The warehouse at the edge of the Ransom District was colder than expected...more server farm than hideout, its walls pulsing faint blue with embedded heat-dampeners. The hum of hardware beneath concrete vibrated the soles of Luka’s boots.“Ten seconds out,” Alessia said over comms, crouched behind a burnt-out delivery truck just down the road. “No visible patrols. Could be automated security.”“Count on it,” Vesper replied from a rooftop above. “I’m seeing infrared grids. Motion-based. If we breach wrong, it cooks us alive.”“Good thing we’re not breaching wrong,” Luka said calmly, nodding to Viktor beside him. “Let’s move.”They approached low and silent, cloaked in dark jackets and dirt. The four-person strike team was lean...Luka, Alessia, Viktor, and Vesper...no distractions, no expendables. This wasn’t war. It was surgery.They reached the southern wall, where Viktor pried open a rusted maintenance grate.“Vent access,” he muttered. “Tight fit. No direct camera lines inside.”“Pe

Rain drilled the city like nails from the sky. The roads shimmered with slick oil-sheen, and steam rose from gutter vents like breath from a dying beast. In the basement of an old theater Luka had once used as a meeting point for Gale family operations, a new kind of war council was forming. The room was dimly lit, humming with backup power. Peeling posters from forgotten plays adorned the brick walls. Vesper, Viktor, Alessia, and Luka were gathered around a stripped-down operations board...maps, names, faces, routes...all changing by the hour. “You’re bleeding operatives,” Viktor growled, slamming a folder onto the table. “Salvi’s people are peeling off. Some flipping back to Mirelle. Others disappearing.” “They smell the fire coming,” Alessia said without looking up. “Rats don’t stay on burning ships.” Vesper circled the table like a panther. Her fingers danced over an uplinked tablet. “We’ve had five confirmed breaches across the southeast corridor. Grid comms went dark at

The city bled information. Screens flickered in pawn shops and penthouses alike. Talk radio hosts screamed theories, back alleys buzzed with disbelief, and the dark web ignited like a struck match. Mirelle’s secrets...her simulations, her fabricated minds, her predictive constructs...were out. Not leaked. Not rumored. Broadcast. And in the midst of it all, Luka Gale stood in the shadow of a crumbling viaduct, hands clenched around a burner phone, listening to silence on the other end. The Foundation hadn’t responded. Not yet. But he knew what silence meant. Preparation. Retaliation. The coiled breath before the storm. “You really did it,” Vesper murmured beside him, her voice taut with something between awe and dread. “You reached into the dragon’s throat and stole a tooth.” “I didn’t do it to make a point,” Luka muttered. “I did it because they were playing god with us.” She tilted her head. “You think gods don’t bleed? That’s cute.” A black SUV pulled up, tires cracking g

The storm passed, but silence didn’t follow.The city had begun to breathe again...but unevenly, like lungs half-collapsed under decades of weight. The broadcast towers had gone dark. The invisible lines that once pulled strings from the Foundation’s ghost-throat now lay in tangled heaps. Data markets shuddered. Military contracts bled out. Politicians’ phones rang and rang and rang.But Luka didn’t hear any of it.He sat in an empty train car moving on a decommissioned loop, deep beneath Sector Twelve. His right hand was bandaged, trembling. Burned by the surge, the nerve damage hadn't faded. Maybe it never would. Marek had offered treatment. Luka had refused. Pain, now, was part of the price.Across from him sat Vesper, arms folded, expression unreadable.“You’re not talking,” Luka said eventually.Vesper studied him. “Neither are you.”He let out a dry laugh. “I’ve been trying to find the right words.”“For what? Victory?” Her tone sharpened. “Because if this is what winning feels

The old subway station at Eastpoint had long been abandoned—its rusted rails swallowed by darkness, its walls lined with the sediment of a forgotten city. But tonight, it pulsed with electricity, humming with something too alive to be infrastructure. Something wrong.Luka stood at the edge of the platform, his coat still soaked from the rain. The air reeked of metal and ozone. Above them, the signal repeaters blinked with a strange rhythm—like a heart out of sync with its own body.Arden was crouched over a battered terminal pulled from an old server rack, his gloved fingers tapping in tight, mechanical bursts. “It’s not just a signal hijack,” he muttered. “It’s deeper. They rewrote the OS...rewrote everything.”Alessia stood close, arms crossed, eyes sharp. “Define ‘everything,’ techboy.”Arden turned, his face paler than usual beneath the dim lights. “Every connected node—cell towers, surveillance drones, traffic lights, grid monitors, you name it—has been overrun. It's not a blacko