Aiden felt the blackout in the lag.
Not on the street, not in the sky.
In the numbers.
One moment Sub‑Grid Twelve was a neat column of figures on his stolen monitor.
The next, the column stuttered, skipped three frames, and came back wrong.
Voltage spikes.
Load redistribution.
A handful of sensors blinking **NO DATA** like they'd died mid‑sentence.
He stared at the screen, heartbeat going sharp behind his ribs.
"No," he said quietly. "Not there."
The safehouse hummed around him.
Old fridge.
Cheap air filter.
A second‑hand server stack Rin swore she'd "borrowed" fair and square.
Nothing about the room was built for this kind of work.
The desk was an overturned crate.
The lamp flickered when the neighborhood kettle farm came online.
But the monitors in front of him were real two narrow panes of glass jacked into a feed he shouldn't have, siphoning off unencrypted system pings from the Department's lower‑priority channels.
It wasn't the Framework.
Not anymore.
