Page 191 of Blood & Throttle

This? This is defense that’s been upgraded, patched, and weaponized into offense.

But that’s not the only tell.

On GhostNetArchive, buried in a reply thread about headset frequency bleed, someone responded to her usinghe. She corrected them without blinking.

“she. try reading next time.”

Cold. Final. Didn’t even capitalize it.

That was the first thread I saved, and probably the last time anyone underestimated her. She hasn’t posted in ten hours. I feel the gap like a static hum behind my eyes.

I don’t know her. Shit I haven’t spoken to her. Haven’t seen her face. But I’ve watched the way she cuts through noise. I’ve run pings on her signal paths—noninvasive, light-skim only. She jumps towers every other day, reroutes like muscle memory, scrambles her delay timings to throw off trackers. Someone taught her how to hide.

Or someone gave her a damn good reason to learn.

I finish the joint, ash it into a cracked dish that used to be a motherboard tray, and swivel to my desk. My fingers hover over the keys. Just one post. One line. Not for the original idiot. For her.

“Your loop’s not the problem. Your signal path’s garbage. Strip your leads, rethread, or keep blowing shit up.”

I sit back. The message pings.

And now I wait.

“Fuck this shit is taking forever,”I mutter, dragging a hand through my hair.

Taz lifts her head from the floor, ears flicking. Whines at me like I’ve lost it. Maybe I have. She watches me with those big, knowing eyes like she’s judging the fact I’m sitting here, refreshing the same fucking message board every ten seconds, waiting for a reply that hasn’t come.

“It’s notthatcrazy,” I tell her. “She posted once. She’ll post again.”

She snorts. Actually snorts. Puts her head back down like I’m pathetic.

I lean back in my chair, let the cracked leather groan beneath me as I stare at the sixth monitor—still blank. Still fucking silent. Static pulses from the edge of the screen, a low glow humming like it knows I’m waiting.

It’s been hours since I found her thread.

Since that one post that cut through the noise like a blade. Whoever wrote it wasn’t just some bored mod-head, they were trained. Or wired for this shit.

So I did what I do—started digging.

Now every rig in my bunker’s working overtime. Scrapers, bots, signal jumpers, I’ve got full-scale sweeps on Glitch588 running across dead networks and burned databases. And finally… I found something. An old MyBase account. Obsolete, buried behind junk firewalls and disconnected IPs, but there she is.

And fuck me.

Caramel hair, long and thick, usually twisted up in these lazy knots or braided over one shoulder. Cute little nose ring. Pouty lips—seriously, the kind of mouth that starts fightsin back alleys. In one clip, she’s gaming, talking shit with a smirk and a headset while three thousand viewers foam at the mouth in the comments. In another, she’s camming.

Not just talking. Not just teasing. Full-on cam girl content—men tipping like rabid dogs just to watch her touch herself. Confident. Controlled. Not desperate, not fake,in charge. Like she knew exactly what they wanted and made them beg for it anyway. She wasn’t doing it for validation.

She was doing it because she could.

Dangerous in the way smart girls with good lighting and nothing to lose always are. And fuck if that didn’t light a fire in my chest I haven’t felt in a long damn time. That was before everything fell apart. Before the Collapse. And now?

Nothing.

She vanished. Not just offline—erased. No footprint. No patterns. No trails except for those rare posts that hit like code dropped by a ghost. No one disappears like that unless theywantto. Unless theyneedto.

Which means one thing: She’s hiding something.

She doesn’t know I’m here yet, sitting in this bunker, chain-smoking next to a dog that thinks I’m emotionally unwell, but I’ve seen enough to know one thing for sure. She’s not just confident or smart—she’sdangerous. The kind of girl who knows exactly how to bait the wire, blow the circuit, and walk away with your firewall in flames. And fuck, do Ilikethat.

She hasn’t noticed me yet. But she will. And when she does? She’s not getting rid of me. Not until I’ve read every encrypted inch of her code… and rewired it to include me.

Permanently.