CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Xinyue did not sleep after the knock.
Sleep was for people whose doors stayed closed.
She sat cross-legged on the narrow bed, the glow of her laptop painting pale lines across her face, while the city murmured beyond the thin walls. The woman's voice still echoed faintly in her memory — calm, confident, already certain of ownership that had never been granted.
They had crossed a line.
And lines, once crossed, had to be redrawn in bloodless but irreversible ways.
By dawn, she had erased her digital skin.
Not her files. Not her work.
Her patterns.
Everything that made her recognizable — timing, routing behavior, keystroke rhythms, access habits — she dismantled piece by piece. It was like scraping off fingerprints she hadn't known she was leaving behind. She created false versions of herself, let them run decoy operations, let them take shallow, flashy jobs designed to be noticed. Meanwhile, her real presence retreated into narrower, darker corridors of the net.
If they were hunting her, she would give them prey.
Just not the real one.
She abandoned the industrial room by noon, slipping into the market districts where crowds swallowed individuals whole. Vendors shouted. Oil crackled. Steam curled from metal lids. Her hood stayed low, her eyes alert, but her posture loosened — the disguise of someone who did not know she was being hunted.
She moved into a temporary nest beneath a half-renovated shopping complex, where unfinished corridors echoed and fluorescent lights flickered like tired stars. It wasn't comfortable. It wasn't meant to be.
It was Invisible.
From there, she began to build her counter-net.
Not a fortress.
A labyrinth.
She created false access nodes that looked valuable but led nowhere. Digital hallways that looped endlessly. Honey systems that whispered temptation into the channels used by her watchers. Anyone trying to trace her would find themselves deeper inside something that fed them misinformation while quietly mapping their own machines.
She wasn't just hiding.
She was learning who was looking.
And slowly, they began to step into her web.
Pings appeared — subtle, careful, professional.
Government-level protocols.
Private-sector tools.
Some international.
Her eyes narrowed.
This wasn't one organization.
This was a coalition of comfort.
People who benefited from quiet corruption and clean illusions.
People she had brushed without ever meaning to.
They were no longer testing her.
They were studying her.
That night, she took a job — small, clean, harmless on the surface — and threaded it through her maze. Whoever followed it would leave fingerprints. And they did.
Four separate entities touched the trail.
Two corporate.
One state.
One unknown.
The unknown one was patient. Elegant. Slow.
She isolated its signature and stared at it for a long time.
Then she smiled.
Not in fear.
In recognition.
Someone out there was playing her game.
And that meant the board had finally become interesting.
Xinyue leaned back in the flickering light, eyes reflecting lines of code that bent reality in quiet ways.
If they wanted a war, they were going to learn something very simple.
Ghosts were hard to catch.
But architects of ghosts?
They were impossible.