Knight taps the screen. “The first tag went up about six months ago. Anonymous ‘observer’ noticed interfering with operations. No face. Just an alias. VANTAGE.”
“Arrow,” I guess.
“Probably,” Knight says. “Then three months ago, this one—” he indicates the second entry “—went live. Vigilante interfering. Alias ‘MASK-01.’ Stills pulled from one of Gage’s ops.”
“You,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“And the last one?” I swallow. “Vigilante plus asset.”
He doesn’t look at me when he says, “Us. Last night. Mask-01 and his problem child.”
A shiver runs down my spine that isn’t entirely fear.
“Who’s VENDR-ALFA07?” I ask. “Vendor? Handler? Etsy shop for murderers?”
Knight snorts, humorless. “Vendor tag. Same entity posts all three. Same payment address. Same signature. They’re the one selling us as targets.”
“And,” I point out, “they’ve been watching you longer than you’ve been watching them.”
His jaw flexes.
“Dean thinks ALFA07 is an internal Cathedral handler,” he says. “Someone high enough to see multiple operations across different cities.”
“So not just a random creep with a laptop,” I say. “Like… a project manager. But for evil.”
His mouth twitches despite the tension. “Something like that.”
I tap the timestamp column.
“But look,” I say. “The bounty goes up after each escalation. First Vantage. Then Mask alone. Then Mask plus asset. They’re leveling up the reward every time you piss them off.”
“I noticed,” he says grimly.
“Doesn’t that mean they’re… scared?” I ask. “Like, if we were nothing, they wouldn’t throw money at us. Right?”
He thinks about it.
“Maybe,” he says. “Or maybe they’re just possessive. This network thrives on control. We’re a variable they can’t account for yet.”
“Well,” I say, sitting back. “Let’s become a variable they regret.”
We fall into a rhythm—he runs scripts and parses logs, I pattern-match and dig into the weird stuff. It’s not quite internet access, more like getting packages delivered through a very paranoid mailman, but it’s enough.
We build a conspiracy corkboard that isn’t a corkboard, just layers of data in my head:
ALFA07 pops up in three other bounty threads over the past year. All “interference” tags. All targeting people who got in the way of Cathedral’s bigger structures.
One is a journalist in another city.
One is a whistleblower.
One is a hacker whose alias I recognize from some old white-hat boards.
All their tags are stamped with the same little signature identifier: >
“Helios,” I say aloud, tasting the word. “Sun god. Loves attention. Big ego.”
