The secondary authority moved at six in the evening.
Not against them directly. That would have been simpler, and simpler was not how he operated, as Aiden had understood from the moment he read the node architecture and recognized its logic. He moved through the infrastructure, through the institutional channels still available to him, through the levers of a system that had not been fully dismantled, because the parts still standing were the parts that had been his rather than the father's.
The first indication was a flag on Tal's network monitor, a targeted suppression request aimed at the transmitted logs, the ones that had been sent to the three secure locations the night before. Not a legal request. A technical one, the kind that came from someone who understood the architecture well enough to reach directly into the transmission layer and attempt to interrupt the distribution before it was complete.
Tal saw it at six oh four.
He had it blocked by six oh six.
