He sat up slowly. His head felt clearer than last night. That was something.
Lian was in the kitchen when he walked in. She had a pot on the stove and chopsticks in her hand, stirring noodles like she was trying to win a fight with them.
“Morning,” Kai said.
She glanced up. “It’s almost noon.”
He winced. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to crash.”
“You needed it,” Lian replied. “Sit. Here.”
She slid a bowl across the table. Kai sat and wrapped his hands around it. The broth was deep and fragrant, the good kind she made only when she was worried.
Lian sat across from him, wiping her hands on a towel. “How’s your head?”
Kai shrugged. “Better. But I keep going over everything again. Even in my sleep. I’m not used to it.”
“You will be,” Lian said. Then she paused, realizing what that could mean. “I don’t mean in some cold way. I just mean it won’t hit you like this forever.”
Kai nodded and picked at the noodles. “It helped to talk yesterday.”
“I know.”
He stirred his food for a bit. “I was thinking… maybe we should check the shard now. The name he said, Tao Ming. It’s stuck in my head.”
Lian stood and grabbed her laptop. “Already started.”
Kai blinked. “When?”
“While you were snoring in your chair.”
“I wasn’t snoring.”
“You were,” she said. “Loudly. I thought the building pipes were breaking.”
Kai felt his face warm. “Okay maybe a little. But did you find anything?”
Lian opened the file directory and turned the screen toward him. “Mei’s decryption filled in a lot of blanks. Most of it is contract schedules and payment routes. But I searched the name. It showed up twice.”
Kai leaned in. “Where?”
“First in a list of offshore intermediaries. Way down the chain. Looks like someone who handles movement of people and equipment. Nothing big by himself.”
“And the second?”
Lian tapped the screen. “In the metadata of a deleted folder. It was labeled M-procurement. The deletion log lists a user named TaoM9.”
Kai raised a brow. “Is that a code? Or…”
Stolen story; please report.
“Could be both,” Lian said. “But the shard’s owner was nowhere near high enough to talk to someone with his own access credential. So either M-procurement means nothing, or it means a lot.”
Kai frowned. “When he said the name… he sounded scared.”
“People in that world are scared of a lot of things,” Lian replied. “But if he said it right before he died, then it mattered to him.”
Kai pushed back his chair. “We should dig more. Cross reference the name with any LSK signatures we found. See if he’s tied to shipping routes, or tech supply, or—”
“Slow down,” Lian said. “Eat first. Then we work.”
Kai forced a few mouthfuls down. She was right. He needed food before he tried to think straight.
After cleaning up, they moved into the living room where Kai’s equipment sprawled across the floor. He took a seat in front of his monitors while Lian sat on the couch, crossing one leg over the other, watching him work.
Kai pulled up the decrypted shard data and started cross-checking the name Tao Ming against the rest of the corrupted entries. Most references were vague. A few linked to cash transfers. One linked to a warehouse near Cheung Sha Wan, though the documentation looked old.
“Could be nothing,” Kai said, scanning the timestamps. “This record is from five years ago.”
Lian considered that. “A lot of these people reuse their old routes. Laziness is common. If he used that space once, he might still be linked to whoever owns it.”
Kai zoomed in on the location tag. “I can check who holds the current lease.”
He pulled up a public records scraper he’d built. After a minute the software spit out a name.
Wong Kar Yi.
Lian tilted her head. “That name show up anywhere in the shard?”
Kai searched. Nothing.
“Doesn’t mean anything,” Lian said. “Fronts change names all the time.”
Kai pushed away from his desk. “We should go check it out.”
Lian nodded slowly. “Not yet. We need eyes first.”
Kai glanced around the room. “Drones or walk-by?”
“Walk-by,” Lian said. “Drones draw attention in that district. And the building is too close to the main road.”
Kai grabbed his jacket. “I can go now.”
Lian stood and took her knife harness off the shelf. “We go. Together.”
He looked a little guilty. “I wasn’t trying to sneak off.”
“I know. But after yesterday I’m not letting you run around alone.”
Kai opened his mouth to argue but closed it again. She was right. He knew that.
They left the safehouse through the back stairwell, slipping into the narrow alley where laundry hung low between buildings and the air smelled like rain on concrete. The district was busy, full of shops packed shoulder to shoulder.
Kai kept his head down as they blended into the crowds. Lian walked beside him, her gaze lazy but sharp.
When they reached the address near Cheung Sha Wan, they didn’t approach the building directly. They took the opposite sidewalk and walked past it twice, pretending to window shop.
The structure looked like an old textile warehouse converted into a storage facility. The metal shutters were down. No signage. No visible security.
Kai murmured, “It looks abandoned.”
“Maybe,” Lian said. “But the cameras on the corner are new.”
Kai glanced without moving his head too much. Two discreet lenses angled toward the alley beside the entrance.
“Someone’s using it,” he said. “Definitely.”
“Let’s circle once from behind.”
They turned a corner and walked down a quieter lane. The back of the warehouse was cleaner than the front. Fresh concrete patchwork. A recently replaced lock on the service door.
“Someone put money into maintaining this place,” Kai said.
Lian studied the small space. “Not drug dealers. Not squatters. Too quiet. Too clean.”
Kai swallowed. “You think the name ties to LSK?”
“I think it ties to something worth checking carefully.”
They stayed a few minutes longer, watching the patterns of the street. Nothing strange happened. No one entered or exited.
