The silence in the motel room after Silica's message vanished was heavier than any darkness they had endured in Ramos's prison. It was the silence of a detonated bomb in the split second before the sound hits. The very air in the room seemed to buzz with tension, ready to shatter.
Kaito was the first to break the stillness. His hands flew over the laptop's keyboard, his face tight with a mix of anger and fear. "It's completely gone. I can't find any trace of how she did it," he said, his voice strained. "She didn't just hack us; it was like a whisper directly into the machine's heart. She was inside our system, and my new security walls didn't even notice her."
