Chapter 32: Static Bloom

  The signal wasn’t supposed to be there.

  Rilo had been skimming legacy traffic on an off-grid node buried deep in Emberfall’s underbelly. Old code. Cold channels. Nothing dangerous.

  Then the static stuttered.

  And the bloom began.

  [PRIORITY UPLINK: REDACTED SOURCE — CONTENT UNVERIFIED][BEGIN PACKET DUMP]

  Images.Flashes.Sound without sync.

  A Dominion attack squad entering a warehouse, timestamped two days before the incident was supposed to happen.Overlay data: Velstrat contractor authorization.Background blur correction, a Velstrat mark on the gear crate. Deliberate. Brazen.

  Rilo froze.

  False flag.

  His fingers hovered above the keys. This wasn’t a leak. This was a detonation.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  He backed out. Too late.

  The packet duplicated, recursive viral forks.Uplink triggers. Mesh relays. Routing through freelancer boards, civic info streams, even junk food ad crawlers.

  Someone had built the burst to spread itself.

  And Rilo, poor bastard, had opened the door.

  A voice hissed from his cracked wall speaker.

  “Rilo. You seeing this? Net says it’s coming from your quadrant.”

  He didn’t answer. Couldn’t.

  His screen pulsed.His fingers trembled.And somewhere beneath his ribs, a slow realization:

  They planned for it to be found.

  Outside, station feeds began to blink.

  First in fringe dens.Then maintenance blocks.Then official channels, choked by emergency override anomalous signals, trying to lock the content down.

  Didn’t matter.

  It was too late.

  “Dominion provocation traced to Velstrat actors.”“Corporate sabotage confirmed. Data sourced. Sources buried.”“War by proxy, the price of profit.”

  They weren’t headlines.They were fractures.

  By the time Rilo sealed his terminal, three copies of the packet had already re-routed to rebel groups in four sectors.One to a data auction house.One straight to a Dominion relay node, flagged for attention.

  He looked down at his hands.

  “I didn’t leak it,” he whispered. “I just saw it.”

  The walls didn’t care.

  The net was already bleeding.