Nine minutes.
Ten.
Eleven.
I inject the final payload, the one I built from scratch. The one I spent four years writing and refining and obsessing over.
Twelve.
Everything goes silent.
The blackout peaks.
Across the feeds, systems crash. Screens go dark. Everything collapses into digital silence.
I sag back in my seat, my lungs burning and chest heaving as though I just ran a marathon.
Twelve minutes and some change after I hit execute, the first nodes begin coming back online, slowly, the digital world stitching itself together again.
Temporary, just like I promised.
But the damage?
Permanent.
Felix meows cautiously from his perch.
“Yeah,” I tell him. “I fixed it.”
And somewhere out there, a lot of very bad people are having a very bad day.
With that thought, I grab my phone. My hands are still shaking when I call Harrison. It rings once. Twice. My pulse skips before he finally answers.
They’re alive.
Lane and Harrison are both alive.
The air finally moves in and out of my lungs again.
I think I’ll live to see another day.
The call ends, and I lower my phone back on the desk slowly, giving myself a chance to soak everything in, for the adrenaline to fade and my heart rate to slow.
I fucking did it.
I burned down two empires with one attack. I gutted the shadow that’s been haunting me for four years, the one who hired a man to take me. A man who never walked out of that basement.
But…
I thought this would feel different.
Victorious.
I thought maybe grief had a kill switch, like if I found the right target and hit it hard enough, something in me would finally shut off.
Instead, it feels like pressing on a bruise that never healed. Like scratching at a phantom limb, one I cut off years ago and my body still swears it’s there.
Felix jumps onto the desk and nudges my wrist, purring like I didn’t just commit large-scale cyber warfare.
