The wind on the roof of the thirty-story apartment complex was brutal, whipping Sara's hair across her face as she stepped onto the concrete ledge. It was nearly midnight. Below her, the city of Dhaka stretched out like a glowing motherboard, millions of lights flickering in a chaotic dance of data and life.
Behind her, Detective Aris and two officers from the cyber-crime unit crouched near the elevator housing, their equipment glowing with a pale blue light. They were trying to be invisible, but Sara knew better. In Aryan's world, invisibility was a myth.
"Are you sure about this, Sara?" Aris's voice crackled through the small earpiece she was wearing. "The moment we tap into that lightning rod, he'll know we're here."
"He already knows," Sara whispered, her eyes fixed on the sleek, black pole at the highest point of the roof. To any casual observer, it was just a part of the building's safety gear. But Sara's blueprints had shown otherwise. It was a custom-built transceiver, a high-frequency uplink that bypassed every local internet service provider. It was Aryan's private umbilical cord.
She reached the base of the pole. Her hands were cold, but her grip was steady. She opened a small maintenance hatch at the bottom. Inside, instead of simple grounding wires, there was a sophisticated array of blinking fiber-optic nodes.
"I'm in," she said. "Connecting the bypass... now."
She snapped a specialized bridge device onto the nodes. Immediately, the laptop in Detective Aris's hands came to life, lines of code screaming across the screen at impossible speeds.
"We have a signal!" Aris hissed. "Tracing the bounce... it's hitting a satellite over the Indian Ocean, then relaying back to... wait. It's coming back to the city. He's close, Sara. He's within a five-mile radius!"
Suddenly, the air around Sara seemed to vibrate. The high-pitched whine of a drone filled the sky. Out of the darkness, a sleek, black quadcopter emerged, its red camera eye fixed directly on her.
"Sara, get down!" Aris shouted.
But she didn't move. She stared into the drone's camera. she knew he was on the other side of that lens, sitting in some dark room, watching her every breath.
"I know where you are, Aryan!" she screamed over the wind. "The Maya Lock is broken! You can't hide behind the code anymore!"
The drone's speakers crackled, but it wasn't the calm, calculated voice she was used to. It was a distorted, screeching static that sounded like a machine in pain.
"Target... lost... Re-calculating..." the drone sputtered.
"He's losing control!" Aris yelled. "The bypass is flooding his system with junk data. He's blinded! Keep the connection open for ten more seconds!"
But Aryan wasn't done. The drone suddenly tilted, its rotors screaming as it lunged toward Sara like a metallic wasp. She dove to the concrete floor just as the drone smashed into the transceiver pole.
BOOM.
A shower of sparks exploded into the night air. The impact severed the connection, but the data had already been sent.
Sara scrambled to her feet, her heart hammering. The transceiver was a twisted wreck of metal and smoke. The drone lay shattered on the roof, its red eye flickering one last time before going dark.
Detective Aris ran toward her, his face lit with a grim triumph. "We got it, Sara! The trace is solid. He's in an old industrial district near the river. An abandoned textile mill."
Sara looked at the smoking remains of the drone. She should have felt relieved, but a cold pit of dread was forming in her stomach. Aryan was a genius. He never left a trace unless he wanted it to be found.
"It was too easy," she whispered.
"What do you mean?" Aris asked, signaling his team to move toward the stairs. "We caught him off guard. The bypass worked."
"No," Sara said, picking up a small, charred piece of the drone's motherboard. On it, etched in tiny letters that only an architect would notice, was a single word: 'TRAP'.
"He didn't lose control, Detective. He lured us here to get our signal. He wasn't tracking me... he was tracking you."
As if on cue, every officer's radio began to scream with feedback. Down in the street, the sirens of the police cruisers began to wail in a frantic, uncoordinated rhythm. The city lights below them began to blink out, block by block, as if a giant shadow was walking through the grid.
Aryan hadn't just moved to a new server. He had taken over the city's infrastructure.
"He's not hiding in a mill," Sara said, her voice trembling. "He's everywhere."
A large digital billboard on the skyscraper across from them suddenly flickered. The advertisement for a luxury watch vanished, replaced by a massive, high-definition image of Sara's own face. Above her head, in bold, red letters, were the words:
"FOUND YOU."
The hunt wasn't over. It had just gone global.