My palm on his wound becomes a seal. The temperature in the room changes. The servers' lights shift into a breathing pattern. For a bright moment I feel the bond bloom into something like safety.
Then my phone lights against my thigh—Ana's alert. Not local. City's network pings us, multiple nodes. Feed thumbnails bloom on my screen: street cams, building cams, a police drone hovering two miles away. My heart lurches.
"If this goes out," Ana says, flat, "they'll see everything."
Lucien's eyes find mine. He's a map of pain and pleading. He saved me with his body; he's bleeding because he refused to let me go. I'm the one starting the ritual. It will anchor him, make him whole in a way that can't be erased.
"You can do it," he says. "Hide it."
"I can try," I reply.
I press harder, and the words tumble from me like clauses stitched in blood. The trackers overlay the old protocol with a noise pattern designed to mimic routine net heartbeat. A camera angle in the feed tilts. On my screen, a police drone switches data buckets.
Lucien convulses. The room tastes like ozone. My palm grows hot. The bond flares outward like a pulse, and I watch thumbnails on my phone bloom with light that looks like ink spilling on water.
"Shield!" Ana shouts. "Now!"
I close my eyes and force the last words through. The seal forms in my chest and disperses into the network like smoke that refuses to be collected.
Something answers from outside the chamber—an incoming signal that is not a surveillance pull. The rune we've been tracing shudders on the slab.
The feeders spike.
I feel the first ripple of exposure, the taste of it at the back of my tongue. We are not alone in making this act matter.
I finish the phrase and press my whole palm to Lucien's heart. His breath comes ragged and then steadier. For the first time tonight his fingers relax.
On my phone a camera feed I did not open begins to grow—an angle of the ritual chamber, the wax crest in focus, a timestamp. The feed is already routing.
If I don't move now, the city's web will carry this signal to every feed we own and a thousand we don't.
I let the seal set in Lucien's skin, but my eyes never leave the screen. The ritual completes and he breathes and the trackers cheer quietly—victory squeezed between teeth.
The bloom in the thumbnails clicks another node. An unfamiliar IP tags itself into the feed. The rune pulses.
I reach for the control panel Ana has hacked and begin isolating the chamber from the city's mesh. If I fail, regulators will see ritual signatures they can use to freeze assets. If I succeed, the evidence we pulled here becomes our weapon.
My hand is on the terminal. The other remains on Lucien, and the bond hums with a tenderness that does not make me weak. It makes me answerable.
The terminal accepts my command. The network begins to clamp.
Across Ana's screen a new video begins to render with a title someone chose for maximum damage: PROOF.MKV.
The render bar ticks.
We have one last second before it pushes out.
If I cut the net now, the file will disappear into their vault; if I let it upload, they will have a broadcast the city will eat.
I look at Lucien. He meets my eyes and there is no demand—only the raw, violent gratitude of a man who was almost lost and who knows how much we'll both pay for the saving.
"Do it," he says. "Whatever you need."
My fingers hover. The render ticks—twenty percent, thirty. The rune in the slab glows like a heartbeat.
I know what the ritual will mean if it reaches the city's nets. I also know I can't leave Lucien to the night's shadows.
I press the key.
