The first video went up in the middle of the night.
It was grainy, a little too bright, clearly ripped from an internal feed by someone who did not care about polish. It opened on a chair, a collar, a body straining against restraints.
There was no voiceover.
No music.
Just the sound of someone screaming until they could not.
Then a caption.
THIS IS TWELVE‑NORTH.
It lasted thirty seconds before the Order's filters flagged it and tore it down.
By then, ten thousand people had seen it.
By morning, a million had.
It reappeared in chat threads and private nodes, chopped into shorter clips, reversed, slowed down, annotated. Some called it fake. Some called it justice. Some refused to watch and shared it anyway.
On a commuter tram, a woman in a gray suit stared at the glitching image on her neighbor's wrist screen until she realized her hands were shaking.
In a tower apartment, a boy with a faint, illegal glow under his skin watched in absolute silence as his parents argued over whether to turn it off.
In a security barracks, three techs huddled around a cracked tablet, eyes flicking to the door every few seconds.
"Looks like omega rigs," one said softly.
"We are not talking about this," another hissed.
"Too late," the third replied.
The city did not riot.
Not yet.
It murmured.
It whispered.
It watched.
And in the spaces behind official statements and carefully worded alerts about a "containment incident at a research facility," something began to loosen.
***
Taro barely stepped away from the relay console for five hours.
His fingers vibrated with caffeine and adrenaline as he rode packet streams, rerouting mirrored copies every time a node went dark.
"They learned faster than I hoped," he muttered, eyes bloodshot. "Slower than I feared. That is not a comforting middle."
He felt rather than saw Aiden come up beside him.
"How bad?" Aiden asked.
"On their side or ours?" Taro said.
"Start with theirs," Aiden replied.
"Filters are tightening," Taro said. "They are pushing an update to every civic screen that auto‑blocks anything with certain energy signatures or metadata tags. They are calling it a security patch. Which is adorable."
Aiden's mouth twitched.
"And ours?" he asked.
Taro nodded toward the rows of improvised equipment, half of it half broken.
"We are burning through safe relays," he said. "Every time we light one up, we risk losing it forever. Some cells are already dark. Could be caution. Could be raids. Could be both."
He swallowed.
"Also, Lysa is not here," he said.
Aiden knew that.
His ribs knew it every time he tried to take a full breath.
"She knew this would happen," Aiden said. "She planned for it."
"Planning and living through it are not the same," Taro said.
He scrubbed a hand over his face.
"I can keep this going another few hours," he added. "After that, the network map looks like a constellation someone erased half the stars from."
"Is it enough?" Aiden asked.
Taro's laugh was thin.
"What does that even mean," he said, "enough?"
He flicked a few switches, watched a new cluster of feeds blink from red to amber.
"The file is out," he said. "It will not vanish, no matter how hard they swat. It is already sitting on drives under ten thousand mattresses. If they shut down the whole net, people will carry it by hand. So yes. In that sense, it is enough."
He paused.
"In the sense where everyone walks away and we open a bakery," he added, "no."
Aiden almost smiled.
"Did you ever want a bakery," he asked.
"Once," Taro said. "Then I learned ovens can explode."
He tapped the sliver icon on his screen, where an encrypted copy of Aiden's data pulsed.
"You did your part," Taro said quietly. "Now we see if anyone in this city remembers how to be human when the lights are on."
***
Kael could not sit still.
The depot was too small.
The air was too thick.
Every time someone checked a feed and swore under their breath, his skin crawled.
Rin watched him pace.
"You are going to wear a groove in the floor," she said.
"Good," he said. "Then we will know where to stand when the ceiling falls in."
He caught his reflection in a fragment of broken metal leaning against the wall.
He looked like someone else.
Hair singed.
Eyes too bright.
Collar scar red around his throat, no shell to hide it now.
"If this works," he said, "they will come hard. If it fails, they will come harder."
Rin shifted on her crate.
Her fingers moved constantly now, weaving thin slivers of light between them, shredding and remaking them.
She had not stopped since she realized she could.
"What did you expect," she asked, "that they would say thank you?"
"No," he said.
He had not expected anything that clean.
He had expected to die in the labs or in a corridor or on a street, and the idea that he had not, that he had to think past that, still felt like a mistake.
Rin tilted her head.
"You look disappointed," she said.
"I am not sure what I look," he answered.
He joined her on the crate.
For a moment, they simply listened to the hum of equipment and the occasional burst of static from Taro's corner.
"What do you want from this," Rin asked.
Her voice was quiet, but the question cut straight through.
Kael opened his mouth.
Closed it.
"I want them to stop," he said at last. "I want no one else to wake up in a chair like the one you woke up in. I want kids who glow to be more afraid of spilling coffee than of stepping outside."
"That is a lot of wanting," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"And for you," she added.
He hesitated.
"I thought I wanted revenge," he said. "Turned out I wanted proof. That it was not in my head. That when they hurt me, it was not some personal failing that I could have fixed by being more obedient."
Rin looked at her hands.
"The proof hurts too," she said.
"Yes," he agreed.
They sat with that.
Aiden approached, slower than usual.
"Council," he said.
Kael blinked.
"We have a council now," he asked.
"Call it a meeting if it makes you feel less official," Aiden said. "Taro, Rin, anyone who intends to keep breathing through the next week and has opinions. We need to decide our next move before the city decides it for us."
Taro did not look away from his screens.
"I object to the word 'council' on the grounds that it implies we have control," he said, but he pushed his chair back anyway.
People gathered in a rough circle.
Eleven from the raid.
Three from the depot's original crew.
Aiden.
Kael.
No Lysa.
The absence sat in the middle with them, invisible and heavy.
Aiden did not stand.
He leaned against a crate so his ribs would not steal his breath.
"Here is what we know," he said. "The leak is out. The Order is already trying to shape it. Public bulletins call it a 'terrorist manipulation of internal footage.' They are insisting the procedures shown are 'isolated and outdated.'"
"Outdated," someone repeated, disgusted.
"Yes," Aiden said. "They are also increasing patrols in Deviant‑dense districts. Not raids yet, but presence. It is pressure. Reminder."
"Show of force," Kael said.
"Exactly," Aiden said. "At the same time, some civic channels are asking questions. Soft ones. Carefully worded. Talk shows hosting 'experts' who say things like 'if this is real, we deserve transparency.' It is not rebellion. It is not nothing."
"So what do we do," Taro asked. "Try to push them? Hit something else while they are off balance?"
"No," Aiden said.
The firmness surprised even him.
"We just proved we can break their teeth," he said. "If we hit something now, while the city is still trying to process, they will point at us and say 'see, monsters.' Any sympathy evaporates. Any doubt hardens."
"So we sit," Kael said.
"For a moment," Aiden said. "We let the footage breathe. We let people talk. We answer when they ask, quietly, in places the Board cannot easily shut down. We give witnesses a chance to speak. Survivors."
He glanced at Rin.
She went very still.
"You want me to go on a show and talk about the labs," she said.
"Not a show," Aiden said. "That would be suicide. Small gatherings. Community nets. Underground forums. Your story, if you choose to tell it."
"What does that change," Rin asked. "They saw the video. They have the graphs. Why do they need my words on top of that."
"Because numbers can be argued with," Aiden said. "Statistics can be spun. But when someone looks into a lens and says 'this happened to me' and you can see the way their hands shake, that is harder to file under 'propaganda' and move on."
Rin stared at him.
"I am not a symbol," she said.
"Neither am I," he said. "That will not stop them from making us into ones."
She looked down.
Light threads tangled between her fingers.
"I will think about it," she said.
"That is all I can ask," Aiden said.
Taro rocked his chair back on two legs.
"And what about the Board," he asked. "You know they are already drafting something worse than Twelve‑North. Cleaner. Deeper. No cameras at all."
"Yes," Aiden said.
"So we hit that next," Kael said.
Aiden shook his head.
"We do not know where it is," he said. "We cannot fight a ghost."
"We fought one already," Kael said. "The city thought Twelve‑North was an urban myth. We dragged it into the light."
"And paid for it," Taro added.
Kael's jaw clenched.
"So what, we wait until they build a new pillar and start again," he asked. "Hope public outrage grows a conscience before they redesign the collars."
"Hope," Aiden said, "and plan. There are cracks now. Agents like Rian. Techs who saw more than they were supposed to. Civilians who suddenly remember the neighbor's kid who disappeared after a scan came back wrong. These are openings. Lysa built the Network to use them. We do not honor that by turning every fear spike into an explosion."
"Sounds like restraint," Kael said.
"It sounds like survival," Aiden replied.
Their eyes met.
Kael held his gaze for a long, taut moment.
"Fine," Kael said at last. "We wait. We talk. We do the thing where we act like adults. But if they start filling new chairs while the city is still digesting the old footage, I am not staying here."
"I know," Aiden said.
He did not say I would not ask you to.
He did not have to.
***
Across the city, screens flickered.
Some showed the official loop.
A blurred image.
A corporate sigil.
A spokesperson assuring viewers that independent investigators would review all procedures and that the Order remained committed to safety.
Some showed the raw clip.
Chair.
Collar.
Screams.
In one cramped apartment, a father reached out and switched the screen off with a sharp gesture.
His daughter sat at the table, hands around a mug that had gone cold.
"You do not need to see that," he said.
"I already did," she replied.
Her eyes glowed faintly in the dim.
He looked away.
In a polished office high in a tower, a Board member watched the same footage on a private, secured feed. No logos. No commentary.
Just data.
"Can we contain it," she asked.
The analyst across from her swallowed.
"Not completely," he said. "We can shape it. But there will be pockets we cannot reach without shutting down the entire civil net. That would cause its own… issues."
The Board member's lips thinned.
"Then we adapt," she said. "We emphasize the threat. The danger of unregulated Deviants. We remind people that without us, this city falls into chaos."
"And the labs," he asked. "Do we… change anything."
She considered.
"Not yet," she said. "We cannot appear to be reacting. That would read as guilt. We will make adjustments quietly, later."
She turned her chair toward the window.
Far below, the city lights glimmered like a false constellation.
"Draft a statement," she said. "Blame the extremists for forcing our hand. The public likes a villain."
"Yes, Chair," the analyst said.
He left.
She kept watching the skyline.
From somewhere very deep, under all the training and doctrine, a thought surfaced.
What if they are right.
She pushed it down.
There was work to do.
***
In the depot, night settled fully.
No one slept well.
Kael lay on his back on a thin mat, staring at the pipes overhead.
Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the pillar.
Every time he opened them, he saw the sliver's glow through Aiden's shirt.
He turned his head.
Aiden lay a few meters away, on his side, ribs strapped, breathing shallow.
"Are you awake," Kael whispered.
"Yes," Aiden whispered back.
"Do you think she is alive," Kael asked.
He did not have to say Lysa's name.
Aiden was silent for a long time.
"I do not know," he said.
"That is not an answer," Kael said.
"It is the only honest one," Aiden replied.
Kael swallowed.
"If she is dead," he said, "what do we do."
"The same as if she is not," Aiden said. "We keep going."
"That sounds like something she would say," Kael muttered.
"I know," Aiden said.
They lay there, surrounded by the soft sounds of people trying and failing to rest.
Outside, the city's shields hummed.
Inside, the Network's patched‑together machines did the same.
Two systems, both straining.
Somewhere between them, "The Order and the Flame" stopped being a phrase in underground whispers and started to turn into a story people told themselves in bright apartments and dark alleys, trying to decide who was burning whom.