Karim liked his car the way he liked his life—quiet, controlled, and ruthlessly organized.The dashboard was spotless, no dust in the seams, no forgotten receipts stuffed into corners. The navigation screen glowed a calm blue as it traced a clean route through the city, traffic updates pulsing softly like a heartbeat he’d trained himself not to feel.He drove with both hands on the wheel.Not because he had to.Because he preferred it that way.Night pressed in from all sides, the city thinning the farther he went from the center. Streetlights grew sparse. Houses spread out, each one wrapped in its own private silence. Carlos had always liked space—too much of it, if Karim were being honest. Space to think. Space to spiral. Space to disappear when things got hard.Karim’s jaw tightened.Carlos not answering his phone wasn’t like him. Not when things were already this bad. Not when Aurelius was shaking and Eli was in a hospital bed and the media had started circling like vultures that

Moravia smelled like antiseptic - or maybe it was just their memory playing tricks on them.It wasn't sharp or the clean scent of a place that healed people for a living, but the quieter kind—filtered air, damp concrete outside, something metallic lingering underneath it all. The hospital Eli lay, with his legs propped up against a wall for support, sat on the edge of the city, private in the same way the one in New York had been private or more. There were no signs. No unnecessary staff. No questions that weren’t already answered somewhere else. Just doctors and securities who lived and breathed there Carlos noticed the increased security immediately.“Things must have gotten worse since the last time we had been here,” he murmured as Karim helped him out of the car. “Because I don't remember this place being this guarded.”Karim didn’t rise to it. He scanned the perimeter out of habit, clocked exits, watched reflections in the glass. Then he steered Carlos inside with a hand at his

Recovery did not arrive all at once.It came in increments so small they were easy to dismiss—an extra step without the cane, a night without pain medication, the way Eli could sit upright for hours without the familiar white-hot pull along his leg. Even the short glances in the hospital mirrors told Eli what he was suspecting, reluctantly. The bruising faded into jaundiced shadows. The hollow beneath his eyes filled in. His shoulders began to sit where they belonged again, no longer sloped forward as if bracing for impact.It unsettled him.Not because he didn’t want to heal—but because healing required him to be still long enough to notice it.Dr. Rael noticed before he did.“You’re done pretending,” he said one morning, flipping through his chart with that same no-nonsense efficiency. “Which means you’re actually healing.”Eli scoffed softly, eyes half-lidded. “I wasn’t pretending.”Dr. Rael didn’t look up. “You were surviving. There’s a difference.”That landed closer to the truth

The city looked the same as it had before the broadcast by the time Eli left the office.Not that he was expecting any change.New York barely took notice of what was happening behind the scene, in underground corridors or corporate walls, in conversations never recorded and even when it did,– it absorbed disruptions the way oceans absorbed stones—ripples flattened quickly, surface calm restored long before anything beneath had settled. What surfaced here was rarely the thing that mattered. He rode the elevator down alone, hands loose at his sides, posture relaxed enough to be unremarkable. His reflection in the mirrored panel didn’t offer much to remember—no tension in the jaw, no sharpness in the eyes. Just another man in a tailored coat at the end of a long day. Expression composed enough to pass for indifference. Enough to discourage curiosity.The doors opened into the underground garage with a muted chime, sound swallowed almost immediately by concrete and distance. He crossed

Eli didn’t move for a long time after the call ended.The hazard lights continued their slow, mechanical blinking. On. Off. On. Off. Each pulse washing the empty stretch of road in brief amber warning.Inside Aurelius.It hadn’t been breached. Hadn't infiltrated.Permission.He reached for his phone again before he could second-guess it and called Carlos back.It rang once.“Tell me you’re still at your desk,” Eli said.A faint rustle. The low hum of multiple monitors. “I’m not planning to leave.”“Good. Don’t.”Carlos didn’t respond immediately. He didn’t need to.“I want you to keep digging,” Eli continued. His voice had settled into something flatter now. Controlled. “Not just the subsidiary. I want a precise origin point. Terminal if you can get it. Building if you can’t. I want to know whether this came from a forgotten server room or someone’s corner office.”“That’ll take time,” Carlos said.“I’m aware.”“And if they’ve scrubbed it?”“Then find the residue.”A quiet exhale on t