The Devil’s Due

Silas stared at the screen, a muscle twitching in his jaw. The digital trail he’d been following, the breadcrumbs of impossibly perfect stock trades, had vanished. One moment, he was closing in on his prey, the next, nothing. It was as if his target had simply ceased to exist, a ghost in the machine who had given up the ghost.

But Silas didn’t believe in ghosts. He believed in data, and the absence of data was, in itself, a data point. He reran the traces, his algorithms digging deeper, sifting through the digital noise. And then he found it: a single, anomalous packet, a digital echo of Kenji’s escape. It was a fragment, a whisper, but it was enough.

The packet’s origin was untraceable, a phantom signal from a dead server. But its destination was a different story. It was a blind spot, a data void in the heart of the city. An old print shop. It made no sense. And that’s why Silas knew it was the right place.

He smiled, a cold, predatory expression. The hunt was back on. And this time, he would be ready for a ghost.