Chapter Two: Stealing a City in Forty Seconds

He called. The phone was already off. The hardware shop's giveaway page had vanished, leaving no cached record. Worse, when he tried to picture the host from the promotional stream, he remembered only hands wearing silver rings. The face was gone. At two in the morning, he was still writing down every detail when someone knocked. Shen Yan approached the peephole with the shell casing in his fist. Lin Qi stood in the corridor, rain in her short hair and the training bag of Team Undertow over one shoulder. They had not met for three years. Her first words were not a greeting. “Don't install that graphics card.” She stared at him through the door, her voice trembling.