The System remembered everything.
That was its blessing and its curse: every ping, every scan, every "harmless" charity bracelet left a mark somewhere in its routes.
Kael lay back in the visitor chair, eyes closed, fingers laced over his chest.
"Don't move," Haneul said. "You look like you're about to astral-project into the hospital ceiling."
"Not inaccurate," he murmured. "Mira, keep Cho from freaking out if I start mumbling."
"I'll tell him you're meditating," Mira said dryly. "He already thinks you're weird."
He dropped into the debug layer.
White.
Threads.
He focused on the last scan ping, the one that had scraped over Haneul's shard.
[EVENT: SOUL_SCAN_PING (UNAUTHORIZED DEVICE).][SOURCE: UNKNOWN_BRACELET_ID_7439.][PATH: HOSPITAL_LOCAL_NET → CITY_NODE → EXTERNAL_RELAY]
He hooked into the path, following it backward.
The System wasn't built to be traced by users.
But it also wasn't built to host rogue cult scanners and shard Executors. Adaptation went both ways.
He slid past the hospital's sanitized logs, into the city's event routing records. Cookies, timestamps, authentication crumbs. The bracelet had used a low-tier "religious service" access key—cheap and easy to obtain.
Sloppy.
[KEY: FAITH_SUPPORT_22 – REGISTERED TO: "TOWER SPIRITUAL RECOVERY GROUP – GRAY-3."]
He snorted.
"Subtle as ever," he muttered.
The signal hopped again, riding a secure tunnel to a private Node.
He hit resistance.
[OBJECT: PRIVATE_NODE – ID: SHRINE_GRAYROOT-LOCAL.][STATUS: ENCRYPTED / READ-ONLY TO AUTHORIZED USERS.][ACCESS REQUEST: DENIED.]
Of course they had a private Node.
He skimmed the edges instead, watching metadata.
Connection attempts, latency patterns, shard resonance spikes. The Node sat like a spider at the center of a small web, collecting pings from bracelets across the city.
He zoomed out.
Dozens of weak lines.
One stronger one.
[FRAGMENT RESONANCE: DAMAGED_SHARD_ID: LOST_CHILD.]
The same damaged shard that hummed inside their cobbled-together device in the warehouse. They'd wired it into their Node.
"Gross," he said.
Beta pinged.
[OBSERVATION: CULT NODE IS USING DAMAGED SHARD AS LOCATOR.][RISK: HIGH FOR NEARBY FRAGMENT HOSTS.]
"Yes," he said. "That's why we're here."
The Node's outbound path intrigued him.
It didn't just log shard pings; it forwarded a filtered digest to another Node higher up—somewhere in a Tower-adjacent data center with a bland corporate label.
[FORWARD DESTINATION: PAN-TOWER HOLDINGS / R&D DIVISION (MASKED).]
"Of course," he murmured. "Of course there's a corp hand in this."
He felt a flare of anger that wasn't entirely his.
Haneul's shard.
It didn't like being treated as a commodity.
"Okay," he whispered. "You want a flick to the forehead? Let's give them a headache."
He couldn't hack their Node outright.
Too risky.
But he could mislabel.
The bracelets expected a certain kind of response when they pinged: resonance yes/no, plus a rough "strength" metric.
He could, theoretically, alter that metric at the path level. A tiny patch, applied only when the signal went back to specific devices.
"Target?" Beta pinged.
[WHICH DEVICES?]
"The ones that just scanned my sister," he said. "And any others registered to that same local group."
He grabbed the bracelet ID Cho had logged from security footage—7439—and pulled up its siblings.
[BRACELET_IDS: 7439, 7440, 7441…][OWNER: SHRINE_GRAYROOT-LOCAL.]
He opened a small flag on their return path.
[FLAG: RESONANCE_REPORT_MODIFIER = 1.0]
And set it to something else.
[EDIT: IF FRAGMENT_HOST_ID == RYU_HANEUL → 0.0 (NO SIGNAL).][ELSE → RANDOM NOISE BETWEEN 0.2 AND 0.4]
"So when they scan her, they get nothing," he said softly. "When they scan anyone else, they get fuzzy maybe-signals all over the place."
"Decoys," Mira murmured, listening through his link.
"At worst, they waste time stalker-pinging random people instead of narrowing down," he said.
Beta hummed.
[LOCAL PATCH APPLIED.][EFFECT: CULT SHARD-LOCATOR ACCURACY REDUCED.][RISK OF COLLATERAL HARM: LOW (FALSE POSITIVES ONLY).]
"Good enough," he said.
He wasn't satisfied.
He wanted an actual flick.
He looked at the private Node.
It sat there, fat and self-important, humming around its damaged shard.
He couldn't break it.
But he could… remind it that it was being watched.
He opened its descriptor.
[NODE_LABEL: SHRINE_GRAYROOT-LOCAL.]
He added a line to its internal notes—visible only to admins and high-level observers.
[NOTE: MONITORED FOR UNAUTHORIZED FRAGMENT INTERACTIONS.]
And signed it:
[TAG: OBSERVER.]
Not Mira's ID.
Something else.
He borrowed Beta's style of logging, cryptic and System-neutral.
[ADDED BY: MORAL_AUDIT_LAYER.]
The Node accepted the note, filed it.
Somewhere, whoever admin'd that shrine Node would eventually see:
"MONITORED."
A warning, vague and menacing.
"Sometimes paranoia is a gift," he said.
Beta added its own comment.
[NOTE: INTIMIDATION VIA METADATA – UNORTHODOX BUT LOW-RISK.]
"You're welcome," he said.
He surfaced.
Haneul's room snapped back into focus.
Mira was watching him, arms crossed. Cho hovered by the door, half-worried, half-fascinated.
"You were out for… maybe sixty seconds," Haneul said. "You made a weird face."
"Just telling a Node to get off my lawn," Kael said.
He explained the patch, the decoy signals, the "monitored" note.
Mira's eyebrows rose.
"You pretended to be a System moral layer?" she asked.
"Borrowed the vibe," he said. "If they're half as devout as their branding, that label should freak them out."
Cho looked faintly horrified and impressed.
"Is this… safe?" he asked. "For you?"
Kael checked his detection risk.
[DETECTION_RISK: 0.11 → 0.13][WATCHDOG_PROCESS_Ω: STATUS – CURIOUS BUT NOT ESCALATED.]
"Marginally noisier, but still under 'tripwire,'" he said. "Beta approved."
"Beta is not the boss of you," Haneul said.
"Tell that to its report templates," Kael muttered.
Haneul lay back, exhaling.
"Okay," she said. "So now cult bracelets see ghosts and your graffiti in their Node. I can live with that."
Her shard relaxed a little.
[FRAGMENT: ALERT LEVEL – NORMALIZING.]
"Next time they try something more direct, we escalate," Mira said. "For now, this buys us confusion. Confusion means time."
"Time is good," Cho said fervently.
Kael's UI pinged with a new Inheritance note.
[MILESTONE: DIRECTLY INTERFERED WITH HOSTILE SHARD-HUNTING MECHANISM.][REWARD: MINOR BOOST TO TRACE MASKING WHEN DEFENDING FRAGMENT HOST.]
He could feel it, faintly—some of his own trace obfuscation routines now cross-linked to Haneul's privacy ring.
"Nice," he said. "Sibling discount."
Haneul smirked.
"Family plan," she said.