ASHES OF TRUTH

SHADOW CODE

I didn’t sleep.

The night hung around me like damp cloth, heavy with sounds that shouldn’t have been there the hum of the fridge, the whisper of air through the vents, and somewhere deep in my head, the echo of his voice: “They’ll never understand us.”

At 3 a.m., I replay the audio file Sade copied before locking it away.

There it is again, under the words faint, rhythmic, the hum of a generator, then the long moan of a ferry horn. Lagos Island, probably the marina. Thomas never liked the Island; said it felt too clean to be real.

So why is he there now?

The Decoy Plan

By morning, Sade and I are back at the cyber-crime unit.

The room smells of solder, instant coffee, and too many screens. Blue light paints everyone’s faces a sickly hue.

A young officer named Bayo adjusts his headset. “We traced the packet signatures. Whoever’s sending her messages bounces through public Wi-Fi points cafés, coworking spaces, hotels.”

“Too many to hit at once,” Sade mutters. “We need him to reveal himself.”

She turns to me. “You’re the bait.”

I blink. “Excuse me?”

“You’ll post something that makes him reach out again,” she explains. “Something that makes him think you’re giving up. He’ll try to ‘save’ you and we’ll trace him through that response.”

I want to say no, to refuse to let my life become a snare. But something deep inside call it anger, or love in its most broken form makes me nod.

“What do I write?” I ask.

Sade smiles, just slightly. “Write what you always do the truth.”

Publishing the Trap

I sit at my old desk in the newsroom that afternoon, pretending the fluorescent light above me isn’t flickering like a dying conscience.

The column I draft feels like an obituary written in the first person.

Truth Has Teeth.

There comes a time when even the storyteller tires of chasing shadows. I’ve spent my career trying to expose rot, to make sense of what we bury. But lately I wonder whether some truths aren’t meant to heal us, only to haunt us.

I hit “Publish.”

For the first time in months, I feel almost calm.

By evening, the story trends on Twitter. Readers argue about whether I’ve resigned or lost my mind. Some praise my courage. Others call me a fraud.

Then, buried in hundreds of comments, I see it:

Still us, under the waves.

My hands go cold. No one else would know those words.

It was a line from a postcard he sent on our honeymoon, after we’d gotten caught in a rainstorm by the sea.

I forward the message to Sade, who texts back instantly:

“He bit.”

Digital Traces

By midnight the cyber-unit isolates the account’s origin a coworking hub in Lekki Phase 1. Sade’s team moves in, but when they reach the site, the office is empty except for a single humming desktop.

Bayo’s voice crackles through the speaker. “He wasn’t alone. System’s linked to a whole network. Calls itself The Clean Algorithm.”

He sends me screenshots: a manifesto typed in cool white on black background.

Corruption is a virus.

Systems fail because people rot.

The Algorithm restores balance.

They talk about Thomas as if he were a folk hero. The Engineer of Purity.

My throat tightens.

“Do you see this?” I ask Sade.

She nods grimly. “He has followers.”

The Meeting

I shouldn’t have gone.

Every law in my head screamed it was a trap. But curiosity or guilt is a stubborn fuel.

The coworking hub is tucked above a pharmacy, its sign half burnt out. Inside, the air smells of ozone and instant noodles. A few young men type behind glowing monitors.

I ask for the system admin. No one answers. Then a boy barely older than my interns steps forward. “You’re Ada Thomas,” he says quietly. “He told us you’d come.”

“He?” I manage.

“Thomas. He’s not trying to hurt anyone. He’s trying to fix things. Like you taught him.”

Something cracks in me. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He reaches into his hoodie and pulls out a flash drive. “He said you’d need this when you were ready.” Then he slips away before Sade’s plainclothes officers can react.

The Drive

Back at the unit, the drive unfolds its secrets in streams of code and chat logs.

Thomas’s words spill across the screen precise, emotionless, laced with logic. He talks about “resets,” about cleansing “digital corruption.” The conversations are with multiple handles, but his tone is the same a professor explaining ethics to eager pupils.

Then, in between, fragments appear that don’t fit.

Lines of poetry embedded in scripts:

“Ada, the code is a heart that never stops running.”

“You once said truth had teeth I only built the mouth.”

I can’t breathe.

Sade touches my shoulder gently. “He’s talking to you, even here.”

I nod, eyes stinging. “He always did.”

The Live Stream

We work through the night, decoding fragments, following digital breadcrumbs through VPNs and ghost servers. Around 4 a.m., my phone buzzes. A live video link — sender unknown.

Sade shakes her head. “Don’t open it.”

But I already have.

The feed flickers to life: a dim room, camera tilted upward. A figure sits in shadow. Only his hands are visible, folded neatly on a desk. His voice is unmistakable.

“You finally understand. They’re watching us both now.”

Behind him, just for an instant, light catches a piece of paper taped to the wall — a child’s drawing, all crayon and love: a stick family of four, holding hands.

My children’s drawing.

The feed cuts.

The Cliff

The room feels suddenly too small.

Sade calls for a trace, but the signal’s already vanished. I’m left staring at the dark screen, my reflection hovering where his had been.

“He’s nearby,” she whispers. “Ada, he’s close.”

I press a hand to my chest, as if I could steady the world inside it. Somewhere between love and horror, I realize what scares me most isn’t that he’s watching it’s that a part of me still wants to see him again.

Outside, dawn breaks over Lagos like static noisy, electric, unstoppable.