Chapter 21

Take Notes, Al Boy.

“Yours?” he asked, not even trying to hide the nerves in his voice.

“No.” I said. “Mine don’t get caught.”

He swallowed and bly. On the fourth loopback. I caught a static flicker, a stutter in their cloaking. A mistake. Small, but there. Someone moved too fast, tried to open two ports simultaneously. Rookie error. Overconfident. I froze the moment in the packet stream and blew it up on the screen. Bingo. A fragment of an origin trail. Just enough.

“Nico, write this down,” I said. “Cairo. Sector 9. Former Interlink node, now privatized. We’ve got a ghost in the system. Not ours.”

“That’s old Spire intel territory,” he said, eyes widening. “I thought they were disbanded.”

“Only the ones with names and pensions,” I muttered. “This smells like freelancer work. Big paycheck. Specific target.”