A man snarls, “And if you can’t hold against the Nine?”
Lonari steps closer, and the air shifts like a predator entering a pen. “Then you die anyway. So choose: die disciplined, or die stupid.”
Silence.
The merchants swallow their panic and, one by one, nod.
Renn starts moving them back, organizing them into something that looks less like a stampede and more like a line. The casino music swells again, trying desperately to sell the lie that this is normal.
Lonari turns slightly toward me. “You’re coming with me.”
“I was already going to,” I mutter.
“Good,” he replies. “Because you’re about to earn your keep.”
“Excuse me?” I snap.
Lonari’s eyes flick to mine, dry humor flashing. “That’s a joke.”
I glare. “Bad joke.”
He bares his teeth. “Still a joke.”
I mutter, “Mobsters are terrible at comedy,” and follow him through a staff corridor before the lobby can swallow me again.
The server spine smells like home and trauma.
Cold air. Ozone. Warm dust baked into circuitry. Fans roaring softly like a tired animal breathing. Blue indicator lights blinking in patterns that feel smug. The place is a skeleton, and I love it because skeletons don’t lie—bones are honest about what holds you up.
I ignore the ache in my side and set my portable kit on a maintenance table. My fingers still shake sometimes when I’m alone, but I don’t let anyone see that part.
Renn stands by the door with two guards, arms crossed, watching the hall.
Lonari hovers behind me like a mountain trying to pretend it’s not hovering.
“Stop that,” I mutter without looking up.
“What,” Lonari says.
“The looming.”
“I’m not looming,” he lies.
I snort and plug into the Nun’s backbone through a rerouted maintenance relay, the same boring node I used before. I spin up a temporary comm hub—isolated VLAN, air-gapped except for the one narrow pipe I control, and even that pipe is wrapped in encryption that would make an IHC auditor cry.
Screens bloom around me—network topology, signal logs, intrusion attempts, relay pings.
And immediately I see it.
Ghost pings.
Not full handshake attempts, not loud probes. Polite little taps on obscure ports, like someone knocking gently on a door they know they don’t technically own.
Nine-linked signatures have a smell. A rhythm. A particular kind of arrogance that thinks it’s invisible because it’s rich.
I isolate one ping and run a trace.
The origin bounces—shell nodes, civilian relays, a Baragon clearinghouse stub that’s supposedly frozen—then loops back into a dead-end address that’s only “dead” if you believe what you’re told.
