They left the wreck without ceremony. No celebrating—just the steady movement of people who knew what needed doing.
Back at the safehouse they worked quickly and quietly. V checked weapons and taped a few EMPs in place. Max fed Eidolon new routing locks and tactical overlays; his constructs booted and dropped to low-power standby around the perimeter. Lucy sat at the kitchen table with her deck open and a cooling mug of coffee beside her. She ran the logs again, looking for patterns.
"Five left," she said, voice flat. She rubbed her forehead. "They're not random. Nodes sit along heavy infrastructure—substation clusters, transit splices, old maintenance cavities. Whoever set this up planned for city-wide collapse if the system broke."
V snorted. "Corporate paranoia with a paint job. How does that help us?"
"It helps," Lucy replied. "If they cluster around infrastructure, there are physical seams: service shafts, maintenance ducts, swap stations. We don't need to batter doors. We find seams nobody watches and move through quietly."
Max watched the map Lucy had pulled up on the holo and traced the line of red dots with his finger. "Node Three is under the old river pump station—sealed concrete, single maintenance entrance. Tough, but the seams line up with a freight conduit under the rail loop. You go through the conduit, you get to the junction unseen."
"So we crawl under a live rail line and hope the maintenance bots don't notice?" Lucy asked.
"We don't go blind," Max said. "We use the freight conduit. It's checked less. You get into the junction, I drop a beacon to keep their watchers busy, V and I sweep, you do the crawl and plant the corruptor."
V cracked her knuckles. "Long as I get to shoot the hardpoints."
They split tasks. Lucy rewrote her corruptor to handle newer hardware. Node Two had been older and slower; Node Three would have FPGA layers and hardened replication. She built sinkholes—traps that would quarantine a node—and a surgical rot to erase replication keys in a way that required a full shutdown to fix.
V staged the van two blocks from the rail yard with decoy plates and a fake manifest. Max prepped a lightweight rig, his rifle modified to accept Eidolon's feed through a tether. He packed forged passes and burner keys that died on touch.
At dusk they moved. The freight yard smelled of oil and rain. The conduit hatch was half-hidden behind rejected pallets. Inside, the conduit was cold and quiet; the city's noise dropped to a distant thrum.
They crept through the metal tunnel. Max ran Eidolon's sensor overlay over his vision—thermal ghosts of maintenance bots, faint heartbeats of active nodes, a cam loop with a nine-minute blind spot. Lucy matched her work to the blind spot's cadence as she crawled.
At the junction a maintenance hatch led down. The hatch needed an authorized key; the lock hadn't been patched after a midnight repair. Max set clamps and pried the hatch open. Below, the air smelled like warm metal and oil. A console glowed red: NODE 3 — SECURE: ARMED.
They froze for a second. Max stayed calm. "No theatrics. Move clean. V, cover the aperture. Lucy, hardline only. If it reaches for you—cut and run."
V took position at the hatch. The corridor beyond hummed with power. Lucy jacked in and her deck filled with processes: layered firewalls, watchdog services, a port that blinked every twelve seconds. This was an armed vault.
She set the sink and bait. Her hands were steady.
"Ready?" Max asked.
"Ready," she said.
She ran the probe. The node opened like a predator's eye: active heuristics, watchdogs, port gates. BLACKSHADE-3 woke and hit like a hostile program meant to force a drop.
"Hello to you too," Lucy muttered.
Max stayed angled toward the racks, rifle lowered but Eidolon feeding him corrections. "Contain it. Don't fight on its ground."
Lucy flared a fake admin handshake; BLACKSHADE hooked it and ran into her sandbox. The deck rattled with phantom diagnostics—fake memory overruns and thermal spikes. Her sandbox bled those lies into a dead loop; BLACKSHADE slammed into the trap.
"Got it," she said, sweat on her brow.
V whispered over comms, "Movement. Two heavies at the end of the hall."
"Hold them," Max said.
Lucy pushed the rot into the replication table. Keys invalidated one by one. The node spun up mirrored instances to trap her, but she forked the phantom into a decoy thread. The console blinked:
NODE 3 — REPLICATION KEYS: INVALIDISOLATION: PENDING
Then gunfire cracked. V called out, "Loader incoming—servo-mount with a chain gun!"
Max moved with precise speed. Eidolon's corrections guided him; constructs slammed into the loader's legs and tangled servos. Max braced and fired. The loader's coolant lines ruptured and it staggered. V planted an EMP and it collapsed.
"Clear," V said.
Lucy yanked the probe free. Her deck cooled. "Done," she said. "Node Three is blind."
Max nodded once. "Move."
They ghosted back through the conduit, breathing hard from the crawl. The van took them away into the wet night.
Minutes later Lucy opened the log:
NODE 3 — ISOLATION: SUCCESSREMAINING HOSTS: 4
She let out a breath. "Four left."
V whistled. "Hell of a fight for one."
Max watched the map. "The next will be harder."
Buried in the final log snippet was a fragment Lucy had seen before—a faint tag in the deepest layers: HINGE. It wasn't just an identifier; it had weight.
"They're linked," Lucy said. "Four left—and the next one is a keystone."
Max looked at the map. "Then we cut the hinge before they can use it."
The rain slid across the windshield as they drove. Lucy stared at the tiny checksum and the faint name under it. She said the word out loud, low enough that only Max would hear.
"Root."
The van hummed along the soaked freeway, rain sheeting in hard gray lines across the glass. Neon bled from the city in fractured streaks, painting the cabin red and blue. None of them spoke for a while. V leaned back with her boots up, already stripping and reassembling her sidearm, mechanical, methodical. Lucy's eyes stayed on the checksum burned into her deck's memory buffer, fingers worrying the edge of her coffee cup like it might split under pressure.
Max drove. Calm. Steady. No hurry. He could have pressed the van harder, but instead he let the pace sink them into a rhythm that matched the rain.
Finally, Lucy said it again, voice firmer. "Root. The nodes aren't the system. They're anchors. Root is the system."
V cocked an eyebrow. "Like a king on a chessboard?"
***
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