Chapter 8 · The City Hears Her

The broadcast tower's maintenance hatch was still warm when Nora shoved her way through it. Her fingers were already bleeding. She didn't care.

Inside, the broadcast core hummed like a thousand voices talking at once, all of them saying the same thing. Elara's name. Over and over.

Nora pulled the stolen transit pass from her jacket and jammed it into the auxiliary port. The core stuttered. Good. That meant Silas hadn't locked her out yet.

"Come on," she muttered, fingers flying across the interface panel. "Come on, you piece of shit."

The broadcast was already live. She could see the feed spilling across every public screen in the city, every transit monitor, every emergency display. Elara's face. Elara's record. A list of charges that made Nora's stomach turn.

Terrorism. Mass murder. Conspiracy to destabilize civic order.

And under it all, a single line in Silas's calm, measured voice: "This woman will destroy your city. She has done it before. She will do it again."

"Liar," Nora hissed.

She pulled up the broadcast's source code, scanning for the kill switch. Silas was too smart to leave it exposed, but he was also arrogant. He thought nobody could get this far.