The city did not reward mercy.
It rewarded efficiency.
Xinyue learned that quickly.
The money from the river building job did not sit in her account for long. She moved it the same night — broken into fragments, scattered through digital corridors that folded and twisted like smoke. Nothing stayed still. Nothing stayed obvious. Every transaction was a shadow stepping through another shadow, and by dawn, the original payment had ceased to exist in any meaningful way.
She sat on the cold concrete floor of her high-rise refuge, knees drawn to her chest, laptop balanced on her thighs, the glow of the screen carving pale lines across her face. Outside, the wind clawed through broken vents, making the building groan like something alive. The city never truly slept — it only lowered its voice.
Her burner phone vibrated again.
This one was different.
No encryption signature she recognized. No professional efficiency. Just a single message:
You're getting noticed.
Her fingers stilled.
Xinyue did not respond. She stared at the screen, listening to the hum of distant traffic far below. Messages like that were not warnings. They were tests. Hooks cast into dark water to see what might bite.
She turned the phone face-down.
But the words lingered.
Getting noticed was both inevitable and dangerous. Power drew eyes. Eyes drew hands. And hands — she knew — had a way of closing around your throat when you weren't careful.
Over the following weeks, the jobs changed.
No longer simple building access or internal system bypasses. Now they came layered with complexity — nested security, false trails, hidden traps meant to expose anyone careless enough to touch them. Someone out there was watching the watchers.
And they were measuring her.
She took each job slowly, deliberately, moving through systems like a surgeon rather than a thief. Every line of code was placed with patience. Every erased log left behind something subtly misleading. She didn't just disappear — she misdirected.
And quietly, invisibly, her name began to circulate in places she could not hear.
Not a real name. Never that.
A handle. A rumor. A shadow reputation.
The Ghost of Fourteen Floors.
The name made her lips tighten. She didn't like being turned into a myth. Myths attracted hunters.
One night, after completing a particularly intricate job involving a logistics firm that had buried illegal shipping routes beneath layers of corporate legality, she noticed something wrong.
Her system lagged.
Just a fraction of a second.
Barely perceptible.
But wrong.
Her heart didn't race. Panic was useless. She leaned back, eyes narrowing, fingers hovering above the keys. Someone had touched her network. Not enough to break in — but enough to knock, gently.
A courtesy tap.
She disconnected everything instantly, pulling batteries, killing power, plunging her room into darkness. Silence wrapped around her like a held breath.
Minutes passed.
Then ten.
Then twenty.
Nothing happened.
But the message was clear.
She was no longer invisible.
The next day, she changed locations.
Her new refuge was smaller, dirtier — a forgotten storage level beneath an abandoned shopping complex, smelling faintly of mold and old cardboard. The lights flickered. Rats moved in the walls. But it was quiet. Forgotten.
Safe — for now.
She worked differently after that. Less volume. More selectivity. Jobs were vetted twice. Sometimes three times. She refused anything that smelled like bait.
But the city kept pushing.
One evening, as she exited a convenience store with a bottle of water and cheap noodles, she noticed a man leaning against a lamppost across the street. He wasn't doing anything obvious. That was what made him dangerous. His eyes followed reflections, not faces. His posture was loose — too loose.
He wasn't watching her.
He was watching the space around her.
Xinyue did not look back.
She walked.
She turned corners. Slowed down. Changed rhythm.
The footsteps behind her adjusted perfectly.
Her pulse remained steady. Fear had taught her nothing. Calculation had taught her everything.
She slipped into a crowded pedestrian tunnel, melted into a stream of commuters, then abruptly reversed direction, ducking through a maintenance door she had memorized weeks earlier. She climbed two flights of narrow stairs and emerged onto a street that smelled of fried oil and rain.
The man did not appear.
But that did not mean he wasn't still there — somewhere.
That night, Xinyue did not sleep.
She sat cross-legged on her mat, staring at the faint glow of her laptop, the old promise whispering through her mind again.
Power was not protection.
Power was a target.
And the city, at last, had begun to aim back.