GHOST PHONE

CHAPTER SIX: MOVING

They left Kijiji Block before sunrise. Not together that would've drawn eyes.

Bibi Amina went first, off to her sister's place in Githurai with a bag that looked like it held nothing worth stealing. It actually held Zane's backup drive, their identity papers, and thirty thousand shillings in old notes she'd kept in a tin behind the water heater for eleven years, for an emergency she'd never once named out loud.

Zane went second, down the building's back service stairwell, the one that let out into an alley feeding three different streets. He had the Ghost Phone, his tools, one change of clothes, and the fiber-optic cable he'd lifted from the Jua yard — old habits, hard to kill even now.

Dex was waiting at the bottom of the alley.

"Found us a place." He had a school backpack on that clinked softly with every step. "Old relay station, out near the Dandora boundary. Off-grid, off the map — the kind of place the city forgot it ever built. I found it two years back, mapping dead zones."

"Of course you did."

"Still has power, too. Solar array on the roof, somehow still working after all this time." He glanced over. "And one other thing we actually need."

"Which is?"

"A hardline straight into the old NairoNet — not the version Vane Corp runs now, the original city network, before any of it got privatized."

Zane caught up to what he meant a beat later. "You want to trace the transfers. From inside."

"I want to build something nobody can argue with." Dex didn't slow down. "Bibi Amina had it right — the only way through this is making the truth too loud to bury. And for that we need proof that isn't just you saying it happened. We need the data to do the talking."

The alley narrowed before it let them out, walls close enough that Zane's shoulder scraped brick. He didn't slow down for it.

Dex's backpack clinked again. Loose hardware, maybe wire spools. Zane didn't ask. There'd be time for an inventory once they weren't moving.

"How far's Dandora boundary on foot?"

"Forty minutes if we don't get clever about it." Dex checked something on his wrist unit, the cheap kind, no signature worth flagging. "Hour if we dodge the camera nodes on Outer Ring."

"We dodge the camera nodes."

"Figured."

They came out onto a wider street, empty except for a stray dog working over something in the gutter and a delivery drone two blocks up, humming its low patient hum, paying nobody any attention. Zane watched it anyway until it banked off toward a side street and vanished.

His legs ached already. Not from the walking — from the last three days catching up to him all at once, the kind of ache that lived somewhere behind the knees and refused to be ignored just because there were more important things happening.

"You good?" Dex didn't look at him when he asked it. That was the thing about Dex. He asked the real questions sideways, like looking straight at you might make you lie.

"I'm walking."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the one you're getting."

Dex let it go. They crossed under a flyover where the concrete dripped something that wasn't quite rain, and the sound of their footsteps changed, went hollow and close, then opened back up again on the other side.

"Bibi say anything before she left?"

Zane thought about the kitchen, the tin behind the water heater, the way her hands hadn't shaken at all packing that bag, like she'd rehearsed it a hundred times in her head over eleven years even though she'd never said the word emergency out loud. "She told me not to be stupid."

"Solid advice."

"She also told me you'd say something like that."

That got a laugh out of Dex, short and real, gone as fast as it came. They didn't have room for much more than that this morning.

The streets kept changing under them — tar going to broken tar going to the kind of packed dirt that meant the city stopped pretending to maintain things out here. Zane felt it in his ankles before he saw it. Fewer drones. Fewer lights. The buildings got lower, then sparser, then started looking less like buildings and more like the idea of them, propped up on memory and rebar.

Somewhere behind them, miles back now, Marcus Vane was probably still asleep behind glass forty floors up, not yet aware that the boy who could unmake him was walking, right now, toward the one piece of old infrastructure built before men like him existed to own it.

Zane adjusted the strap of his bag and kept his eyes on Dex's back, and kept walking.