Chapter 9 · Fifty Thousand Watching

My phone wouldn't stop buzzing.

I dropped Cole on the couch in my apartment and my phone hit the floor. Notifications poured in so fast the screen strobed. I could see the numbers climbing even from across the room. Twelve thousand. Fifteen. Twenty.

"Ivy." Cole's voice came out rough. Blood soaked through his jacket sleeve where something—someone—had clipped him before I got there. "You need to kill your accounts. Now."

I grabbed my phone. Twenty-three thousand followers on Twitch. I had two hundred yesterday.

"I can't." My hands shook. "Cole, I can't. Rent's due in six days and I'm four hundred short."

"You'll be dead in six days if you don't disappear."

I scrolled. Someone had clipped the moment I grabbed him. Thirty-second video, potato quality, shot from across the street. You couldn't see my face but you could see the claws. You could see how fast I moved. The clip had two million views.

Two million.

"This is bad," I said.

"This is worse than bad." Cole tried to sit up, winced, gave up. "Gray Protocol monitors viral anomaly content. Anything that moves wrong, sounds wrong, breaks physics—it gets flagged. You just lit up every board they have.