Kael stood up, the discharge rod humming faintly in his palm. “I didn’t cause trouble. I just zapped the system back to its default settings: freedom.”
“They’ll send more,” Voss said. “Other corporations. Other systems.”
“I know,” he said. “But now ten thousand people remember what it felt like to be free. That’s a harder virus to delete.”
The head of Aethel Security, a man named Voss, tracked the hack to an abandoned substation. Inside, he found Kael, not hunched over a console, but calmly eating a ration bar.
“Zapper Zero,” Voss sneered, raising a high-frequency blade. “You’ve caused a lot of trouble.”
Voss lunged. Kael sidestepped, not with superhuman speed, but with the precision of someone who understood energy flow. He tapped Voss’s wrist. A soft zap —and Voss’s neural implant rebooted. His eyes went wide, then soft. He dropped the blade.
“Sir?” Voss whispered, looking at his own corporate uniform as if seeing it for the first time. “What am I doing here?”
