shot, but it folded like wet laundry onto the tunnel floor.
Knife Boy surged toward the woman with his blades, but she swayed left, then right, the steel touching nothing. His third knife strike was a savage uppercut she pivoted away from, then brought her knee into his groin so hard even Jen winced. The warrior took the knives off Knife Boy, put her foot inside his instep, and buried the blades in the monster’s throat. Blood fountained, almost black in the dim tunnel. It coated the warrior’s armour. It gleamed red in Jen’s flashlight as the body capsized away.
Captain Nunchaku approached with more caution. Jen hadn’t known people still used weapons like that. She’d seen an old movie once, something with turtles, and in her defence she’d been a kid at the time, and it was one of Ernie’s shitty movies, but one turtle used them. Or was it the guys in black? Or both?
Whatever, none of the fools in that movie moved with the same speed and power as Captain Nunchaku. The armoured warrior tensed, then swayed, stepping back as the wooden haft of the weapon tried to find her head. She ducked, and the nunchaku came around to her body. She didn’t dodge that one, the wood clanging against her banded armour, and then she was on him like a feral cat. Near as Jen could tell, their saviour pummelled Captain Nunchaku’s body about four thousand times in two seconds. He staggered back as if someone were hitting him with a jackhammer. The nunchaku clattered to the tunnel floor. He got his arms and claws up, but the woman stepped away, spun, and the heel of her foot went right around his clumsy block, catching him in the side of the head.
He fell, like someone had just pulled all his bones out. Or cut his strings. Or whatever? Was there a better metaphor? Jen’s brain was struggling to grab one from tape storage.
The Guy with a Pistol felt it was his moment. He fired at the armoured warrior. The noise was absolutely amazing in the confines of the tunnel. And it was here that Jen realised, That woman has been moving farther up the tunnel all this time. It meant a stray shot was less likely to hit Jen or Aidan. The first round hit the tunnel wall as the warrior stepped left, drawing her gun from behind her. The pistol fired again, and the warrior slipped left again as her weapon came up.
Ah. That’s a sawn-off shotgun. Jen had the realisation just as the armoured woman fired. The double blast made the puny pistol’s efforts sound like a pop-gun. The monster’s head exploded in a shower of red and white parts, spraying the tunnel wall opposite with ichor.
Smoke curled from the shotgun barrel. The warrior held her pose for a moment, then snapped the breach open, ejected the spent shells, and reloaded it from the fresh ones at her belt. The voice modulator gave nothing away as she said, “Out for a stroll, are we?”
“I, uh. And the prof, well. And see,” said Jen. “Um?”
“Go home,” said the warrior. “Never come back here. It’s not safe for you.”
“Will it be yourself that’s coming to do us in if we don’t?” Aidan, near as Jen could tell, hadn’t pissed himself, nor had he run away. His voice was calm, as if he’d spent a lot of time facing ‘redcap bastards’ on a Monday evening, and had this all under control.
The mask turned towards him. Jen could see the wet red of it, and nothing of the eyes behind. “She said you were a professor. Professors are supposed to be smart.”
“Oh aye, but not every last one of them. Some of them have tenure, you see?”
The warrior stared, then barked a laugh. Jen snorted, then giggled, covering her mouth. And Aidan laughed, those green eyes crinkling, and Jen knew for an absolute fact she had the biggest crush in the world, and also her scholastic year was doomed. The warrior sobered first. “It’s not safe for you because there’s only one of me. I can’t be everywhere.” She turned from them and stalked deeper into the tunnel.
“Is she, uh.” Jen looked around. “Like, is she just going to leave the bodies here?”
“She doesn’t seem to be the full package when it comes to her profession, does she now?” Aidan smoothed down his coat. “Do you know where we might be able to get our hands on a nice cup of coffee? It’s a small world, but it’d be grand to find a place that serves a good brew.”
“You want to talk about tonight?” At Aidan’s nod, Jen stuffed her hands into her jacket pocket. “Because we need to not do this again.” Another nod. “There’s a coffee cart. Just back there. Come on.”
She led Aidan from the tunnel, but spared a backward glance. The tunnel was dark, and empty of anything except four cooling bodies.
Who the hell was that? Do I owe a masked stranger my life? It felt odd. Most of the time, people owed Jen. It was how the world was supposed to work, and now, suddenly, it didn’t. And, like, who wears a mask anyway?
The tunnel had no immediate answers, and Jen’s hands were shaking. There was coffee, and the real world, back the way they’d come. But she felt like the real world might just be a lie. A thin veneer, spread over the real workings of Valhaven. She shuddered, stamped through the sand, and wondered why she’d heard no police sirens answer the call of three gunshots.
🔁 Writer’s Note
Jen was one of the characters who came alive the fastest when I started building Dawn’s Warden.
She’s messy, brilliant, and way too stubborn for her own good.
In a world full of warriors and old magic, I wanted someone who didn’t fight with strength or spells. I needed Jen to fight with curiosity.
Someone who could look at a nightmare… and try to understand it.
Codebreaker is her heartbeat. Fast, fractured, and determined to find the truth, even when it hurts.
I hope you love her as much as I do.
📨 You Know the Drill: Preorder
The Three Faces of Fate launches May 1.
Jen’s just getting started.
👇👇👇
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