The four maintenance trucks arrived at 12:44.
They came without markings, escorted by one dark sedan. Their drivers wore gray work jackets instead of uniforms, but the way they checked the alley before opening the rear doors made it clear they did not repair pipes for a living.
NS's father had sent members of his private security team.
"Thirty-eight passengers," NC told the first driver. "Four children. Seven people who need help climbing."
The driver looked at the bus, the broken rear window, and the bullet hole in its roof.
"What happened?"
"Public transportation," Cherry said.
Mr. Kim pointed toward the families.
"Questions after they are inside."
The drivers obeyed.
We divided ourselves between the trucks. Families and the most seriously injured entered first. The copied phones went into four separate vehicles. Shinso carried the original evidence drive beneath his shirt inside a sealed medicine bag.
Acid rain struck the plastic sheet above the loading bay.
The runoff had begun leaving pale lines across the metal door.
I helped Kitty into the third truck. NS started to help June into the same one, but his bandaged arm failed when he lifted it.
June climbed without him.
Then she turned and offered her hand.
"May I?" she asked.
NS looked at her.
For one second, the storm, the soldiers, and the waiting convoy disappeared from his expression.
"You are mocking me."
"A little."
He took her hand and climbed inside.
It was not reconciliation.
It was the first joke they had shared without hurting someone.
The convoy entered the service roads at 12:51.
Rain turned the small windows gray. Every few minutes, lightning revealed apartment towers without electricity and military vehicles occupying the larger intersections.
The maintenance trucks did not use the main avenues. They crossed beneath a railway yard, followed a drainage road behind the university district, and passed through a private delivery gate whose guard recognized NS's family seal.
Nobody spoke above a whisper.
Then our phones began vibrating.
One notification became five.
Five became dozens.
My social-media account received one hundred and eighty-four friend requests before the signal disappeared again. My follower count rose by more than six hundred. Most profile pictures showed cartoon fighters, masked doctors, smiling animals, or characters holding national flags.
"Why would six hundred people follow you?" Kitty asked.
"This is the wrong time to damage my confidence."
"I am asking scientifically."
Across from us, June's phone continued vibrating inside her hand.
"Three hundred and six requests," she said.
NS checked his own account.
"Mine stopped displaying the number."
"That might be normal for you," I said.
"It is not."
His family name already attracted strangers. The new accounts were different. They had no photographs of real lives, no conversations older than that morning, and no mutual friends until they began adding us.
One account followed NS, then June, then Kitty, then me.
Another followed Mr. Kim and every public Utopia student visible in the Congress Square footage.
A cartoon fox sent me a private message.
WE SUPPORT BRAVE STUDENTS. ARE ALL YOUR FRIENDS SAFE AFTER THE BUS ATTACK?
The fight had happened less than an hour earlier.
No independent report had mentioned it.
I showed Shinso.
"Do not answer," he said.
"I wasn't planning to become friends with the fox."
"Do not block it yet either. Screenshot the profile, then close the application."
"Why not block it?"
"Because it wants proof that you are looking at the screen."
He moved between us, recording account names before we shut down the applications. The requests continued arriving behind the closed screens.
Attention had never felt so much like somebody touching the outside of a locked door.
The surge reached the hospital too.
JP received requests from cartoon boxers and sports pages that had never posted a match. TZ's new followers used gaming characters. Anna's showed candles, prayer books, and white flowers. Accounts presenting themselves as public-health students asked HS which hospital entrance remained open.
NC received map pages.
Jihye received tarot pages.
Bunny received smiling animals.
Cherry received comedy accounts that repeated her old public jokes back to her.
The avatars were selected to look familiar.
The questions were selected to collect facts.
One account claiming to represent volunteer nurses asked Anna whether the wounded teenager from Congress Square was still alive. Another asked TZ whether JP could walk yet. A third told HS that medicine was available at the western granary and requested the names of patients who needed it.
None of them replied.
JP read the message on TZ's phone.
"They know what each of us cares about."
TZ powered the phone off.
"Then we stop teaching them."
JP looked toward the emergency room doors.
"What if one of the messages is real?"
"That is why it works."
VT's surveillance system contained 72,418 profiles across the country's five largest platforms.
Not all of them performed the same task.
Fifty-four thousand accounts repeated slogans, raised hashtags, and buried corrections beneath artificial agreement.
Fourteen thousand two hundred remained quiet until a protest target appeared. Those accounts followed, requested friendship, watched public posts, recorded active hours, and mapped relationships.
The final four thousand two hundred eighteen were operated by people inside MALT's cyber units. They carried longer histories, copied photographs, borrowed personalities, and enough ordinary mistakes to appear human during a conversation.
Some were entirely fabricated.
Others had been stolen from citizens who no longer controlled their passwords.
The number on VT's dashboard changed every minute as platforms removed accounts and his teams replaced them.
He opened a target map labeled UTOPIA CAMPUS 2.
Thirteen names formed the center.
XH.
NS.
June.
Kitty.
JP, TZ, HS, NC, Jihye, Bunny, Cherry, Shinso, and KM.
Lines connected them to classmates, relatives, teachers, hospital workers, former rivals, and people who had shared their videos from Congress Square.
The system did not understand friendship.
It understood frequency.
Who appeared beside whom.
Who answered first.
Whose account became active after another person vanished.
Whose name could frighten someone else into replying.
"The cluster is moving," an operator said.
"Direction?" VT asked.
"Northeast. The accounts entered the same three cellular sectors within nine minutes. NS's device is among them."
"His mansion."
"Likely. Should we notify the patrol units?"
VT studied the web of names.
"No."
"Sir?"
"A frightened group separates. A group that believes it has reached safety calls everyone it loves."
He enlarged NS's profile.
"Let them arrive."
The mansion gates opened at 1:29.
I had visited the property before, but I had never entered it inside a maintenance truck with acid rain running down the doors.
The underground garage was larger than Shinso's entire workspace. Backup lights illuminated water tanks, filtration equipment, parked vehicles, and rows of emergency supplies NS's father had ordered before the coup announcement.
The contrast became painful immediately.
Outside the gates, families were rationing water to wash chemical rain from children's eyes.
Inside, filtered water moved through silver pipes beneath a private house.
NS saw us looking.
"Do not apologize for what keeps people alive," June told him.
"I wasn't going to."
"You had the face."
"What face?"
"The guilty billionaire face."
"My family is not billionaire rich."
I looked around the underground garage.
"This is a difficult room for that argument."
Even Kitty smiled.
NS's father met us beside the internal doors. He did not embrace his son. He checked the bandage first.
"You were shot."
"Grazed."
"That word does not improve it."
"I have already lost this debate."
"Good. The doctor is waiting."
He looked beyond NS toward the families leaving the trucks.
"The east ballroom has mattresses. Children and injured people upstairs first. Food is being prepared. No one uses unfiltered water. Wet clothes remain in the garage."
The bus driver hesitated beside the last truck.
"Sir, we cannot pay for this."
NS's father looked at him.
"Then I will suffer the tragedy of not sending an invoice. Go inside."
The man did.
NS received seven sutures in a small medical room beside the garage.
The family doctor checked my ribs and confirmed that the bus fight had not improved them. Mr. Kim's split lip required no stitches. June and Kitty had bruises where the soldiers grabbed them, but no fractures.
Nobody used the word lucky.
Lucky people had not been fired on in Congress Square, hunted through acidic rain, and assaulted on a bus before lunch.
By 2:05, the thirty-eight survivors had eaten something warm.
Some slept immediately. Others sat beneath blankets with their eyes open.
The main group gathered in NS's library around one clean tablet that had never been connected to our personal accounts. Shinso displayed the screenshots from the convoy.
"These requests are surveillance," he said. "They are trying to establish who is together, who is injured, who has evidence, and who can be used to reach someone else."
"Can they see inside private profiles?" Bunny asked.
"Some can if accepted. Others only need what is already public. VT also controls parts of the phone network. The bots are not his only eyes."
NC looked toward the ceiling.
"Does he know we are here?"
NS answered before Shinso could.
"Assume he does."
Silence followed.
The mansion had walls, guards, water, and electricity.
It no longer felt hidden.
At 2:16, the Final General Strike statement reached another eleven universities.
Student leaders posted their real names beneath it.
MALT's accounts answered with cartoons.
They warned that joining the strike would destroy the economy. They claimed the Lady President had secretly resigned. They promised that everyone who remained home for seventy-two hours would be protected.
At the same time, other accounts pushed the western granary into the country's most discussed locations.
RICE FOR EVERY FAMILY. GATES OPEN AT THREE.
Kitty read the message twice.
"My mother said the soldiers will already be there."
"She is right," Shinso said.
"Then we have forty-four minutes to warn people."
Mr. Kim looked around the room.
"Without exposing this house. Without sending our names through a network controlled by VT. And without running toward another fight."
Kitty's eyes moved to me on the final sentence.
JP's mother's message had reached us with the hospital update.
He does not honor you by running toward every fight prepared for him.
I looked at the fake friend requests waiting behind my dark screen.
Somewhere inside MALT's system, seventy-two thousand profiles were watching to see which one of us moved first.
"Then we do not give them one person," I said.
"What do we give them?" June asked.
I looked at the thirty-two university signatures, the workers' committees, the hospital staff, and the market groups preparing for morning.
"Everyone."
I pointed toward the general-strike statement.
"Do not post from us. Send one warning to every real organization on that list. Let all of them publish it together."
Shinso considered it.
"They can still trace where the first copy entered the network."
NS looked toward his father.
"Can your business line reach anyone outside MALT's exchange?"
"One regional office," his father said. "The connection passes through a neighboring country. It was intended for financial emergencies."
"This feels financial," Cherry said. "MALT is using public money to kill the public."
"It also feels like an emergency," Bunny added.
NS's father unlocked the private terminal.
Before we wrote anything, a transport workers' group sent a photograph taken near the western granary. It showed three gray-green trucks entering a side gate at 11:48. The public entrance remained chained. Soldiers unloaded black shields beneath the warehouse awning.
Red bands marked their arms.
The photograph gave us something stronger than suspicion.
June wrote the first sentence.
THE WESTERN GRANARY IS CLOSED. NO PUBLIC FOOD DISTRIBUTION HAS BEEN AUTHORIZED.
Kitty added the second.
ARMED RED-BAND UNITS ARE ALREADY INSIDE. DO NOT APPROACH EVEN IF PEOPLE BREAK THE GATES.
Shinso attached the original photograph and its time information. NC added the addresses of verified community kitchens that had confirmed they were open. Mr. Kim removed every student's name from the document.
At 2:24, the warning left the mansion through NS's regional business line.
It reached the first university two minutes later.
At 2:28, thirty-two student unions posted it together.
Faculty groups followed. Transport workers sent it to drivers. Market associations printed it at shops whose power had returned. A monastery repeated it through battery loudspeakers. Hospital volunteers wrote it on cardboard beside the emergency entrances.
MALT's accounts responded immediately.
Cartoon farmers claimed the military trucks were delivering rice. Cartoon mothers accused the students of keeping food away from hungry children. Thousands of accounts copied the same accusation with the same spelling mistake.
The warning did not reach everyone.
It reached enough people to change the crowd.
At 2:34, a father walking toward the granary read it on a bus driver's phone. He turned his two children around.
Behind him, others continued forward.
On VT's map, the Utopia cluster remained gathered at NS's mansion.
He smiled when its connections began spreading outward.
At the western granary, a man wearing civilian clothes removed a bolt cutter from beneath his jacket.
The red-band soldiers watching from the upper windows allowed him to approach the gate.