Ups! Gambar ini tidak mengikuti Pedoman Konten kami. Untuk melanjutkan publikasi, hapuslah gambar ini atau unggah gambar lain.
There was something wrong with the quiet.
It had been six days since Hayamei came back from Baton Rouge. Six days since she saw the proof: her father alive, Zora working beside him. Six days since the unicorn was torn open and revealed that they were being listened to.
And in all that time... nothing.
Too still. Too clean.
Ghost had checked the perimeter three times that morning. Na'Nami was still going to school like everything was normal. The town waved at Hayamei like she hadn't spent the last year running from war.
But she felt it.
Something was already bleeding under the floorboards—they just hadn't pulled up the wood yet.
⸻
Hayamei sat at the kitchen table with a butcher's knife in her hand and a burner phone in the other.
She wasn't chopping anything. She just liked the weight. It steadied her thoughts.
She scrolled through the last two weeks of traffic on their safe network. Nothing popped up—no suspicious pings, no broken codes. Monroe said the lines were clean.
Still.
She didn't trust clean.
⸻
Ghost walked in, wiping oil from his fingers, fresh off another patrol sweep.
"They're not close," he said. "Not physically."
"Which means they're already in," Hayamei replied.
Ghost raised an eyebrow.
She nodded at the cracked window above the sink. "Somebody's been here. Just close enough to plant a seed. Just far enough not to get shot."
"You think they left a message?"
"I think they're watching how we move before they strike."
She paused, then added, "And I think someone on the inside is helping them do it."
⸻
That night, Hayamei did something she hadn't done in a long time.
She called a meeting.
Only six women showed up. Women she'd vetted, trusted, bled with in different stages of her life. Some were from her old city life. One was from the club days. One had delivered Na'Nami during the blackout birth. Another was a nurse who stitched up Hayamei's gunshot wound years ago and never asked questions.
They met in the abandoned church Hayamei bought months earlier. The floor still smelled like paint and steel.
"I brought y'all here because something's coming," she said. "Something big."
