Mainly because I want to kiss him.
It’s been hours since we received the packets from Ozzy.
There’s a special kind of intimacy in sharing a screen with someone.
Not the Netflix-and-chill kind.
Thewe might die and we’re building the map that decides howkind.
I kind of love it.
Knight and I end up side by side at the tiny cabin table, knees bumping under the wood, the battered tablet propped between us on a stack of canned beans.
Knight scrolls, jaw tight.
I steal a cold grape from the bowl we found in the fridge. Apparently Ranger also stocked fresh fruit, which I’m choosing to interpret as his way of sayingdon’t die of scurvy.
“Okay,” Knight says, eyes narrowed. “This is the bounty board’s backbone. Obfuscated, obviously. But you can’t fully hide behavior.”
Lines of text fill the screen—hashes, timestamps, transaction routes, string after string of data that makes most people’s eyes cross.
Mine light up.
I tuck one leg under me and lean closer.
“So the main node is this ‘HubZero’ address,” I murmur, following his cursor. “All these subnodes feed into it. Different vendors, different taggers, different ‘clients.’ Like a marketplace.”
“Exactly.” He zooms in on a cluster in the top right. “Here’s the part that matters to us.”
Three entries glow, highlighted in yellow.
– NODE: HZ//VENDR-ALFA07
TAG: INTERFERENCE / OBSERVER
ALIAS: VANTAGE
BOUNTY: 15BTC
– NODE: HZ//VENDR-ALFA07
TAG: INTERFERENCE / VIGILANTE
ALIAS: MASK-01
BOUNTY: 20BTC
– NODE: HZ//VENDR-ALFA07
TAG: INTERFERENCE / VIGILANTE+ASSET
ALIAS: MASK-01 + ASSET
BOUNTY: 35BTC
My stomach does a small, unfriendly flip.
“That’s us,” I say quietly.
