CHAPTER TWENTY ONE:The rain hadn’t stopped since dawn.It fell in relentless sheets, blurring the city’s edges until skyscrapers looked like ghostly silhouettes adrift in fog. The cab’s windshield wipers groaned with every pass, fighting a losing battle against the storm. Billy sat in the back seat, coat collar up, the envelope of evidence clutched tight in his gloved hand. The paper inside felt heavier than it should—like it carried not just proof, but history. Across from him, Evelyn watched in silence, her expression a carefully neutral mask that failed to hide her unease.“You look like you’re about to start a war,” she said finally, her voice soft but steady.Billy’s gaze stayed fixed on the window, where streaks of rain raced down like veins of silver.“Maybe I already did,” he murmured.The cab jerked to a halt outside an abandoned office block. Once, it had been one of his father’s subsidiaries—a logistics firm on paper, a money-laundering front in truth. Billy remembered sta

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE:The rain had thinned to a cold mist by the time Billy stepped out of the factory. His boots splashed through puddles streaked with oil and blood. Behind him, the sun was rising — a weak, gray disc smothered by clouds — and yet the air buzzed with the kind of stillness that comes only before another storm.Evelyn limped at his side, Tyla wrapped in a blanket she’d scavenged from the wreck. The world had gone strangely quiet; even the city seemed to be holding its breath. But Billy could feel it — the counterstrike coming.“They won’t stop,” Evelyn said, her voice low. “You humiliated them on a live feed. You exposed the infrastructure. They’ll burn the city to silence you.”Billy’s jaw tightened. “Then let them come. I’ve spent too long running from ghosts. It’s time they start running from me.”He crouched beside one of the fallen attackers, prying open the phone he’d retrieved. A military-grade encryption program blinked across the cracked screen. Beneath it, a

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE:Morning bled into chaos.The skyline was a smear of smoke and static as armored convoys rolled through the streets, their sirens howling like mechanical wolves. Paragon’s private forces had taken over the city’s security grid — drones in the sky, checkpoints on every corner.And somewhere amid that digital siege, Billy prepared to go live.The safehouse was a hollowed-out radio station — abandoned since the first data wars. Wires hung from the ceiling, dust coated everything but the single transmitter they’d reactivated. The air smelled of ozone and sweat.Evelyn checked the feed one last time. “Signal’s piggybacked through pirate bands. Once we go live, they’ll trace us in minutes.”Billy nodded, tightening the earpiece around his jaw. “I only need five.”Tyla hovered nearby, pale and anxious. “If they catch you before the broadcast reaches the global nodes—”“Then the truth dies with me,” he said quietly, not looking up. “So let’s make sure it doesn’t.”---At t

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN:The city didn’t sleep that night.It watched. It waited. It whispered Billy’s name like a ghost rumor carried through static.In the underbelly — beneath a collapsed overpass that used to feed Paragon’s corporate district — Billy’s team regrouped. The safehouse was barely standing: flickering monitors, water dripping from cracked pipes, the smell of rust and fear thick in the air.Owen hunched over a makeshift server, wires spilling out like veins. “We’ve lost three of our caches,” he said. “Someone’s purging our backups faster than I can rebuild.”Evelyn stood by the window, cleaning her gun with mechanical precision. “He’s moving faster than we thought. The data flow’s rerouting through private satellites. He’s creating a shadow grid — a digital city that doesn’t exist on paper.”Billy listened in silence. The light from the monitors cast sharp edges on his face. “Then we burn it before it stabilizes.”Tyla frowned. “You can’t destroy what you can’t locate. He’

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE:Smoke curled from the ruins of Archive Nine like incense at a funeral. The explosion had gutted the underground vault, and the morning light cut through the dust like blades. The air reeked of burnt circuitry and ozone. Every sound — the distant crackle of fire, the groan of shifting metal — felt like the breath of something dying, or trying not to.Billy stood in the rubble, his face streaked with ash and dried blood. The fire reflected in his eyes, but there was no triumph there — only calculation. Beside him, Evelyn checked her weapon with steady hands, though her sleeve was torn and her side bled where shrapnel had grazed her. Tyla knelt near the wreckage, cradling a small, glowing shard of data crystal she’d salvaged from the debris.Owen crouched beside a half-melted terminal, tapping at his console. “Power’s fluctuating. Whatever you hit, it didn’t kill the grid — just crippled it.”“That’s the point,” Billy said. His voice was quiet but cold. “You don’t ki