The fifteen-thousand-dollar check felt like a lead weight in Alex's pocket. The applause from the pitch competition still echoed in his ears, a hollow sound. They'd done it. They'd stood in a room full of sharks and convinced them they were whales. Chloe's eyes had been blazing with a fierce, triumphant light, but all Alex could feel was the cold dread of exposure. They weren't hiding in the shadows anymore. They were on stage, under a spotlight, and he knew, with a certainty that sat like a stone in his gut, that Julian Reed was in the audience, watching.
The article in TechCrunch dropped two days later. "Nexus Protocols: The Audacious Plan to Rebuild the Internet from the Ground Up." It was flattering, full of the buzzwords Chloe had drilled into him. It called them "visionary" and "fearless." Alex read it on his phone, standing on a crowded Queens sidewalk, the words blurring as a delivery truck roared past. Every compliment felt like another brick in the wall he was building around himself.
The first ripple of consequence wasn't from Reed. It was from his father. Jiang Chen came home from his shift, a printed copy of the TechCrunch article clutched in his hand. He'd gone to the library, used one of the public computers, and figured out how to print it.
"You are in the newspaper?" Jiang said, his voice a mixture of awe and confusion. He held the paper out like it was a sacred text. "This… this is your company? This 'Nexus'?"
Alex nodded, his throat tight. "Yeah, Dad. That's us."
Jiang stared at the paper, then back at his son. The simple pride he'd had for the $5,000 was gone, replaced by something more complex, more distant. "This is… very big. This is not a small business." He looked around their cramped living room, with its worn furniture and the faint smell of yesterday's cooking. "You are moving in different circles now."
It wasn't a criticism. It was an observation, and it cut deeper. He was becoming a stranger in his own home.
The second ripple was digital. Their website traffic exploded. Their inbox flooded with emails—VCs wanting meetings, tech bloggers wanting interviews, randos asking for beta access. It was noise. Overwhelming, chaotic noise. But buried in the chaos was a single, quiet email. The sender address was a random string of characters. The subject line was blank. The body contained only a link.
Alex almost deleted it as spam. But a cold instinct made him open a virtual machine, an isolated digital sandbox, and click the link.
It led to a private, encrypted image board. There was no text. Just a single, grainy photo, taken from a long lens. It was a picture of him and Chloe, leaving the library two days ago. Someone had drawn a small, red circle around Chloe's face.
The message was clear, and far more terrifying than a lawsuit. I see you. And I see who matters to you.
He didn't tell Chloe. He couldn't. The fear was a sour taste in his mouth. He'd brought this to her doorstep. That photo was his fault.
He spent the next 48 hours in a controlled panic. He used the last of his Code Points on a utility called [PERIMETER SCAN], a one-time deep dive into the digital footprints of everyone associated with Nexus—him, Chloe, his family. He found nothing. The photo was a ghost. A professional job. Reed was reminding him that the flamethrower could be aimed anywhere.
The pressure was a physical weight, bending his spine. He couldn't focus in class. Dr. Albright called on him about a point on garbage collection in Java, and Alex just stared blankly, his mind a thousand miles away, tracing the possible paths a hired operative might take to get to Chloe's apartment. The silence in the lecture hall was deafening. Leo shot him a worried look.
Later, at their new "safe" spot—a noisy, crowded food court under the 7 train—Chloe was buzzing with energy, talking about a term sheet from a mid-tier VC.
"Alex, are you listening? This is real. They're talking a two-million-dollar seed round at a ten-million valuation. We could actually build this. Hire people. Get a real office."
He was staring past her, watching the crowd, his [SITUATIONAL AWARENESS] working overtime, cataloging faces, looking for anyone who seemed too still, too observant. A guy in a grey hoodie by the teriyaki stand. A woman pretending to read her phone near the exit.
"Alex!"
He flinched, his focus snapping back to her. "Yeah. Two million. That's… great."
Her face fell. "What is wrong with you? We just won. We're winning. This is what we wanted."
"He sent a picture," Alex said, the words coming out flat and dead.
"What picture?"
"Of you. Of us. Leaving the library. It was a message. 'I know who she is.'"
All the color drained from Chloe's face. The excitement in her eyes snuffed out, replaced by a cold, hard fear. She looked down at her hands, then back up at him. "Okay," she said, her voice quiet but steady. "Okay. So that's the price. We knew there'd be one." She took a deep breath. "What's the plan?"
Her resilience almost broke him. She should be running. She should be screaming at him. Instead, she was asking for the plan.
"I don't know," he admitted, the confession making him feel weak, useless. "I can't… I can't see him. I can't fight what I can't see."
"Then we make him show himself," she said, her voice gaining strength. "We use the spotlight. We give an interview. A big one. We talk about how we're being pressured by 'entrenched interests.' We make it so if anything happens to us, he's the first person everyone looks at."
It was a dangerous, aggressive move. It was putting their heads even further above the parapet.
"It's a gamble," he said.
"Staying quiet is a bigger one," she countered. "He thinks we're rats in a corner. So we stop acting like it."
He looked at her, really looked at her. The fear was still there, in the tightness around her mouth, but it was being mastered by a colder, harder thing: resolve. She was all in. There was no going back for her. The target on her back was permanent.
"Okay," he said, the word a surrender and a commitment all at once. "We go public."
He pulled out his phone. There was a new email from the VC, filled with exclamation points and promises. There was a text from Leo, asking if he wanted to grab a beer to celebrate the end of finals. There was a missed call from his mom, probably wondering why he hadn't been home for dinner in three days.
He was being pulled in a dozen different directions, the fabric of his life stretching thin. The spotlight was on them now, hot and bright. It was their shield. And it was also the perfect thing for a sniper to aim at. They had the money, the fame, the momentum. And all Alex could think, as he sat in the grimy food court, was that they had just made themselves the perfect, high-value target.