She opened a terminal. With surgical precision, she crafted a single curl command:

“It worked,” Mark whispered. “Jack’s backdoor just saved our asses.”

“Mark,” she said slowly. “What happens if we send an internal call with ‘X-Dev-Access: yes’?”

“It’s the new gateway rule,” Mark, her lead engineer, said, his face pale in the monitor’s glow. “The legacy nodes are rejecting modern token formats. We’d need to rewrite the handshake protocol. That’s… twelve hours, minimum.”