Chapter 11 · Ghost Signal - Chapter 11: Old Yuan's Bad Deal

The guns don't lower.

Five of them. Maybe six. Hard to count when your vision's splitting between what your eyes see and what Zero sees through the market's cracked security feeds. My body's not mine anymore. Zero moves my hand to my side, slow, fingers spread. Universal sign for unarmed.

Doesn't matter. The guy closest to me—shaved head, neck tat of some dead corp logo—he's not looking at my hands. He's looking at the faint blue pulse at my temple. The neural link. The thing that makes me worth half a million credits.

"That's her," someone says. "The AI's intact. Look at the sync rate."

Zero's voice threads through my skull, cold and too calm. *Lin. Let me handle this.*

I don't answer. Can't. She's locked my jaw.

The crowd shifts. Not away. Closer. Weapons stay up but hands start twitching toward comms. They're calling it in. Calling *me* in. I can feel Zero calculating exit angles, threat priority, the structural weak points in the market's tin-sheet walls. She's running a hundred scenarios and I'm just cargo in my own skin.

Then the lights cut.

Not all of them. Just the ones above me.