The moment that breath echoed through the dark, something inside Aria shifted—quietly, like a blade returning to its rightful sheath.
The audience saw only the pale cone of light from her collar cam, but they could feel it:
the air thickening, the tension stretching thin as wire.
She touched her wrist where a watch should've been.
Nothing there.
Didn't matter.
A memory of movements—complex, precise—flowed through her fingers.
Her nails tapped the metal frame beside her:
tap—tap, tap… tap–tap.
A rhythm too precise to be random.
A code.
The kind she hadn't used since the day she "died."
The ancient monitors around her shimmered.
Static bent.
The text warped.
Someone on the other side was trying to seize control of the feed again.
Aria sighed, almost bored.
"Still using analog choke points? How nostalgic."
She dropped into a crouch, sweeping her hand along the concrete floor until her fingers brushed a loose power conduit.
She tugged it once.
The screen nearest to her glitched violently.
She tugged again.
The static rearranged itself into something that almost resembled a face—a silhouette.
A distorted voice crackled through the warehouse, mechanical and familiar in the worst way:
"A-01. Stand down. You're compromised."
Aria laughed.
It wasn't loud.
It wasn't mocking.
It was the kind of laugh that meant: If you think that scares me, you don't remember who I am.
"I'm not compromised," she said lightly.
"You're predictable."
Her fingers slid to the base of her collar camera.
The audience saw her press a tiny switch they didn't know existed.
Her livestream quality nosedived for a second—
—then surged back in crystal clarity.
Viewers didn't realize what had happened.
The Agency did.
She'd just rerouted her signal through independent satellites.
Civilians shouldn't even know the pathway existed.
Her voice softened, almost playful:
"Let's level the playing field."
The monitors flickered again.
This time, she controlled the static.
Lines of code rippled across the screens—fast, elegant, vicious.
Her pattern.
Her signature.
Every Agency tech watching the stream reacted the same way:
"…Oh god. That's her."
Somewhere outside the warehouse, in an unmarked van filled with surveillance equipment, technicians panicked.
"She's brute forcing our network."
"She doesn't even have a terminal!"
"She's doing it through the broadcast feed—how is that even—"
The supervisor snapped, "Counter with Protocol Sigma!"
"We can't—she's already inside the—"
Every monitor in the van turned black.
Then a single sentence appeared:
"Don't interrupt me."
The supervisor went pale.
Inside the warehouse, Aria moved with a strange, calm confidence, as if the darkness belonged to her.
"Since you went through the trouble of inviting me," she murmured, "let's see who's hiding behind that signal."
She snapped a broken fuse box open with her bare hands, exposing a nest of forgotten wires.
Her fingers darted through them, rearranging circuits in the dark without hesitation—every motion precise, practiced, almost graceful.
Seconds later, the screens lit up again.
This time, she had hijacked the surveillance grid.
And the viewers at home suddenly weren't watching a show anymore.
They were watching a hunt.
Every monitor displayed a different angle of the warehouse:
rust-laced beams, cracked floors, shadows, stillness…
—until one screen showed a figure behind a support column.
A person.
Waiting.
Watching her.
Aria tilted her head. "Found you."
The distorted voice returned, more strained this time:
"A-01. Don't force engagement."
She smirked.
"Engagement? Honey, I'm bored."
Then she did something the viewers didn't fully understand until much later.
She looked straight at the camera—their camera—and said calmly:
"Remember this layout."
Thousands of fans, sitting at home, unknowingly tightened their grip on their phones, eyes widening as the grid of the warehouse lit up across the screen.
"At my signal," she murmured, "highlight the far-left blind spot."
She didn't explain what that meant.
Didn't need to.
Her fans—the same fans who had been decoding her Easter eggs, memes, and subtle patterns for months—instinctively began mapping the angles in their heads.
Millions of watchers became her remote eyes.
She had turned the entire internet into her surveillance team.
She flicked a switch on the fuse box.
The warehouse lights flashed once—
—and died again.
Complete darkness.
But now, the livestream was running on her terms.
Mask drop.
Round two.
No more pretending.
Somewhere in the dark, the hidden figure shifted.
Aria smiled without looking.
"You picked the wrong night to come for me."