Chapter Two: Ninety Seconds

for seventy-two hours. Vega had left a new message on the tablet. [They can trace the terminal. You need professional-league registration to enter the complex network. Employees touch only the outer layer. Player match data uploads directly to the core archive.] Lin laughed once. His professional registration had expired seven years ago. Forget Étoile Athletic—even a fourth-tier club would reject a twenty-four-year-old cleaner with a ruined knee and no agent. Then he remembered a flyer on the cleaning-room noticeboard. Saint-Denis Workers, bottom of the eighth tier, had lost three players to a wage dispute and invited anyone with academy experience to an open trial on Friday. Their home ground stood two kilometers from Étoile's data relay.