CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - The first mistake they made was thinking she was alone.
The second was thinking she was predictable.
Xinyue studied the unfamiliar signature for three days without touching it. She let it breathe inside her labyrinth of false corridors, watching the way it moved — careful, quiet, and unnervingly polite. It did not push. It did not pry. It simply… waited. As if it knew the system would eventually speak to it on its own.
That kind of patience was rare.
That kind of patience belonged to someone who had time, funding, and protection.
She finally touched it at 1:04 a.m.
Just a brush.
A whisper.
The response was immediate.
Not an alarm.
Not a block.
A handshake.
Her lips curved slightly.
"Interesting," she murmured.
The connection was routed through so many clean proxies that it almost vanished — but not quite. She followed the echo back far enough to taste the infrastructure beneath it. Private satellites. Government-adjacent nodes. Corporate cloaking.
This wasn't a hunter.
This was a patron.
Someone who didn't want her erased.
Someone who wanted her owned.
Her burner vibrated.
New number.
No relay.
No encryption handshake.
Just text.
You're very good.
So good that you're expensive.
Xinyue stared at the words, then typed back:
Expensive things don't like cages.
The reply came slowly.
Cages are for animals.
We offer rooms with views.
She closed her eyes briefly.
They always dressed chains in silk.
She did not answer.
Instead, she moved.
She pushed a controlled leak into her maze — a digital rumor pointing toward a false shell that looked like her real core. She seeded it into channels she knew her watchers listened to.
And then she waited.
Two nights later, something touched the shell.
Hard.
Fast.
Professional.
She watched them enter.
Watched them commit.
Watched them dig.
And then she closed the door.
Systems inside the shell began feeding them fabricated data — fake ledgers, false identities, ghost payments, invented alliances. Whoever they were, they were now building conclusions on lies she had written.
And somewhere, someone important would soon believe them.
Her phone vibrated again.
You've become inconvenient.
She smiled softly.
"I was born that way," she whispered.
She typed back
'Inconvenience is cheaper than obedience'.
The reply took longer.
When it came, it was shorter.
You can't outrun this forever.
Xinyue shut the phone off.
They weren't wrong.
But they didn't need her to outrun them.
They needed her to mislead them long enough to make their own power collapse under the weight of false certainty.
And that was something she could do very, very well.
The city pulsed outside her window, unaware that deep within its veins, something quiet and surgical had begun to cut.
Not to destroy.
But to rearrange.