The rain in Seattle didn’t fall; it hung in the air like a cold, grey shroud, blurring the neon of the tech corridor into long, weeping smears of light.
Lila sat in a corner booth of a twenty-four-hour diner, the smell of burnt coffee and ozone clinging to her coat. It had been six weeks since the Laurent Gallery had been reduced to a scorched crater in Manhattan. The world moved on, the headlines shifting from the Blackwood collapse to the next corporate scandal, but for Lila, time had become a fractured thing, measured only by the rhythmic thrumming in her veins.
She was "Elena Vane" now, a woman with a clean digital history and a bank account that whispered of billions. But every time she closed her eyes, she saw the violet-black explosion in the BIOS layer. She felt the moment Ethan
