Just a “maintenance handshake” buried inside a diagnostic subroutine—harmless on paper—pinging the satellite grid at the exact moment Morazin’s voice is clearest, most distributed, least deniable.
My backdoor opens.
And somewhere in the corporate satellite infrastructure Morazin is using as a mask, my little orphan-made hook sinks in and starts dragging his words where he doesn’t want them to go.
I keep my face blank in the camera feed.
I let fear show in my eyes if it wants to—let them think I’m just a restrained civilian about to die.
Because the real weapon isn’t my expression.
It’s timing.
Morazin’s voice swells. “This is what happens?—”
And I whisper, just for myself, just for the part of me that used to scrub floors for adults who wouldn’t meet my eyes:
“Go ahead. Talk.”
Because every syllable he speaks now is mine.
And when the confession lands, it’s going to land with maximum clarity…
…and minimum ability to spin.
CHAPTER 16
LONARI
Gur tries to tear itself apart like a wounded animal the second it smells weakness.
The streets don’t care that I stripped a fake Godfather on a casino dais. The alleys don’t care that I burned half our reserves to sever Nine contracts. The rival crews don’t care that I’m “legitimate” now by syndicate standards—whatever the hell legitimacy means when your government is a ledger and your laws are enforced at gunpoint.
They care about one thing:
Can Kaijen still bite?
So I make sure the city feels teeth.
Emergency rule isn’t a speech. It’s logistics.
It’s standing in a street that still reeks of smoke and hot metal while crews glare across a line of painted asphalt like it’s sacred territory, and telling them if they shoot each other today, I’ll shoot them tomorrow. It’s sending patrol rotations to medical stations before I send them to casinos. It’s making sure trauma bays have power and clean bandages before anyone gets a fresh suit.
It’s building legitimacy while still bleeding.
I’m at a triage hub on Kaijen east when the next minor war tries to start—two small crews, both young, both hungry, both convinced they’re the main character in a story Gur never promised them. One’s got Sable Knife colors tied around their arms like a joke. The other’s Kaijen-adjacent, but not sworn—dock rats with rifles, eyes too bright.
They’re screaming at each other across a barricade of overturned cargo pallets.
“—you don’t own this block!”
“We spilled blood for this block!”
“You spilled blood because you’re stupid!”
I step between them and the argument dies mid-breath, like someone hit mute.
The air smells like antiseptic and sweat and spilled disinfectant. Behind me, inside the makeshift medical station, I hear a woman groaning in pain and a medic swearing under their breath. A child cries—thin, exhausted—like they’ve been crying for hours and forgot why.
