Ellie smiled. “OMG,” she breathed again, this time with feeling. “You want to play.”

Ellie Nova’s night vision goggles weren’t military grade. They were better .

A ghost. Or a very expensive piece of counter-surveillance tech.

Who’s still here?

“I’m you,” the girl said, standing up. “Version 2.0. I’m what happens when the LA New finishes reverse-engineering your NVG code. I’m the upgrade you never asked for.” She tapped her temple. “And I’ve already patched into the network. EchoParkBoy? The others? They’re not gone. They’re just… mine now.”

Ellie zoomed in on the epicenter. The LA New. The city’s newest, most secretive tech campus—a mirrored tower that ate sunlight and spat out algorithms. Officially, they did “predictive infrastructure.” Unofficially, they owned half the surveillance drones in the basin. And now, someone in that tower had found a way to not just track her network, but delete it.