Static.
That’s how it starts.
Not the romantic kind—the crackling kind that eats through silence and turns it into threat. The kind that crawls along your spine when you know something is wrong before the data confirms it.
I’m hunched over a stripped-down console in the back of an abandoned relay station, the glow of six mismatched monitors washing my hands in pale blue. Outside, the night is too quiet. Snow falls like ash. The kind of stillness predators love.
I don’t look up when the first encrypted ping hits.
I feel it.
A tremor through the network. A frequency spike. Syndicate chatter doesn’t announce itself—it leaks. Sloppy edges where confidence curdles into hunger.
My jaw tightens as I decrypt on instinct, fingers moving faster than thought.
Bounty protocol initiated. Tier B
