The worst thing about betrayal isn’t the shock.
It’s the familiarity.
It’s realizing the knife was sharpened in rooms you built, by hands you once trusted to steady you when the ground shook.
I stand in the Cross Tech sub-basement, fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, the air humming with servers and secrets, while Luna scrolls through the mirrored data we pulled from the racetrack node. Her jaw is set, eyes blazing—not with fear, but with purpose.
She’s not running anymore.
She’s hunting.
“This isn’t just a leak,” she says, voice low. “It’s a pipeline.”
I nod once. I’ve already seen it. The timestamps. The encrypted backdoors. The way the Syndicate piggybacked internal Cross Tech updates minutes after executive-level changes went live.
Someone high up isn’t just feeding them scrap
