Night fell faster than usual. The clouds were bruised and heavy; the city's lights refracted into a thousand tiny alarms. Lucy's apartment felt like a command post gone intimate — maps, code lists, and the soft glow of monitors. The cultural function had been a test. Now the next movement was imminent.
"Lucy… I found something. There's a pattern in his movements. He's signaling someone." Siya's voice was low and urgent over the secure earpiece.
Lucy rotated the data on her screen: calls, dropped pings, bursts of activity invisible to a casual eye. Nick's choreography wasn't random; it was language. Short bursts at odd hours, a two-beat pause, a long hold. Lucy tapped her pen, translating the pattern into meaning.
"He's building a net," she said. "Not to trap people physically — to harvest reactions. To create mirrors of chaos."
Siya's silence told Lucy she understood. "We need to disrupt the rhythm," she said. "If he can't count on predictable responses, his signal fails."
Outside, the monsoon hammered the city. The night smelled of wet concrete and fried street food. A taxi splashed by, sending a shower of droplets against Lucy's window. She turned away from the glass and focused on the school map again.
"We set three layers," she instructed. "Visible security — guards, exits watched. Layer two — undercover watchers in the crowd and decoys. Layer three — a radio dead zone. If a signal goes out, we scramble electromagnetic interference for five minutes and then move."
Siya's reply was immediate. "Agents in position. Volunteers on radio silence. The janitor's on the rear gate and he's wired to the backup line."
Lucy's fingers flew across the keyboard, sending encrypted instructions she'd written in the hours after the transmitter discovery. Her training — and guilt — braided into everything she did. She placed the jammers in undisclosed locations, lined up volunteers with reflective tags, and prepared a rapid-exit route for the children that used the theater's fly system and the adjacent courtyard.
"Good," she whispered. But the whisper felt brittle. "If he escalates — we take the kids first. No negotiations."
On a rain-slick lane, Nick checked his phone. The handler's last message had been terse: Signal window opens 02:00–02:10. Public vector: Central High. Secondary: Rana's comms. Tertiary target: Helix dump.
Nick smiled without joy. The timeline was tight, surgical. He had chosen the school function because it would draw the cameras of local news, parents with phones, and the inevitable emotional response. In the panic he would trigger, Helix files would cascade into public feeds; the Agency's internal faults would be exposed in the glare.
At 01:58, a white delivery van — part of a festival logistic crew — parked two streets away from the school. Nick watched from a shadowed doorway. A man in the van tapped the roof three times and then two, then paused. That was the pattern: three-two-pause — a simple, human Morse.
Lucy, monitoring feeds from her laptop, picked up a faint anomaly on a stray public webcam — a tiny blue dot blinking on and off near the logistics gate. She noted the timing: exactly as Nick's handler had ordered. Her stomach dropped.
"Signal pattern," she told Siya. "Three-two-pause. He's starting now."
Siya's fingers tightened over her radio pack. "We've got eyes on the van. Janitor's ready to check the load. Volunteers to the gates. If anything — interference now."
Lucy hit the interference switch from her console — a small box the janitor had placed in a maintenance duct earlier that day. For five minutes, the vicinity would be a radio shadow. Phones might glitch. Cameras might freeze. It would be enough to break Nick's choreography.
The van door creaked open. A delivery boy — the same one from the earlier test — hopped down, whistle between his lips. He moved toward the gate and then stalled, performing the three-two pause.
At that moment, every device in the van stuttered. A small static hiss filled the air as the interference box took effect. The boy's hands flicked, trying to get a signal. A parent filmed anyway, but her clip cut off at the crucial beat. The protocol had worked.
Across the street, the men in black who'd watched for Nick since the leak cursed. Their coordinated response faltered. The handler's phone buzzed with an angry text: Interference. Abort window?
Nick watched the chaos on his tablet and realized the net had snagged a different current than he intended. He didn't want full abort; he wanted to adapt. He sent a message to a secondary cell. In the crowd ten minutes later, a man would act out the emotional pivot he needed — not a technical fail but a human one. He smiled. He always had a contingency.
But Lucy's plan had bought them more than interference. It gave them agency in the moment. Teachers moved children to side exits, volunteers shepherded parents away from chokepoints, and the janitor searched the van carefully — finding nothing more than festival supplies. No detonator. No broadcast rig. The van rolled away, empty of menace, and the function resumed under a pall of anxious whispering.
Back in the shadows, Nick made a decision. The primary vector had been neutralized — but the tertiary objective, the Helix dump to Rana's comms, remained open. If he could hijack a low-level transmission to Rana's internal phone, he could cascade snippets that would render the Agency naked in public eyes.
At 03:14, an email digest from a local journalist who covered the school function lit up Lucy's feed. It contained a fragment of a file — unlabelled, partial, but damning enough: a roster of covert ops and an internal memo linking Sid's mission to a directive from within the Agency. The first ripple of Helix had slipped out through a backchannel.
Lucy read it, lips moving. The document cut off mid-sentence, but the subtext was explosive. Rana's face, somewhere in the city, must have gone cold. For Lucy, the win was pyrrhic — exposure, yes, but at a cost none of them could yet assess.
She swallowed, feeling the weight of the night. "He got through," she said softly.
Siya squeezed her hand. "But not the way he wanted."
Outside, the rain had eased to a hush. The signal had been sent; the city had reacted; the Agency had blinked. For Nick, the game had shifted from elegant choreography to improvisation. For Lucy, the night had been a narrow victory purchased with new vulnerabilities.
When the early light bled into the horizon, Lucy sat for a long time, staring at the partial file. Sid's name lay there like an accusation and a promise. The signal had been a clarion call — not only to the public but to those hidden within the Agency who had something to lose.
She glanced at Siya and then at the cracked photo of Sid. "Tomorrow," she said, voice steady, "we go to Rana. No more shadows."
Siya nodded. "We'll be ready."
Nick, across the city, watched the newsfeeds with a cigarette stubbed out between his fingers. The leak had begun in fits and starts; Helix would grow if he pushed. He thought of the man he'd been, the man he needed to be now, and the calculus that had become his life: truth measured in burns and exposures.
He stubbed the cigarette into wet dirt and melted into the alleyways. The signal had been sent. The war was no longer a private war. It had become a broadcasted argument — and both sides now had to answer.
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