2026-01-07 23:57:11
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Davion had never wanted to be recognized.He stood at the edge of the library ruins, dust still clinging to his clothes, watching the crowd grow by the minute. People gathered not because someone told them to—but because something inside them pulled them there. Phones were raised. Voices overlapped. Arguments sparked and dissolved just as quickly.Truth didn’t arrive neatly.It arrived like this.Mira leaned against a cracked pillar nearby, arm in a sling Beverly had improvised. “They’re not leaving,” she said quietly.Davion nodded. “They won’t.”Beverly sat on the hood of a burned-out vehicle, pale but awake, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. Her eyes were sharp despite the exhaustion. “The spine’s still unstable,” she said. “They’ll try to reassert control, but… it won’t be clean anymore.”Jared sat a little apart from them, wrists bound again—this time by trust rather than tech. He stared at the crowd with something close to awe. “You gave them questions,” he murmured. “That
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The world didn’t end.It shifted.Beverly felt it first—a pressure behind her eyes, like trying to remember something that hadn’t happened yet. The screens in front of her flooded with data, cascading layers of architecture unfolding too fast to fully process. The spine wasn’t a single system. It was a living framework, threaded through infrastructure, communication, memory caches, even emergency services.“Oh my God,” she whispered. “It’s everywhere.”The lights in the library flickered—not off, not on, but uncertain. The air itself seemed heavier, charged with static.Davion staggered slightly, bracing himself against a table. “What did you do?”“I didn’t break it,” Beverly said quickly. “I exposed it.”Mira fired blindly toward the door as figures pushed through the smoke. Her disruptor crackled, slamming into one operative’s shield and sending them skidding back. Others moved in behind them, disciplined, relentless.“Fall back!” Davion shouted.They retreated deeper into the libra
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The safehouse wasn’t safe.That was the first thing Davion understood the moment the door sealed behind them. The building—an old community library repurposed and abandoned years ago—had been chosen because it sat in a blind spot of the city’s surveillance grid. Too obsolete to monitor closely. Too unimportant to upgrade.Which meant no one expected anything important to happen here.Davion leaned against a dusty bookshelf, chest still tight from the run. Beverly immediately began unpacking equipment, spreading cables, drives, and screens across a long wooden table like a surgeon preparing for an operation. Mira stood near the boarded-up window, watching the street below through a narrow crack.Jared sat on the floor.Unrestrained.That alone felt wrong.“You’re quiet,” Mira said without turning.Jared smiled faintly. “I’m enjoying the irony. For years, I controlled rooms like this. Now I’m a guest.”“Don’t get comfortable,” Beverly muttered. “You’re here because you’re useful. The mo
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They didn’t argue.That alone told Davion how serious the moment was.Sirens echoed closer now, bouncing off concrete and steel, overlapping into a single, rising pressure. Red-and-blue light flickered through broken warehouse windows, cutting through smoke and dust like warning signals from a future that was already collapsing.“We move,” Davion said.Beverly didn’t hesitate. She yanked her bag higher on her shoulder, fingers already flying across her device. “I can jam local feeds for thirty seconds. Maybe forty if nothing glitches.”Mira grabbed Jared by the arm and shoved him forward. “Walk. Don’t try anything stupid.”Jared laughed quietly. “You really think you can hide me?”“No,” Mira said. “But I think I can choose who doesn’t get you.”That shut him up.They slipped out through a side exit just as the first official patrol vehicles screeched to a stop at the front of the warehouse. Beverly’s jammer pulsed, knocking nearby cameras into static. Davion led them into the narrow s
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The warehouse didn’t feel victorious.It felt hollow.Smoke drifted lazily through the broken rafters, curling around dead drones and collapsed machinery like ghosts that didn’t know where to go. Emergency lights flickered weakly, bathing everything in a dull red glow. Jared sat against a shattered crate, wrists bound with reinforced cuffs Beverly had scavenged from his own equipment.He didn’t look defeated.He looked thoughtful.That unsettled Davion more than rage ever could.“Don’t take your eyes off him,” Beverly said quietly, still pacing the perimeter with her scanner. “People like him… they don’t stop planning just because they’ve lost.”Davion nodded but didn’t answer. His attention was fixed on Jared, who was staring at the floor like he was reading invisible code written into the concrete.Mira broke the silence. “Extraction teams will be here in twelve minutes. That’s assuming no one reroutes them.”“Someone will try,” Beverly said flatly.Outside, the city was waking up t
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The warehouse loomed like a tomb, its massive doors groaning as Davion pried them open. Inside, shadows stretched long across rusted beams, abandoned crates, and broken machinery. The faint hum of electricity and the soft whir of hidden drones created a tense, mechanical heartbeat.Davion moved first, leading the way with Mira slightly above on a catwalk and Beverly covering the sides. Every step echoed, bouncing off the steel walls. Every shadow seemed alive.“You hear that?” Mira whispered from above, her disruptor humming. “Drones… lots of them.”Beverly scanned the room with her portable device. “And some kind of automated traps. He’s making sure we can’t just walk in.”Davion clenched his fists, jaw tight. “Then we go in slow, methodical. One step at a time. Watch each other’s backs. We end this tonight.”The first trap revealed itself almost immediately.A row of pressure-sensitive plates embedded in the floor lit up faintly as they moved forward. Small drones swooped out from h
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