The image on Jinx's scanner pulsed with a sickly, green light.
It was a web.
A perfect, geometric lattice of energy that covered the entire storage facility from ground to sky.
Every line was connected, every angle was perfect.
It was beautiful.
It was terrifying.
"What is that?" Michael breathed, his voice a hoarse whisper.
"That," Jinx said, her voice low and grim, "is a Ghost trap."
She tapped a finger on the screen, zooming in.
"It's a sensor grid. A dense one. Military-grade. It's designed to detect everything. Motion, heat, sound, energy signatures… even a rat couldn't sneak through that without tripping a dozen alarms."
Michael stared out the grimy window of the abandoned apartment.
The storage facility across the street looked exactly the same as it had a minute ago.
Quiet.
Empty.
Sleeping under the orange glow of the city lights.
But now he knew it was a lie.
It was a prison, and its walls were invisible.
"So we can't get in," he said, the words tasting like defeat.
"Worse," Jinx corrected him. "It's not just a sensor grid."
She tweaked a dial on the side of her modified tablet. The display shifted, the green lattice fading to be replaced by a series of pulsing red dots.
There were three of them.
They were positioned at the three main corners of the facility, forming a perfect, equilateral triangle.
They were the anchors of the web.
"They're here," Michael whispered, a cold dread seeping into his bones.
The Ghosts.
"They're not just guarding the place," Jinx explained, her voice tight with a horrified understanding. "They are the cage. Their phasing tech is generating the entire sensor field. They've turned the whole block into their own personal hunting ground."
The full weight of their situation crashed down on Michael.
He thought of the key in his pocket, the legacy his father had entrusted to him, the truth of his mother's sacrifice.
It was all sitting in a metal box just a few hundred feet away.
Locked inside an impenetrable fortress, guarded by spectral assassins who could erase him from existence.
It was an impossible problem.
A new wave of despair, cold and sharp, threatened to pull him under.
How could he possibly stand against this?
He looked out the window again, his eyes scanning the perimeter of the facility.
"But there must be guards," he said, forcing the despair down. "Physical guards. The Ghosts can't be everywhere at once."
"You're learning," Jinx nodded, a flicker of her old, cynical self returning.
She handed him a pair of high-powered, military-grade binoculars. They were heavy and cold in his hands.
"Look," she said. "But don't look for the uniforms. You won't find any."
Michael raised the binoculars to his eyes, focusing on the main gate of the storage facility.
At first, he saw nothing but the empty guard booth and the blowing trash.
Then he remembered Jinx's lesson.
Look for the things that are wrong.
He scanned the street.
He saw the man in the brown jacket, the one they'd passed earlier. He was still there, still on his phone, a silent statue of surveillance.
He saw a dark blue sedan parked across the street. Inside, he could just make out the silhouettes of two men, sitting perfectly still, their eyes fixed on the gate. They weren't talking. They weren't looking at their phones. They were just… watching.
He swept the binoculars higher, along the rooftops of the adjacent buildings.
He saw a glint of light.
He focused.
It was the lens of a sniper's scope, reflecting the city lights. The rifle was attached to a tripod, perfectly still, manned by a figure shrouded in shadow.
They weren't laying a siege.
This was a silent occupation.
A quiet, patient, and utterly lethal encirclement.
"They're not DGC patrol units," Jinx said, her voice a low murmur beside him. "They're from the Bureau. Special Operations. Gideon's personal clean-up crew."
Suddenly, the silent tension was broken.
Two unmarked, black vans, identical to the ones he'd seen in his paranoia, pulled up to the main gate.
They moved with a quiet, efficient purpose that made Michael's skin crawl.
The doors slid open.
Men in plain clothes - black tactical pants, black jackets, black boots - poured out. They moved with the cold, fluid precision of a wolf pack. They didn't speak. They communicated with sharp, subtle hand gestures.
They weren't setting up a perimeter.
They were reinforcing one that was already there.
This was an escalation.
"They know," Michael breathed. "They know I'm here. They know I'm coming for the drive."
"No," Jinx countered, her eyes narrowed in concentration as she watched the troops deploy. "They don't know you're here yet. If they did, the Ghosts would be ripping this building apart to find us."
"This is protocol. They lost you in the tunnels. They know your objective is the drive. So they lock it down. They turn it into the most attractive bait in the world."
"They're not waiting for you to break in, kid," she said, and her words chilled him more than any Phase-Ripper.
"They're waiting for you to show up."
"They've created a perfect box. And they're just waiting for the mouse to walk into it."
Michael lowered the binoculars, his hands trembling slightly.
He stared at the impenetrable fortress across the street.
The invisible web of the Ghosts.
The silent, watching soldiers.
The hidden snipers.
It was a tactical nightmare. A meat grinder.
Stealth was impossible. The sensor grid would detect him.
A frontal assault was suicide. They were outmanned and outgunned a hundred to one.
He felt the hard, unyielding shape of the Legacy Drive in his mind's eye, a prize locked in an unbreakable vault.
He thought of Jinx's captured team, of his father in a DGC black site, of his mother's lonely, fifteen-year vigil.
The despair receded, burned away by a surge of hot, defiant anger.
No.
He would not be the mouse.
"There's no way in," Jinx said, her voice heavy with the finality of a death sentence. "The trap is perfect. We can't get through the web, and we can't fight the guards."
"There's nothing we can do."
Michael looked at the facility, at the invisible cage woven from his own stolen power.
He looked at the soldiers moving with their cold, deadly precision.
He thought of the Ghosts, the silent, phasing specters that were the heart of the trap.
And a new idea began to form in his mind.
An idea born of desperation and defiance.
An idea so reckless, so insane, that it just might work.
Jinx was right.
They couldn't break into the prison.
They couldn't fight their way through the guards.
"You're wrong," Michael said, his voice quiet, but filled with a new, strange certainty.
He turned to look at her, his eyes burning with a wild, dangerous light.
"There is a way in."
"You're thinking like a person, Jinx. You're thinking about getting past the guards, about breaking through the walls."
"But what if I don't have to?"
She stared at him, confused. "What are you talking about?"
He looked back at the storage facility, at the impossible, perfect trap.
A slow, grim smile touched his lips.
"They built a cage for a ghost," he whispered.
"So I'll walk in like one."