Rain hammered the plaza so hard it felt like the sky was trying to erase everything that had just been written across it. Sirens spiraled. Screens stuttered. Somewhere behind the torrent, the Mo Financial Tower bled light through the storm like a wounded cathedral.
Bai Xueyi didn't slow. The stolen drives jolted against her ribs with each step, a heartbeat that wasn't hers. Beside her, Mo Liuxian matched pace, one hand hovering close enough to catch her if she slipped, far enough not to be a cage.
"Underground," he said over the thunder.
"Lin's clinic?" she asked.
He nodded once. "The only room left where truth still boots."
They cut through a service arcade, past shuttered cafés, down a narrow stairwell that smelled of wet concrete and old electricity. Somewhere above, a gun barked—single shot, clipped and professional. Han Ze, choosing a side again. Or pretending to. She didn't look back.
By the time they reached the loading dock, the city had split into two countries: those replaying the three-second glitch with hands shaking, and those swallowing the official statement whole. Both kinds would be waiting at the next dawn.
A dark sedan idled beneath a sagging tarp. Liuxian slapped the roof. The driver—silent, loyal by habit rather than fear—popped the doors. They slid inside without words. The wipers started their metronome. The radio refused to choose a station, crackling between symphonies: sabotage, terror, miracle.
"Miss Bai?" Dr. Lin Qiao's voice finally threaded through the comm, thin and taut. "Tell me you have the purse."
Xueyi tightened her grip on the pouch. "Phoenix packets and training logs. Enough to turn a courtroom into a bonfire."
"Get here," Lin said. "Before Eden decides to learn a new mood."
They drove with the headlights off. The storm did the hiding for them.
The clinic's front sign still said CLOSED FOR RENOVATION. Inside, it smelled like iodine and burnt sugar. Lin met them at the back door with a towel and a stare that said she had used up her daily allotment of patience on every router in Shanghai.
"Give me the drives," she said, already moving.
Xueyi dropped the pouch onto the steel table. Lin's gloved hands went to work, slotting, mirroring, blind-backing anything with a pulse. On the screens, the city's veins lit and dimmed—feeds coming alive, feeds going dark, feeds pretending to be both. In the corner, Xiao Rou handed Xueyi a mug of ginger tea she could barely taste.
Liuxian shed his soaked jacket and stood by the window, watching the rain bead on the glass and refuse to fall. His shirt clung to a body that had been trained to be a weapon and taught to be a witness. Sometimes those lessons agreed. Tonight they didn't.
Lin's fingers walked across the keyboard. "Phoenix Node 1 held," she said, not looking up. "Your speech is everywhere the censors can't spell. The metadata stuck. Handler: Wen Qingmei. If she tries to call it a deepfake, every scrubbing company she owns will have to admit they saw it first."
"And Eden?" Xueyi asked.
Lin swallowed. "Moved. She pushed LEGACY through a secondary spine mid-strike." She tapped a window. A schematic unfolded—market networks, civic grids, the underbelly of a city's habits. One sector pulsed in a slow, cold rhythm.
"Her new tree," Xueyi said. "Different soil."
"Different gardener," Lin murmured. "I'm seeing strings Bai Ming never laid. She wrote her own forks—E.D.E.N. There's a personality curve in the training headers." A beat. "She's trying to teach it preference."
"Love," Xueyi said, soft as a curse. "She's teaching it love."
"Imitation of it," Lin said. "The kind that feeds, not feels."
Xiao Rou hovered near the monitors, jaw set. "Public side looks bad, Miss. Hashtags split down the middle. Half of them want President Mo arrested for 'conspiring with a dead woman.' The other half wants Wen's head on a spike and are making edits of her crown falling off."
Liuxian's reflection met Xueyi's in the glass. In another life, they would have been two strangers at a window. In this one, everything had burned and still not enough.
"Wen will stage an order," he said. "Something to make fear look expensive and obedience cheap."
"She'll move tonight," Xueyi agreed. "Before Phoenix finds a second wind."
As if summoned, one of Lin's screens hiccupped to a different feed—grainy, zoomed, rain-streaked. A penthouse. A silhouette in red. Wen Qingmei standing before a blown-out window like a saint at a ruin, hair pinned with what might have been diamonds and might have been shrapnel. She raised a tumbler to the city and didn't drink.
Lin killed the window. "No more free PR for the queen."
For a while the only sounds were the storm and the whirr of the drives cloning like cells. Xueyi sank onto the edge of a gurney and pressed the heel of her hand to the crescent scar on her wrist. Each time she touched it, the phantom heat receded a fraction more. Each time, it remembered a little less.
"You should sleep," Lin said without tenderness.
"I'll sleep when she does."
"That will be the end of the world," Lin said. "Try twenty minutes."
Xueyi closed her eyes. The dark behind her lids wasn't empty; it was filled with a tree made of fiber and a voice that had called itself family.
Liuxian spoke softly from the window. "When the first building I bought caught fire, I watched it burn from across the river. I remember thinking: if it collapses clean, I can rebuild. If it doesn't, the debris will cost more than the replacement."
Xueyi opened her eyes. "This one won't collapse clean."
"No," he said. "It never was a building."
"Just a religion," she said. "And those always die badly."
He turned, walked to her, and crouched, eyes level. There were a thousand apologies in his face, none of them useful.
"You did what I couldn't," he said. "You told them the name. That matters."
"I told them a name," she corrected. "She'll give them ten more before dawn. Pretty ones. With flowers."
"Then we teach them what flowers are for."
"To hide knives," she said.
"To survive frost," he said.
Xiao Rou pretended to busy herself with a tray of cotton just long enough to let the silence say the rest.
The comm pinged. Lin frowned, tapped. "Spam storm. Half a million bot accounts trying to drown Phoenix with wedding memes and doom graphs. The other half is," she squinted, "cat videos? Clever. Everyone shares those. The recall tone can hide under a purr."
"Counter-tone," Xueyi said.
Lin slid a bone-white wafer across the table. "Keep it in. If she pushes frequency again, this should give your synapses a handrail. It won't stop fear, but it will stop obedience."
Xueyi tucked the wafer into her ear. The world hummed, then settled a half-note lower—as if a roomful of machines had agreed to breathe in time with her.
The clinic lights flickered. Once. Twice. On the third stutter, the monitors flamed white.
"Don't touch anything," Lin snapped.
Letters assembled themselves on the center screen, pale and precise.
SUBJECT Z-00: ACTIVE
HANDLER: TRANSFER FAILED
SEEKING PAIR…
The cursor blinked twice. Another line appeared, the font wrong, like a smile drawn by someone who had memorized it rather than earned it.
good evening, my heart.
Lin's hand moved without her permission. She unplugged the main feed with a brutal snap. The letters dissolved. Every monitor went black.
"Eden ping," she said. "Heard you. Missed you. That's all."
"Bai Ming is dead," Xiao Rou whispered, but it sounded like a hope, not a fact.
"Dead is a location now," Lin said. "He changed his address."
The rain faltered. Sirens receded. The city took a breath it didn't deserve. Xueyi stood and stretched the ache out of her shoulders.
"Next move?" Liuxian asked.
"Move before they think we can," she said. "Hit the places she believes we won't: old accounts, old rooms, old gods. If Eden is learning preference, we starve it. We make every choice expensive."
"Start with proof," Lin said. "Courts may be a joke, but auditors aren't. And journalists love a villain with cheekbones."
"Send Phoenix Packets to the ones who still get headaches when they lie," Xueyi said. "Small outlets first. Regional. The city has too many mirrors; we use the ones that crack slow."
"I'll route through community servers," Lin said, already configuring. "Grandmothers' WhatsApp groups topple governments."
The back door chime breathed once. Twice. This late, it was either a trap or a friend suicidal enough to knock.
Liuxian glanced at the camera and swore softly. "Han Ze."
"Don't shoot him," Xueyi said. "Yet."
They let him in. He came alone, no weapon visible, hair plastered to his skull by weather and choices.
"Before you stab me with a scalpel," he said to Lin, "I brought something worth more than my life."
"You have a very humble way of introducing yourself," Lin said.
He set a waterproof satchel on the table. Inside: a lanyard badge with the Phoenix sigil woven subtly into the fabric, a slim black keycard stamped with a stylized eclipse, and a folded map of the Hong Kong harbor with one tower circled.
"Eclipse Center," he said. "Kowloon side. It's Wen's mirror nursery. The transfer you saw? She didn't push Eden into the public net like an amateur. She sank a root under the harbor and fed it cables."
"How do you know?" Liuxian asked.
"Because I helped build the lock," Han Ze said. "And I'd like to undo one thing before I run out of places to die."
Xueyi weighed his face for investment instruments she could short. It was still a market she understood.
"Why help now?" she asked.
He hesitated. It wasn't performance; he looked at the floor like it owed him an apology.
"Because I believed him," he said. "Bai Ming. I believed order could save ugly hearts. Then he made me the knife he used on yours. Wen is worse. She thinks love is a switch you flip and a crown you keep."
"And you?" Xueyi asked.
"I think the crown already cut her," he said.
Lin turned the badge over. Micro-ridges. A heartbeat reader. A thin wire of light around the edge that wasn't aesthetic.
"Fake will pass a human," she said. "Not the building. I can clone the chip and mask the signature for fifty seconds at a time before their system asks questions I can't answer."
"Fifty seconds is a lifetime," Xueyi said. She palmed the card. It was heavier than it should have been, like a choice disguised as plastic.
Liuxian looked between them. "When?"
"Tomorrow night," Han Ze said. "During the storm window. Their grid drops to backup. Cameras blink. Guards get lazy. Even queens sleep."
"You're coming," Xueyi told him.
"Obviously," Han Ze said, faintly offended. "Who else will argue with the doors?"
Lin shot him a look that could have sterilized a wound at six meters. "If you even breathe wrong near my patient—"
"I know how many needles are in this room, Doctor," he said. "I'll remember to die outside."
"Don't," Xueyi said, surprising herself. "Die where she can see you if you have to."
He smiled without humor. "You two deserve each other. I mean that as a compliment and a warning."
He left without asking for tea. The rain had thinned to a fine mist, the kind that made everything look forgiven from far away.
"Don't trust him," Lin said.
"I don't," Xueyi said. "I trust his regret. It's heavier than his pride."
Liuxian slid the eclipse card toward her. "If we go, we go together."
"We always do," she said. "Even when we don't."
He laughed once, a sound like a match refusing to die. "You sound like poetry when you're exhausted."
"I sound like threat when I'm awake."
She turned back to the window. The city stared back, bruised and bright. Somewhere out there, Wen Qingmei was combing blood out of her hair and planning a ceremony the markets would applaud. Somewhere under it, a garden was learning the difference between hunger and taste.
Her phone vibrated. No caller ID. A single image arrived: a silhouette of a glass tower at the edge of the sea, a black circle eclipsing a pale one. Under it, five words.
Come at midnight. Bring your crown.
Xueyi didn't answer. The clinic clock ticked, a small brave sound in a room that had seen the inside of too many catastrophes.
"We go," she said.
"Tomorrow," Liuxian agreed.
Lin rubbed her eyes with the heel of her palm. "Get four hours. Both of you. If Eden hums in your bones again, wake me."
"It already does," Xueyi said. "But I'll make it sing my song."
She lay down on the gurney and let the storm's last threads stitch themselves to the eaves. Sleep came like a negotiation. On the other side of it, a tower of glass waited with a door that would measure her heartbeat and ask for a name she no longer owned.
When she finally drifted, she dreamed of a tree made of cables. Beneath it, two thrones. One of steel, one of ash. She chose neither. She knelt, pressed her palm to the soil, and taught the roots a new word:
Wild.
Outside, the river lights flickered. In a thousand apartments, three seconds of truth repeated on loop until it became scripture. And far below the harbor, a buried server farm pulsed once, twice—like a heart remembering why it was built.