The noise came before sunrise. It wasn't footsteps on the stairs, not V's careless whistling—this was different, soft, electronic.
A small click, then a faint hiss from Lucy's deck. She jerked awake instantly, hand snapping to the keyboard. The screen was black, but faint letters began crawling across it, uneven, shaky, like someone was carving words through broken glass.
[TRACE CONFIRMED]
[RESPONSE PENDING…]
Her heart kicked hard. She hadn't touched the cache since last night, hadn't even gone near the strange signal. Which meant something else had.
She yanked the deck's hardline from the wall and slammed a block on the connection. But for three full seconds the message still crawled on the dead line, as if the signal wasn't outside—it was inside her deck. Then suddenly it stopped. The screen went black again.
Lucy sat frozen, staring at her own pale reflection in the glass, her pulse still racing.
The door creaked open. Max stepped inside, moving quiet, his eyes immediately scanning her face. "You didn't sleep."
Lucy's throat felt dry. "Neither did you." She turned the deck toward him, showing the frozen log. "It came back."
Max's optics dimmed and flickered as he studied the screen without touching it. His voice was certain. "That's not Militech. That encryption's too old. Too clean."
"I know," Lucy whispered. "It wasn't after the van. Or the safehouse. It… traced me. Me."
Max stayed silent for a moment, only listening to the faint hum of the city outside the cracked window. Then he spoke, low and steady. "We don't tell V. If she knew, she'd want to go hunting, and this—" he tapped the dark screen "—this isn't the kind of prey you chase blind."
Lucy let out a sharp, bitter laugh. "So what, we just sit around waiting for it to knock again?"
Max shook his head. "No. We throw it noise. Make it think we're running one direction while we move the other."
Her eyes widened. "You want to toy with it?"
"That's the only way to learn what's on the other end," Max said.
Lucy groaned, pressing her palms to her face. "You're insane. If it's Blackwall bleed, or some ghost-code—"
"—then it's already watching," Max cut in. "Better we know what's staring at us than walk blind into its jaws."
Together they looked at the silent deck. Then the dead screen flickered one more time—the log pulsed faintly, like a dying heartbeat—before vanishing for good.
The silence that followed wasn't quiet.
Lucy could hear every detail—the buzz of a neon sign across the street, the thrum of pipes in the walls, even the faint crackle of static still clinging to her deck. She hated it. It felt like the city itself was holding its breath.
Max didn't move. He just stood there, broad shoulders blocking half the window's glow, optics narrowed in a way that made her skin prickle. He wasn't scanning for Militech, wasn't checking weapons. He was listening.
Finally, he spoke. "It's not gone."
Lucy's head snapped up. "What do you mean, not gone? You saw it—"
Max shook his head, voice flat. "That wasn't an end. That was a marker. A breadcrumb."
Lucy stared at him, the realization sinking in. "You think… it left that on purpose?"
He met her eyes, and for once, she wished he wouldn't. "Yeah."
She pushed back from the desk, pacing the room. "Then we're screwed. If it can crawl inside my deck like that—past blocks, past isolation—what the hell am I supposed to do? Just sit here until it decides to peel my brain open?"
Max tilted his head, calm in a way that almost infuriated her. "No. You're going to do what you do best. Trace it back."
Lucy froze mid-step, turning on him. "Are you kidding me? You just said it wasn't prey. You said we don't chase it blind."
"I said we don't," Max corrected, pointing at her deck. "But it already picked you. That means you've got leverage."
Lucy blinked, trying to process. "Leverage? Against—what, a ghost? Some relic of the Net nobody's seen in years? That's not leverage, Max, that's a death sentence."
He stepped closer, lowering his voice until it was almost a growl. "Everything that wants you is a death sentence. You survived anyway. You're still here. That's leverage."
Her lips parted, but no words came out. She hated that he made it sound simple, hated that part of her wanted to believe it.
The deck pulsed again. Not a heartbeat this time—just a single, faint glyph. Not letters. Not numbers. A shape.
A circle.
Lucy's blood went cold.
Max leaned in, optics catching the glow. "Now we know what it wants us to see."
The circle held for two seconds, then dissolved into static.
And in that static, for the briefest instant, Lucy swore she heard something—like a whisper, buried in the wires.
Her throat went dry. "Max… that wasn't code."
He didn't blink. "No," he said. "That was a voice."
Lucy's voice catches in her throat. The room seems smaller, the air thicker. For a second she wonders if she imagined the whisper—if the night, the strain, the net-bruise are finally getting to her. Then the deck flickers again, not text this time but a thin line of audio: a sound like someone breathing through rust.
"—Wake," it says, almost a hiss.
Lucy's fingers hover. Every instinct screams to cut power and burn the whole machine, but curiosity is a different kind of hunger. She steadies her hands and answers the only way she can without throwing herself at the thing: she pushes a tiny, deliberate probe into the cache—an echo, shaped like a question.
The response is immediate, and not entirely digital. For a moment the safehouse is full of static and old rain and a half-memory of a street she's never walked. Then the deck outputs a single word, slow and deliberate:
"Seam."
Lucy's skin prickles. She yanks a breath through her teeth. "Seam what?" she asks out loud, partly to Max, partly because the sound felt like someone standing in the doorway.
Max moves without theatrics—quiet gloves, a rifle across his back, the motion of someone who's done this enough that it's second nature. "Keep talking," he says. He doesn't look at Lucy. He's already scanning exits and corners, already thinking three moves ahead.
***
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It's 22 chaps ahead