Chapter 4 — Things That Burn
When the first headlines hit, Jane was washing a mug she could not remember buying. The kitchen light flickered over the sink; outside, the city breathed rain. Her phone buzzed with a dozen notifications—mentions, tags, messages from strangers and old acquaintances who suddenly wanted to know if she was "the WebNovel hacker." For a dizzy second she felt like the main character in one of her earlier books: the underdog who finally pulls a rope and watches a machine topple.
Then she read the headlines.
"Platform Outage Traced to Malicious Traffic."
"WebNovel Investigates System Compromise."
"Site-Wide Lag Forces Emergency Maintenance."
The wording was careful, corporate. The PR team hadn't yet used the words that made things real—breach, attack, criminal. That would come later. For now, the company framed it as a "technical incident" and promised "full transparency." People were scientific with speculation. Some praised the momentary chaos as poetic justice against an algorithmic oligarchy. Others feared for their saved drafts, their coins, the little economies that supported their evenings.
Jane felt a thin, hot thrill. She had been the moving cause and the hidden hand, and the world had not yet found her. The smell of soap and lemon filled her small apartment while she replayed the script's output in her head; clean numbers, traffic loops, simulated queries that looked human on the surface but were a calculation away from collapse. She had done something no editor or gatekeeper could dismiss as poor taste or bad prose: she had made a giant stumble.
Then the call came.
Her laptop pinged. The email subject line was clinical and cold: Notice of Suspension Pending Investigation. The first sentence said nothing about justice and everything about policy. It requested a meeting—no, a deposition—with the company's Security and Legal teams. The company wanted to examine her logs. They wanted to know who she had paid. They wanted access to her devices.
Her breath shrank inside the thin walls of her ribs. She thought immediately of Marta and the vendors, of folders with code, of the scripts that had, for a few glorious hours, turned the platform sick. She thought of the author whose account had been frozen in an earlier incident. She felt, briefly, the weight of every small choice built into this avalanche.
She considered deleting everything. Burn the laptop. Throw it into the bay. Become a rumor, a ghost. But she remembered Marta's voice—deliberate, unafraid—telling her that when a system looked for a scapegoat, you didn't run; you redirected the attention. She remembered the months of quiet that had fed her hunger: the nights of being unseen, endless rejection piling like unread mail in her inbox. She had not climbed so high to dissolve into legend.
So she did what she now did best: moved.
---
WebNovel's office was a clean sliver of glass in the tech district, the kind of place that smelled faintly of disinfectant and coffee and the kind of ambition that wears cardigans. When she arrived, security checked her ID, patted down her bag, and led her into a room with frosted glass and a single long table. Two men and a woman stood to greet her—one in a suit the color of old ash, one with a lanyard and a look that said he had not slept much this week, and a woman whose hair was pulled back like a professional noose.
"Ms. Lee," the woman said, smiling with the kind of politeness that comes with power. "Thank you for coming. We appreciate your cooperation."
Jane's legs felt thin. She realized, in the moment they sat and the official recorder went on, that she had rehearsed a dozen statements in her head but none of them matched the plain, antiseptic glare of the room. She had imagined dramatic confrontations, the moral triumph of exposing corrupt systems. She had not imagined waiting for a tick-boxed formality.
The ash-suited man—Legal—opened a laptop and slid a sheet across the table. "We'd like to start with a simple question: were you responsible for the traffic events on July 12th?" His voice was flat. He had the patience of someone who had heard every kind of lie.
"Yes," she said before she could stop herself. The admission escaped like breath. It was both a release and a confession. The room did not fall apart. Instead, there was a procedural calm that felt colder than anger.
They asked about vendors, about payments, about names. She named Falcon and Hex—vaguely, because she did not have full names. She admitted to buying engagement packages, to coordinating small operations through third parties. She did not, at first, mention the deeper scripts: the flood queries, the churn simulators, the copyright template network. There was a part of her that hoped the most monstrous acts would take the fall for the rest. It was hubris, and it smelled faintly like self-preservation.
Legal leaned forward. "We'll need access to your devices, Ms. Lee. We also recommend you preserve all communications relating to this matter." The implication was sharp: preserve, or else.
Outside the glass, someone clicked a camera shutter—the PR machine keeping its distance—and Jane suddenly felt naked.
She agreed. She signed a form that felt like a noose disguised as paperwork. It had her name and an acknowledgment that the platform could suspend accounts, pursue restitution, and refer criminal matters to authorities. Her signature looked small and fragile on the page.
When she left, the sun was lower, and the city moved through the proper rhythms of work and pickup. She felt unmoored. She had spoken and given away small threads; with each one, the map of her operations could be assembled by patient hands. She had made herself visible.
---
Back in the apartment, Marta's messages stacked up like impatient knives.
"How'd it go?"
"They grilled you?"
"We need to talk. Tonight."
Jane's fingers hovered but did not type. She had not told Marta the whole story in the room, not yet. The thought of revealing how deep she had gone—all the code, the scripts, the way she'd pressed on the seams to make the machine cough—made her feel ashamed and powerful in equal measure. She thought about telling Marta to lay low, to vanish, but the memory of Marta's warmth in their late-night confessions made that impossible. Marta had been her accomplice, her friend, the person who had handed her a map.
At midnight, Marta appeared at her door. Not a text, not a voice call—Marta stood on the landing, coat damp from rain, eyes sharp as knives and brighter. She stepped inside without waiting for an invitation, as if the apartment had always been hers.
"You signed?" Marta asked bluntly, droplet of rain catching on her eyebrow.
"Partial," Jane said. "Enough. They asked for my devices." The words were small.
Marta's face hardened. "You handed them a mirror."
Jane looked at her. "What now?"
Marta crossed the room and opened Jane's laptop bag. "We use what they gave us," she said simply. "They want devices? Fine. Give them copies. But you also ask for something in return."
Jane blinked. "Like what?"
"Like immunity or a formal agreement that limits their legal reach," Marta said. "Or a public admissions process that frames this as 'mistakes' rather than 'criminal acts.' They'll take the PR win. You'll take a punishment short of prison. It's negotiation, not confession."
Negotiation seemed like a word from boardrooms—cool, precise, and detached. It was also a survival strategy. Jane had already felt, in the corporate room with the ash-suited man, that those with better lawyers did not fall the same way as those with none.
"You think they'll play?" she asked.
"They want to control the narrative," Marta said. "You want to save your skin. There's overlap."
They worked through the night. Marta, who had more connections than Jane had known, poked and prodded. She whispered names of people who could make things easier—consultants, PR folks, small-time lawyers who handled internet cases. They moved like surgeons: cut here, stitch there, ready a narrative that didn't make Jane look like a psychopath and didn't expose the platform's structural sins.
As dawn bled into the apartment, they crafted an alternative: a statement that admitted to using third-party engagement, that admitted to an ill-considered attack, and that promised cooperation and restitution. No mention of the more dangerous scripts. No mention of vendor chains. They hoped it would look like a desperate author who snapped, not a coordinated assault on infrastructure.
But negotiating the public narrative meant aligning with something ugly. WebNovel, in the background, had already begun to leak selective details to certain outlets—the kind of drip-feed that shapes public opinion. The company released a statement saying they "were working with law enforcement and internal security to determine the source of malicious activity." It was careful, but a watchful eye would spot the dots.
The outrage chamber online had splintered into factions: those who called Jane a digital Robin Hood, those who called her a criminal, and a third group who saw an industry symptom writ large. The author community reacted with fear. Contracts were questioned, coins withheld, threads filled with promises to leave the platform if security didn't improve. WebNovel's stock—if WebNovel had a public market—would wobble on rumor. Investors, even hypothetical ones in message boards, murmured concern.
Jane watched it all with a hollowed-out, pinched feeling. She had started the fire hoping to burn a brand's arrogance; now she watched the sparks land on authors and readers whose nights were sustained by small joys. The author whose account had been frozen earlier—whose career had suffered—sent her a private message. It was brief and raw:
"If you did this, you ruined my life."
Jane read it, hands cold. She wanted to answer with something like "I was trying to fix a broken game," but the words felt like sophistry. What had started as a push against injustice had, in its execution, become harm.
"You can't fix every wrong by causing another," Marta said softly, watching Jane read the message. "But you can choose how to move forward."
"How?" Jane asked.
"You show them the parts of the machine," Marta replied. "You reveal their biases. You force them to answer publicly. You leak their preferential deals, their non-disclosure clauses, the way they promoted authors who had inside connections. You make them bleed reputationally. That pressures them more than a server lag."
The plan she sketched was surgical but audacious: leak internal documents that showed favoritism, evidence of paid promotions, internal comms where editors joked about "cozy deals." Expose the system's hypocrisy. If the company could be shamed, maybe it would be forced to change. Maybe it would be fined, restructured, forced to publish a report. Maybe it would be compelled to pay restitution to authors duped by algorithmic favoritism.
Jane listened and felt a kind of cold clarity settle. This was not the impulsive sabotage she'd started with. This was a war for narrative and leverage, with a brutal calculus: public shame could fix structural wrongs, but it would also burn people who had nothing to do with the decisions. They would be collateral.
"Do you trust me?" Marta asked suddenly.
Jane looked up. The question was not rhetorical. It had been a loner's query all her life—the single question beneath friendships and romances and job offers. Could she trust this person who had given her a map and a needle and had now offered her an exit by fire?
"I trust you enough to know you're useful," Jane said finally. It was not forgiveness. It was a pragmatic alliance.
Marta smiled a small, sharp smile. "Useful is better than alone."
---
They started small. First, they acquired a handful of internal memos—nothing classified, but damning enough. It was the kind of thing that lived inside bureaucracies: Slack messages where content leads discussed "promoted posts," emails that referenced a list of "priority authors," screenshots of a spreadsheet with a small column of names circled in ink. It was not a smoking gun of illegality, but it was a pattern: publishers and managers nudging algorithms, editors favoring creators with connections, promotions granted for reasons that had little to do with literary merit.
Jane realized, reading the documents, that the value of this material was not in one line but in accumulation. A single memo could be dismissed as casual talk. Fifty memos, showing the same pattern, suggested a culture.
They worked meticulously to anonymize sources where possible and to package the information so journalists could use it without exposing the identity of whistleblowers. They began with small outlets—an independent blog that focused on creator economies, a freelance reporter who specialized in platform abuses. The story that emerged was not a single indictment but a long, slow drip: "Allegations of preferential promotion at WebNovel." "Internal communications suggest pay-for-visibility schemes." "Authors complain of opaque algorithms and favored lists."
The effect was immediate. The narrative angle shifted. No longer was the story solely about a malicious traffic event; it was now about the system that allowed certain creators to climb faster and the opaque relationships between promotion and money. Readers who had once rallied against Jane now murmured about fairness; authors who feared being canceled breathed a little easier when the platform was forced to answer. WebNovel, on the defensive, released statements denying any systematic favoritism and promising audits. PR teams moved like choreographers arranging an apology.
Jane watched as the company limped, not because she had smashed its servers—she had—but because she had shown its seams. Public pressure is a different kind of force than technical attack; it invites regulators and legal scrutiny in a way a broken search bar does not. The leak had cut deeper.
But with each reveal came more consequences. Authors named in the leaks—some just peripheral—found their readers suspicious. Partnerships evaporated. Contracts with small publishers were paused while legal teams combed for risk. For some, a leak that might expose a favor could also ruin reputations earned painstakingly over years.
The author who had messaged Jane earlier wrote again, this time public and bitter. "You hid behind a crusade," he wrote. "But you were someone's saboteur, and now you've burned people who needed this platform to survive." Comments flooded the thread; some defended Jane as a necessary disruptor, others called for jail time.
Jane stared at the words and for the first time in months—a long, painfully human first time—she began to weep. The tears were not tears of defeat. They were not even entirely remorse. They were grief: for the writer she had been, for the smaller, purer desire that had been a love of stories; for the people hurt as her war unfolded.
She thought of her mother, washing dishes in a restaurant across town, who had always advised caution and who now would, perhaps, hear a headline and feel the sonorous dread of scandal. She imagined the pride she had once felt at the idea of finally being seen and the strange new shame that came with being seen for the wrong reasons.
Marta put a hand on her shoulder. "We did what needed to be done," she said quietly. "But this isn't over." The tone was not comforting. It was determined.
Jane wiped her face and looked at the files on the table—leaks, emails, memos, partial victories like dried bruises. She had started a war to make someone pay. The company had begun to pay, but the ledger was messy. Collateral damage bled into the margin. The moral arithmetic she'd used to justify sabotage had become harder to tally.
Outside, the city continued its indifferent business, rain sliding down windows. Inside, a woman who had wanted nothing more than readers and acceptance had learned that power asks for currency beyond dollars and drafts. It asks for blood, for reputation, for the small kindnesses that tether us to others.
When Marta left that night, there was no smile in the goodbye. There was only the furtive sense of a truce—temporary, tactical. The war would continue, but now WebNovel would be fighting in two arenas: the public court of opinion and the quiet corridors of infrastructure. Jane had lit both fires. Both would need tending. Both would burn.
Jane opened a new document and typed one sentence, the way she always had: Chapter Four. Then she paused. Whatever came next would have to reckon with the people she had commandeered into the fight—friends, enemies, strangers—and with the truth that sometimes, when you strike outward to fix an injustice, what burns first are the small, stubborn lives that caught in the blaze.
She saved the document and shut the laptop. For the first time since this all began, she did not crave the glow of the screen. She wanted, instead, the weight of a real book in her hands—the smell of paper, the certitude that a story could exist on its own without breaking into someone else's life.
Outside, rain fell. Inside, something was beginning to unravel and something else—dangerous, brave, and possibly monstrous—was beginning to harden. The war had widened. The ledger of consequences was open. And Jane, who had wanted to make them all pay, now had to figure out whether what she had demanded of the world was her salvation or her undoing.