Three days underground.
Three days of aliases, burner phones, and concrete tunnels.
Layla hadn't seen sunlight since the leak.
Her safehouse had moved — this time to an abandoned metro station sealed off since the 2011 subway bombings. Fadi called it "Ghost Platform 6." No cameras. No airwaves. Just echoes and secrets.
There were others down there.
Refugees from memory.
A teacher who'd lost her license overnight. A poet whose work had been scrubbed from the national archive. A mechanic who swore his dead brother had once been mayor — except no record of that man existed anymore.
These weren't conspiracy theorists.
They were victims of digital genocide.
And now they were her army.
Layla didn't speak much that first day.
She watched.
Listened.
Took notes.
One woman, Zahra, had been a court translator for twenty years. One day, she woke up to find every legal case she'd ever worked on reattributed to someone named "Safia K." — a Ministry loyalist with no experience.
"I lost my language," Zahra whispered. "And I speak six of them."
Fadi gathered hardware. He was building a mesh network — offline communication hubs — that would let them move memory hand-to-hand if the internet was ever fully killed.
"The Republic can't shut down human routers," he joked.
But no one laughed.
That night, Layla stood on the edge of the dark platform.
A wall once covered in Metro advertisements now bore a single hand-painted line:
"If they delete you, write yourself again."
She stared at it for a long time.
Then she picked up a brush.
And beneath it, she wrote:
"We are the authors now."
The next day, she began training others.
Not how to fight — but how to record.
How to document, securely and redundantly. How to capture the un-capture-able.
Birth records.
Journal pages.
Wounds.
Smiles.
Everything the state could not fake, they would archive.
Even if it was on napkins and polaroids and whispers passed in the dark.
They called it The Living Ledger.
A memory network not of servers — but of people.
Each person became a page.
Each story a node.
Each truth a rebellion.
But then…
Zahra went missing.
Gone.
No signs of forced entry. No noise.
Just a faint trail of deleted messages and a Ministry van sighted above ground that morning.
They'd found them.
And now Layla had a decision to make:
Run deeper.
Or rise louder.
Because hiding had bought her time.
But time wasn't enough.
Not anymore.