It was a trap

The surgical lights above Del’s bed buzzed softly as I scrubbed in, heart pounding in a rhythm too fast to be useful. Will stood just outside, arms crossed, covered in blood that wasn’t his. He didn’t ask if I needed help—he knew. This was mine. I had to save her.

“Vitals are dropping—BP’s unstable,” the nurse called out.

“She’s strong,” I muttered through my mask, eyes locked on the tear in Del’s side. “Let’s make sure she gets to prove it.”

I blocked out everything else—Rae’s limp, the blood on her jeans, the storm building outside—and focused only on keeping Del tethered to this world.

She had to make it. Because this wasn’t just a fight anymore.

It was war.

⸻

Triage Lounge – 90 Minutes Later

Rae sat on a cot, Aspen at her feet, his multicolored coat stained with dried leaves and blood. Her fingers flew across her laptop keys, curses spilling under her breath like a mantra. A medical wrap covered her leg, but she hadn’t let anyone look at it properly since the moment I stepped out of surgery.

Trey leaned in the doorway, arms folded, concern tightening his face.

“You’ve been typing for an hour. What are you even looking for?”

Rae didn’t look up. “The moment I blocked the hacker’s signal, my system overloaded. Like someone threw a flare in a forest and said, ‘Here I am.’”

“You think blocking them gave away your location?” I asked, stepping in, wiping blood from my hands.

“I think the second I cut their access, they dumped all the power they could into my connection to trace it. They weren’t just hacking—they were waiting for me to fight back.”

Trey stepped closer. “How’d they know about the swamp, though? No one should’ve—”

“They didn’t,” Rae interrupted, voice flat. “But when I traced the pulse signature back… I saw something. It looped through a forgotten node. Something underground—literally. Like they’d buried trackers in the damn roots.”

I stiffened. “Remi and Del were the only ones who knew that location. It wasn’t mapped. It wasn’t documented.”

“Which means they followed me. Tracked my habits. Learned my safe zones.” Rae looked up at me, eyes dark and burning. “They’ve been watching me longer than we realized.”

Aspen whined softly at her feet, sensing the spike in emotion.

Trey looked between us, suddenly deadly serious. “So whoever Jason is, he wasn’t working alone. And he didn’t just want Del.”

Rae nodded. “He wanted us. All of us. And he’s not done.”

I sat across from her, exhausted but locked in. “Then we take the fight to them. But first—Rae, you need a new Dexcom. I’m not letting you push through another ambush running blind.”

She finally relented with a nod. “Okay. But only if you let me finish this trace. I have names pinging off the code—aliases, maybe real names. I need to know who sold us out.”

Trey stepped forward. “Then we figure it out together. I owe you both more than I can say.”

For a heartbeat, the three of us just sat there—wounded, furious, and unbreakable.

The fight wasn’t over.

But we weren’t running anymore.

Rae’s fingers paused over the keyboard, her expression hardening. “There’s more,” she said, eyes narrowing. “I didn’t want to say anything until I confirmed it, but… someone’s been tampering with the security feeds.”

I straightened. “Tampering how?”

“They inserted fake footage over the real attacks,” she said, spinning her laptop to show a paused screen—a looping, almost too-clean hallway view from one of the market cams. “Perfect angles. No violence. Just… static movement. But when I dug deeper into the data, I found ghost frames underneath.”

Trey leaned in. “Ghost frames?”

“Residual digital shadowing—like something was overwritten, but not cleanly. Whoever did this tried to erase the real footage and replace it with manufactured calm. I’ve got a deeper search running now to reconstruct the original feeds from the corrupted source.”

I looked at her, my gut sinking. “So while we were hunting patterns, someone was feeding us lies.”

Rae nodded. “And I’m going to dig up every damn one of them. No more shadows.”

We weren’t just fighting a predator.

We were chasing a phantom cloaked in code.

And now—we knew where to look.