CHAPTER FIFTEEN – THE NET TIGHTENS
The city began to close around her like a breath being held.
Xinyue felt it in small things first — a security door that opened a second too slowly, a public terminal that glitched when it shouldn't, a street camera that tilted as she passed beneath it. None of it was proof. All of it was pattern. And pattern was the language of traps.
She moved before dawn, keeping to narrow streets where delivery trucks groaned and shopkeepers swept yesterday's dust into shallow piles. Her hood stayed low. Her reflection stayed broken in shop windows. Her name stayed nowhere.
She did not take new jobs for several days. Instead, she watched.
She watched the way police cruisers lingered longer near certain intersections. She watched how network activity spiked at unusual hours in districts she once passed through freely. She watched how a quiet logistics company quietly replaced its security vendor with one tied to government contracts.
They were not looking for a person.
They were looking for a signature.
Her signature.
She began dismantling pieces of herself — deleting old shells, collapsing backup routes, abandoning digital safe houses she had built with care over years. Each deletion felt like cutting away parts of her own skeleton, but survival demanded sacrifice. You could not mourn what might get you killed.
One night, her burner lit up again.
No number.
No relay.
Just a blinking screen.
She didn't touch it.
The phone vibrated once — then twice — then went silent.
The next morning, she found her building's back entrance chained shut.
Brand new metal.
No signage.
No reason.
Someone was testing her exits.
Xinyue changed districts again, slipping into an industrial zone where factories breathed steam into the sky and the streets smelled of oil and rust. She rented a room under a false name — cash only — from an old man who didn't ask questions and didn't look too closely. The walls were thin, the bed uneven, but the window overlooked a maze of pipes and scaffolding that offered a hundred escape paths.
She rebuilt slowly.
Carefully.
She didn't just hide anymore.
She layered herself.
Every digital action now passed through three false versions of her before becoming real. Her systems whispered lies to anything that touched them, presenting decoys, feeding false patterns into places that might be watching. If someone was following her trail, they would not find her — they would find her shadows.
But shadows, she knew, could be tracked too.
The message finally arrived on her secure channel.
Not a threat.
An offer.
We know what you are.
We respect it.
Work with us.
Be protected.
Her jaw tightened.
Protection was another word for ownership.
She typed three words.
Not for sale.
She wiped the channel clean and shut everything down for forty-eight hours. No signals. No noise. No digital breath.
During that silence, she dreamed — not of freedom, not of the Qiao mansion, not even of hunger — but of being seen.
Not recognized.
Seen.
And that terrified her more than any hunter ever could.
Because the moment the city truly saw her, it would decide what to do with her.
And cities were never kind to things they couldn't control.