Chapter 5 — Ghost in the Wires
Jane woke to silence.
Not the soft, domestic silence of an empty apartment—the fridge hum and radiator rattle still played their background music—but the silence of a digital world holding its breath. Her phone screen, usually alive with pings, had only one notification:
"Your account has been suspended pending further review."
The words sat in the middle of her screen, calm and clean, as if they hadn't just erased years of desperate writing, hundreds of chapters, tens of thousands of words clawed out of sleepless nights.
She dropped the phone.
Her stomach lurched like she'd been punched.
It wasn't the suspension itself. She had expected it after the interview, after the leaks, after daring to slap the giant in public. No—what gutted her was the realization that The Glass Kingdom was gone. Locked, hidden, possibly deleted. Her characters, her broken princesses and ruthless kings, had become corpses behind a wall of corporate caution tape.
It was one thing to sabotage others. It was another to watch her own creation—her lifeline—be buried alive.
Jane staggered to her laptop. Maybe she could export her drafts, save her chapters from their servers, salvage something. But when she logged in, a sterile page greeted her:
"This account is under investigation. All access to drafts and publications is temporarily restricted."
Her scream clawed at her throat and filled the room, raw and animal.
By the time she calmed down, her hands shook too hard to type. She opened a new blank document—offline, untethered from WebNovel's reach. The cursor blinked at her.
A thought grew, sharp and dark: They think they can bury me. They think I'm powerless.
She began to write—not chapters, not prose, but notes. Plans. Diagrams of attack and defense. Lists of every crack Marta had shown her, every vendor name, every possible weapon. She wrote as if she were plotting a novel where the protagonist fought a faceless empire.
But this wasn't fiction anymore.
Marta arrived that evening, carrying two coffees and the smell of rain. She placed one cup in Jane's trembling hands.
"They suspended you," she said. Not a question.
Jane nodded. "Everything's gone."
"Not gone," Marta corrected. "Hidden. They'll hold it until they decide what to do with you."
"That's worse." Jane's voice was hoarse. "They've stolen my book. My characters. My… everything."
Marta's eyes softened. "Then we take it back."
Jane blinked. "How?"
Marta sat across from her and leaned forward. "We go deeper. Up until now, you've been scratching the surface—scripts, churns, reports. That's child's play. If you want your book back, if you want them to pay…" Her lips curved into something sharp. "…you have to haunt them from the inside."
The idea lodged in Jane's chest like a lit match.
Ghost in the wires.
Not sabotage from outside, but infiltration. Not disruption, but possession.
Her fear warred with exhilaration. She'd already crossed so many lines she could no longer see the border. Why stop now?
"What does that mean?" she whispered.
Marta pulled a flash drive from her coat pocket and set it on the table. It looked ordinary, almost fragile, as if it couldn't possibly contain the ruin of giants.
"This," Marta said, "isn't mine. It came from someone who owes me. It's a toolkit—exploits, access points, scripts designed to burrow through weak security protocols. Old employee credentials, too. Enough to slip inside and copy what you need without setting off alarms."
Jane's hand hovered above the drive but didn't touch it. "And if I get caught?"
Marta shrugged. "Then you'll be caught anyway. They already have your name on a list. What you do now decides whether you're their pawn… or their ghost."
That night, Jane stared at the drive until her eyes blurred.
Her rational mind whispered warnings: prison, lawsuits, headlines with her face plastered under Cybercriminal Author Arrested. But her heart pounded louder: They took everything. They buried your voice. Are you really going to let them?
At 3 a.m., she slid the drive into her laptop.
The screen lit with lines of code, a quiet symphony of intrusion.
Her breath caught.
For the first time, Jane wasn't just poking at the seams of the machine. She was stepping inside.
The interface Marta had given her was crude but powerful. It offered windows into databases, file directories, caches of unpublished drafts. She scrolled through folders filled with other writers' novels—some brilliant, some half-finished skeletons. A graveyard of stories that WebNovel kept under lock and key.
Her hands trembled as she searched for her own.
And then—there.
The Glass Kingdom.
Her chapters, intact. Characters frozen mid-sentence, waiting for her.
Tears blurred her vision as she copied the files to her desktop. She clutched her hands to her mouth, half-sobbing, half-laughing. They hadn't erased her. She was still alive.
But as she backed out of the system, another thought struck her.
If her story was buried here, so were thousands of others. Rejected novels, censored drafts, locked accounts. Voices silenced by the same machine that had silenced her.
She scrolled deeper. Folders upon folders of abandoned work. Some bore names she recognized from forums—writers who had vanished without explanation.
Their words were here. Forgotten.
Something inside Jane hardened.
This wasn't just about her anymore.
The next morning, she met Marta at a diner. The flash drive sat between them like contraband.
"I got my book back," Jane whispered.
Marta smiled. "Good. That's step one."
Jane leaned forward. "There's more in there, Marta. Drafts. Rejections. Stories no one was supposed to see again. Do you know how many voices they've buried?"
Marta sipped her coffee. "Thousands, I'd guess."
"They can't keep them locked away," Jane said, voice shaking. "I could… I could release them. Give those stories back to their authors. Or to the world."
Marta's eyes glittered. "Now you're thinking bigger."
Jane walked home through the gray morning light, her mind a storm.
She had started as a rejected writer clawing for attention. She had become a saboteur, a hacker, a ghost in the wires. But now—
Now she was staring at an ocean of stolen voices.
And she had the power to set them free.