[MAKARS CONTAINER PORT. SOUTH SAMARATHA. ~09:45 AM]
Makars hit him like blunt force.
After the controlled sterility of Lawimore, the port city was a sensory detonation, air thick with sea salt, spice, diesel fumes and the constant roar of dock laborers shouting over steel and water.
Arya jumped from Strong 5 onto the pier, dissolving into stacks of burlap sacks and dripping fish crates.
Captain Makil met his eyes only once, then nodded as Arya thanked him.
"You owe me just one thing, son," Makil said and his smile faded.
"Don't let them win."
Arya moved immediately.
...
The torn fire-retardant jacket was a liability, too distinctive. He replaced it with a worn dark hoodie scavenged from a vendor stall.
The thermal printouts and anomaly reports were secured tight against his waist. He committed the contents of Gilang's phone to memory, then wiped the device and discarded it into a sealed waste container bound for outbound cargo, not theatrics, just entropy.
A few critical files were already mirrored in his own phone, stored in a private encrypted cloud node he had built himself.
His posture remained stiff, as if carrying frozen weight.
But his eyes were no longer reading data.
They were reading people.
The port was a living logistics maze, chaotic, inefficient, honest. The opposite of Lawimore's organized deception. Arya touched the thermal prints beneath his hoodie. The thin paper felt hot.
This ecological time bomb would not stay abstract.
It would touch every sack, fisherman, square meter of coast beneath his feet.
He slipped into the main terminal unnoticed.
Near the ATM cluster, he saw them.
Two men in batik shirts, too expensive, too formal for dockside chaos. They weren't scanning faces.
They were scanning posture.
They were looking for someone moving like gravity was wrong, someone walking as if burdened by forbidden truth.
The Nickel Chain.
Surgical. Quiet.
Arya veered sharply into a small food stall, dropped into a plastic chair and ordered bitter coffee. He didn't look at them. He listened.
Footsteps.
Measured. Even. Not rushed.
A deliberate patrol rhythm.
They were close.
Adrenaline flooded cold through his veins, an applied physics in human space.
A memory cut through his mind, Gilang's voice, dry and amused,
"If you can't beat the problem, change the parameters."
Displacement.
Now.
...
Beneath the stall table sat a stack of ice buckets. To the side, a pile of scrap steel waiting for pickup. The agents were four meters out.
Arya hooked a foot around the nearest bucket and yanked.
The bucket slid.
Ice scattered.
The first agent's ankle hit wet concrete.
Impact.
The agent stumbled into his partner, both slamming hard into the metal bumper behind them. Water flooded the floor.
Arya was already moving.
He sprang from the chair, exploiting the fraction of a second created by displaced momentum.
The first agent tried to rise, fury flashing in his eyes.
Arya took the cup of his hot coffee and threw it cleanly into the second agent's face.
Not lethal.
Chemical disorientation.
The man cried out, hands clawing at his eyes.
Arya ran.
He disappeared into the crush of the bus terminal, heart hammering, lungs burning. Makars swallowed him whole, noise and bodies providing perfect camouflage.
He escaped.
But he knew he had left behind, more than three grams of anomalous data.
As he ran, pain flared, not just physical, but moral. His scientific integrity now demanded non-lethal violence.
The disease was setting in.
...
By the time he reached Makars International Airport, he had stabilized his breathing.
Inside the terminal, he secured the cash he'd withdrawn earlier and moved directly to a domestic airline counter. He needed to be forgettable.
"Fastest ticket to Aurellia," he said, voice neutral.
"Destination airport?" the clerk asked.
"International Sahatria." Arya replied instantly. "Economy. Immediate."
The larger hub. Crowded. Chaotic. Perfect for system failure.
He checked the departure board.
Arya was now a fugitive carrying moral contraband.
He had survived the sea and the port.
The real war was on land, where lies wore tailored suits and were far harder to defeat than men with pistols.
A chill crawled up his neck.
Not from the air conditioning.
From targeting.
Eighteen meters away. Passive visual sweep. Non-aggressive.
Nickel Chain methodology.
They had shifted tactics, from posture tracking to psychological profiling.
More dangerous.
They knew he wouldn't use a fake identity. A scientist's integrity was rigid, even in flight.
His real name was the trap.
Arya cleared document screening without incident. The security officer's eyes were routine.
But Arya's attention locked onto the reflection in the glass behind him.
One of the batik agents was holding up a phone, not calling, but syncing to the terminal's camera grid, running passive facial correlation across live feeds.
Seconds.
Arya inhaled slowly, forcing perfect cognitive balance.
He stepped out of the check-in line as if he'd forgotten something, flowed with the crowd toward a nearby coffee shop, deliberately breaking sightlines.
Behind a concrete pillar, he accessed his encrypted cloud node.
He suspended thermal transmission.
Then he sent a decoy location ping, rerouting his signal trail back to the bus terminal he'd escaped earlier.
A lie injected into the data stream.
It wouldn't last long.
But it might buy him air time.
And air time was everything.
As he walked toward the departure gate, Arya clenched his fists, then relaxed them, a grounding motion from the basic Silat techniques Gilang once taught him.
Rima.
Aurellia.
At the security checkpoint, the most dangerous moment of any escape.
Arya handed over his identification.
He glanced back.
Across the crowded terminal, he caught a glimpse of an expensive batik shirt.
The agent he had blinded with coffee.
The man wasn't looking at Arya.
He was staring at the departure board.
…