"They know our hand," Lucy said, watching the feed. The rain smeared the city into streaks. "Root saw the splice. It flagged us, and it's already probing back."
Max stayed calm. "Good. We get ahead of the probe. We don't let them close the net on us."
They didn't argue. They moved with the same clean efficiency as every other job: pack light, pick the exit routes, burn the traces. V checked munitions; Jackie cycled his servos; Lucy ran a fast integrity scrub on the deck and cached the Node One logs in three separate dead-drop packages. Max fed Eidolon a new set of noise patterns and routing decoys, routing his own constructs into ghost patrols around the city to muddy any tracking attempts.
Mary spoke up from the dash. "Root is running a sector-wide sweep. Multiple vectors converging on the exchange. Estimated time to active countermeasures: thirty minutes. They will attempt to lock mobile assets and deploy hardened scouts."
"Thirty minutes," Lucy repeated. "Enough time to move, not enough to take another node."
Max nodded once. "We don't take another node tonight. We set the net. Make them burn time chasing ghosts."
Lucy looked at him. "Explain."
He outlined the move in a few calm sentences. "Root is aware. If we go back in raw, it'll lock everything down. Instead, we force a response that leaves other seams exposed. We spread noise along the east grid, bait a satellite-level ping, and let Eidolon fake the signal origin. While they chase that, we hit a maintenance splice where the redundancy is thin—Node Five's feeder is fed through three third-party switchyards. Less corporate attention, more physical seams. We take the feeder, not the host."
V grinned. "So we make them dance while we cut a tendon."
Jackie cracked his knuckles. "I like dancing."
Lucy set the tools. "I'll code the bait. I can make it loud enough to look like a Root-level trace. But I need an exit plan. If they loop us, we lose more than a node."
Max answered without raising his voice. "I'll hold the perimeter. Eidolon will route false comms through three independent surfaces. Jackie and V take the rear sweep and the decoy run. You and I hit the splice. Minimal footprint. If Root escalates, we fold."
They moved fast. V drove; Jackie rode shotgun; Max sat low, Eidolon feeding him live overlays and blind corridors. Lucy worked the bait through a burned satellite uplink—an old corporate relay Mary still had access to. She made the feed scream: fabricated signatures, fake maintenance windows, a chain of urgent requests that looked like the kind of mess Root would hate to ignore.
"Signal is live," she said. "It's loud. It should pull at least two heavy sweeps and a Netwatch node."
"Good," Max replied. "If they send Netwatch, they will be focused on tracing the uplink. That narrows their field."
They parked three blocks from the target seam, a rusted service culvert that ran under a light-rail junction. Lucy clipped a hardline to the deck and checked the splice access. Jackie and V set up a small perimeter of jammers and decoys—they wanted to look like a small job, not a full assault. Max positioned Eidolon's constructs in stealth, a ring that would bloom if Root's probes closed.
Lucy jacked in and felt the host's diagnostics like a hand on her shoulder: coarse, old hardware, patched over with recent corporate signatures. She fed the bait deeper and then let the probe slip: a narrow rot that would take a feeder offline without touching the host's core. The machine tried to taste it. Root's probes responded—two sweeps from the exchange, a Netwatch ping.
"Netwatch on approach two," Mary said. "They've committed a trace."
"Now," Max said.
Lucy moved the rot into the feeder splice. Her fingers didn't shake. The code ran, quiet, surgical. The feeder's routing table folded and a small section of redundancy collapsed in a way that looked like a hardware fault. The jump had the right fingerprints: old resistor noise, a pressure reading that matched a pump failing. It would trigger maintenance, not a full system lockdown.
NODE 5 — FEEDER: DISABLED
NODE 5 — ISOLATION: PENDING
Lucy pulled the line. They ghosted back out while Jackie and V stirred a controlled distraction—a rigged power glitch two blocks away that sent a flock of Militech drones hunting the wrong grid. Netwatch traced the loud feed the bait had created and found the false origin. The chase was on.
Back in the van, Lucy watched the logs scroll.
NODE 5 — ISOLATION: SUCCESS
REMAINING HOSTS: 2
ROOT ALERT — ACTIVE TRACE (DIVERTED)
Max didn't celebrate. He steered them through the rain the same way he always had—slow, precise, focused. "They moved," he said. "Root tripped on the bait. We made them move their pieces."
V cracked a short, tired laugh. "Two left, then Root itself."
Jackie folded his hands and flexed his chrome fingers. "Bring it."
Lucy closed her deck and looked up at Max. "We've got one window left to force Root to show the spine."
He met her gaze, calm. "Then we use it. We don't guess. We cut where it will hurt most."
The city passed in wet, neon blur. Root was awake and hunting. They'd made it move. Now the next choice was the one that counted—where they cut next, and whether the cut would finally drag Root out into the open.
They had a plan and they stuck to it.
Max pulled the van into a shadowed alley near the central exchange. No lights, no chatter. V checked the satchels—extra EMPs, a bag of flash-bangs, a line of cheap trigger charges. Jackie strapped a compact hydraulic cutter to his thigh and flexed the new Kerenzikov wiring at his wrist until the servos hummed steady. Lucy closed her deck and breathed once. Mary ran a last sweep of the city net and fed the team a clean overlay.
"Two hosts left," Mary said. "Root will react to anything that looks like a move on the exchange. If we make it scream loud enough, Root will answer. That's the opening."
***
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