Buried inside the logs.
Small.
Almost invisible.
But deliberate.
Injected instructions.
Not from the grid operators.
From an external network.
My stomach drops.
“Oh no.”
Boone hears it immediately.
“What?”
“This isn’t system stress.”
“Then what is it?”
I zoom the code.
The command pattern becomes obvious.
The same structure repeating across multiple nodes.
Precise.
Surgical.
Designed to overload stabilizers one region at a time.
Adam’s voice lowers.
“Someone’s pushing the dominoes.”
“Yes.”
Russ exhales slowly.
“So the collapse prediction…”
“…is being manufactured.”
The room goes silent.
Because that means something much worse than coincidence.
It means someone planned this.
I pull up the access trace.
Following the digital trail backward.
