The rain seemed to pause. The hum of the city’s underbelly faded to a held breath.
"Arlo Vex knows," the girl—Tory—said quickly. "He’s not just hunting you for the data-drive you stole. He wants me . My mother’s consciousness is the key to a backdoor in every corporate bank, every security grid. Your father hid it inside me before he died. And Vex has been hunting me for a year. Tonight, he found me."
And somewhere in the ghost-net, in a server farm buried beneath a mountain, a digital shade named Lane watched through her daughter’s eyes and whispered a name into the void.
Rikki knew that sound. Arlo Vex had stopped using human goons. He used shredders —autonomous drone swarms that dissolved flesh and left bone.
"The street?"
It meant: She won.
"But you didn't," Rikki said.