The phone vibrated again.
Aarav Kane didn't need to read the message twice. Cipher Dawn wasn't asking a question. They were offering a trap dressed as a choice.
Justice—or survival.
Aarav slipped the phone back into his pocket and looked at Soren. The archive's white lights buzzed overhead, too clean for the kind of rot they'd uncovered.
"They're pressuring you," Soren said quietly.
"They always do," Aarav replied. "Pressure reveals fractures."
Nisha stood between them, arms crossed, eyes darting to every entrance. "If you go public," she said, "they'll erase us. If you don't… Malhotra keeps killing."
Aarav nodded. "Exactly."
Soren leaned closer. "You leak this without proof, the Bureau disowns you. No backup. No protection. You become a rogue asset."
Aarav smirked faintly. "I've always been bad at following scripts."
He pulled out the memory card recovered from the apartment floorboard. Until now, he'd treated it as a contingency. Now it was a weapon.
"This isn't proof," he said, "but it's bait."
He inserted the card into a public archive terminal—one that synced automatically to an external cloud for transparency logs.
Soren's eyes widened. "What are you doing?"
"Announcing my presence," Aarav said calmly.
The screen flickered.
Lines of encrypted code appeared.
Then—hidden beneath the data—an embedded trigger activated.
Cipher Dawn had built it as a kill switch.
But they'd underestimated one thing.
Aarav Kane never opened a box without knowing how it closed.
The code didn't delete files.
It pinged.
Across multiple networks.
A beacon.
Cipher Dawn's infrastructure responded instinctively—trying to contain the breach, rerouting signals, tightening control.
And in doing so…
They exposed themselves.
Soren stared at the cascading data. "You just forced them to move."
"Yes," Aarav said. "And movement leaves footprints."
Alarms began to echo faintly in the building—not emergency, but system alerts.
Nisha grabbed Aarav's sleeve. "Security is coming."
"Good," Aarav said. "We're done here."
They exited into daylight just as Bureau vehicles screeched to a halt outside the archive. Too many. Too fast.
Malhotra didn't like uncertainty.
A tall figure stepped out of the lead vehicle.
Rudra Malhotra himself.
Perfectly composed. Silver hair neat. Expression calm, almost paternal.
"Aarav," he called out, voice carrying. "You're causing unnecessary damage."
Aarav stopped walking.
Soren whispered, "Don't engage."
Aarav turned anyway.
"Damage?" he said loudly. "You call a dozen staged suicides 'necessary'?"
Murmurs rippled through the onlookers.
Malhotra sighed. "You don't understand the scale of what you're interfering with."
"I understand enough," Aarav replied. "You didn't kill my father. You managed his disappearance."
That hit.
Malhotra's eyes flickered—just for a fraction of a second.
"You always were observant," Malhotra said softly. "That's why you're dangerous."
Bureau agents shifted uneasily.
Aarav raised his voice. "Everyone here—check internal review case 7719. Look at the pattern. Look at who signed off."
Malhotra smiled thinly. "And then what? You think truth survives without power?"
He stepped closer. "Justice is a luxury. Survival is the currency of this world."
Aarav smiled back, cold and sharp.
"Then you're bankrupt."
Sirens wailed—different ones this time.
News vans.
Cameras.
Cipher Dawn's worst enemy.
Exposure.
Malhotra glanced around, calculating.
"You've chosen justice," he said. "That means you won't survive long."
Aarav stepped back toward Soren and Nisha. "Then I'll make the time I have count."
Malhotra turned, disappearing into the chaos before an arrest could be ordered.
He'd escaped.
But not cleanly.
Soren exhaled shakily. "You just started a war."
Aarav looked at the crowd, the cameras, the Bureau scrambling to contain a truth already spreading.
"No," he said quietly. "I made it public."
Nisha squeezed his hand. "What now?"
Aarav's phone buzzed again.
UNKNOWN: Interesting move. Phase Two begins.
Aarav slipped the phone away, eyes hard.
"Now," he said, "we stop reacting."
Above them, the city watched.
And somewhere in the shadows, Cipher Dawn adjusted its strategy.
Because Aarav Kane had just proven something deadly:
He wasn't choosing survival anymore.
He was choosing control.