How hard it was to stop.
How much of me didn’t want to.
I scrub a hand over my face and force myself upright. The couch groans in solidarity. The blanket slides into my lap.
“Morning, idiot,” I mutter at myself.
I check the cheap analog watch Arrow gave me “for when the grid goes down and your fancy toys are trash.”
Just after 7 a.m.
The world outside this cabin doesn’t care that I kissed my best friend’s little sister on a couch last night. It just cares that my face and hers are pinned to a darknet bounty board with a payout high enough to attract the worst kind of attention.
I stand, stretch until my back pops, then pad over to the small pack on the table.
Time to check in.
Ranger packed us a little metal box—looks like an old transistor radio, actually a portable, low-power, directional modem wired to a ruggedized tablet. It can’t stream, can’t browse, can’t do anything fun.
But it can punch a thin, encrypted hole through the sky for five minutes at a time if I aim it right.
Arrow made me promise:once in the morning, once at night, five minutes max each.
I set the box on the table, angle the little antenna toward the gap in the trees Ranger marked in the notes left with the box, and thumb the power switch.
The indicator light blinks once. Twice. Goes steady.
The tablet on the table buzzes softly to life, the offline UI waking up and automatically launching one app.
Not labeled Discord.
But it is.
A hardened, skinned, buried version, routed through more layers than I care to think about.
Our server pops up—just one channel lit.
#burner-briefing
I flex my fingers once and start typing.
Knight:On grid, five minutes. Cabin secure. No tails last night.
Arrow’s icon pops up first, the little neon arrowhead Ozzy made him as a joke.
Arrow:About time, Sleeping Beauty.
Ozzy chimes in a second later, his icon a pixelated frog with a knife.
Ozzy:Cabin play okay?
I huff softly.
Knight:Cabin’s solid. No signs of company. No digital leakage.
A new icon lights up—a stylized G with a halo and tiny devil horns.
Gage.
