Total pages in book: 58
Estimated words: 60921 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 305(@200wpm)___ 244(@250wpm)___ 203(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 60921 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 305(@200wpm)___ 244(@250wpm)___ 203(@300wpm)
Her eyes shine with something bright and hot and terrifyingly hopeful. “Deal,” she murmurs.
We stand there for a second, letting that promise settle between us.
Then she claps her hands once. “Okay. Enough feelings.”
I huff out a laugh despite myself. “Always ruining the mood,” I say.
“You’ll survive.”
She’s right.
I don’t know what the hell we’re walking into next.
I don’t know who’s hunting us, or how many layers we’ll have to peel back before we get to the rot at the center of this.
I know one thing:
As long as she’s here, alive and defiant and completely impossible,
I’m going to do whatever it takes to keep it that way.
TEN
FIGHT ME (NICELY)
LARK
We have our meeting with Ozzy and Arrow, and they send us work. It’s busy work, sure, but at this point I’ll take anything. We need to find these fuckers, and sitting around a cabin staring at one another isn’t helping.
Mainly because I want to kiss him.
It’s been hours since we received the packets from Ozzy.
There’s a special kind of intimacy in sharing a screen with someone.
Not the Netflix-and-chill kind.
The we might die and we’re building the map that decides how kind.
I kind of love it.
Knight and I end up side by side at the tiny cabin table, knees bumping under the wood, the battered tablet propped between us on a stack of canned beans.
Knight scrolls, jaw tight.
I steal a cold grape from the bowl we found in the fridge. Apparently Ranger also stocked fresh fruit, which I’m choosing to interpret as his way of saying don’t die of scurvy.
“Okay,” Knight says, eyes narrowed. “This is the bounty board’s backbone. Obfuscated, obviously. But you can’t fully hide behavior.”
Lines of text fill the screen—hashes, timestamps, transaction routes, string after string of data that makes most people’s eyes cross.
Mine light up.
I tuck one leg under me and lean closer.
“So the main node is this ‘HubZero’ address,” I murmur, following his cursor. “All these subnodes feed into it. Different vendors, different taggers, different ‘clients.’ Like a marketplace.”
“Exactly.” He zooms in on a cluster in the top right. “Here’s the part that matters to us.”
Three entries glow, highlighted in yellow.
– NODE: HZ//VENDR-ALFA07
TAG: INTERFERENCE / OBSERVER
ALIAS: VANTAGE
BOUNTY: 15BTC
– NODE: HZ//VENDR-ALFA07
TAG: INTERFERENCE / VIGILANTE
ALIAS: MASK-01
BOUNTY: 20BTC
– NODE: HZ//VENDR-ALFA07
TAG: INTERFERENCE / VIGILANTE+ASSET
ALIAS: MASK-01 + ASSET
BOUNTY: 35BTC
My stomach does a small, unfriendly flip.
“That’s us,” I say quietly.
Knight taps the screen. “The first tag went up about six months ago. Anonymous ‘observer’ noticed interfering with operations. No face. Just an alias. VANTAGE.”
“Arrow,” I guess.
“Probably,” Knight says. “Then three months ago, this one—” he indicates the second entry “—went live. Vigilante interfering. Alias ‘MASK-01.’ Stills pulled from one of Gage’s ops.”
“You,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“And the last one?” I swallow. “Vigilante plus asset.”
He doesn’t look at me when he says, “Us. Last night. Mask-01 and his problem child.”
A shiver runs down my spine that isn’t entirely fear.
“Who’s VENDR-ALFA07?” I ask. “Vendor? Handler? Etsy shop for murderers?”
Knight snorts, humorless. “Vendor tag. Same entity posts all three. Same payment address. Same signature. They’re the one selling us as targets.”
“And,” I point out, “they’ve been watching you longer than you’ve been watching them.”
His jaw flexes.
“Dean thinks ALFA07 is an internal Cathedral handler,” he says. “Someone high enough to see multiple operations across different cities.”
“So not just a random creep with a laptop,” I say. “Like… a project manager. But for evil.”
His mouth twitches despite the tension. “Something like that.”
I tap the timestamp column.
“But look,” I say. “The bounty goes up after each escalation. First Vantage. Then Mask alone. Then Mask plus asset. They’re leveling up the reward every time you piss them off.”
“I noticed,” he says grimly.
“Doesn’t that mean they’re… scared?” I ask. “Like, if we were nothing, they wouldn’t throw money at us. Right?”
He thinks about it.
“Maybe,” he says. “Or maybe they’re just possessive. This network thrives on control. We’re a variable they can’t account for yet.”
“Well,” I say, sitting back. “Let’s become a variable they regret.”
We fall into a rhythm—he runs scripts and parses logs, I pattern-match and dig into the weird stuff. It’s not quite internet access, more like getting packages delivered through a very paranoid mailman, but it’s enough.
We build a conspiracy corkboard that isn’t a corkboard, just layers of data in my head:
ALFA07 pops up in three other bounty threads over the past year. All “interference” tags. All targeting people who got in the way of Cathedral’s bigger structures.
One is a journalist in another city.
One is a whistleblower.
One is a hacker whose alias I recognize from some old white-hat boards.
All their tags are stamped with the same little signature identifier: <
“Helios,” I say aloud, tasting the word. “Sun god. Loves attention. Big ego.”
Knight taps it. “Or a misdirection.”
“Maybe,” I shrug. “But whoever this is? They like watching. They like marking people. You’re not just a nuisance to them, you’re a pet project.”
He grunts.
Not a fan of that image.