Time is up, Rabbit

Run, Rabbit, Run

The first weeks after the hospital were a blur of codes, fake IDs, and rerouted accounts. The city at night didn't sleep — it just traded one kind of danger for another. Each job blurred into the next — theft after theft, code after code, mark after mark.

Freen didn't need the money. She needed the noise. The rush. The distraction. If she stopped moving, she'd start thinking. And thinking meant remembering.

Once, she'd built an empire out of nothing but code and nerve — a shadow market that traded in secrets instead of currency. They called it Rabbit Hole. And that's how she became The Rabbit.
A place where whistleblowers and criminals shared the same anonymity, where truth had a price tag and lies were sold wholesale.

Freen had started it when she was twenty-three — back when morality felt like an obstacle, not a compass. She didn't care who got hurt, only who paid more. But that was before her.

Before a girl with storm eyes taught her that truth wasn't supposed to be profitable — that some people stayed loyal to truth even when it ruined them. Now, that voice — Becky's voice — lived in her head, asking questions Freen didn't want to answer.

So she drowned it out the only way she knew how — with noise, with risk, with the endless pulse of stolen data. Except now, she used Rabbit Hole not to sell secrets but to drag them into the light.

But still time after time she hear the rain on glass. A smile in half-light. Pink polish, laughter curling soft against her ear.

"Just a dream," she whispered to herself once, watching the neon bleed. "All of it. Just — a dream."

But her chest still ached when she said it.

"Freen," Heng said one night, leaning against the lab's doorway, voice tight. "You're burning out. These jobs — they're getting messy. You can't keep outrunning sleep like this."

"I'm fine."

She didn't even look up from the data stream.

"You're not. You're distracted."

Freen gave a small, humorless laugh. 

"Distraction keeps me alive."

Heng sighed. "One of these days, it won't."

She ignored him. But he wasn't wrong.

And here she is, still watching the city's cleanest mind and sharpest mouth - Rebecca Armstrong. Who still chasing the Rabbit. Still believing truth could be clean. Nothing changed, probably that was really just a dream.

Freen told herself she only watched to make sure Becky wasn't getting too close to the truth of The Rabbit. That was the story she repeated every night. But the truth was quieter. Darker. More dangerous.

She watched because she couldn't stop. Because each time she saw Becky step out of a car or adjust her glasses under the streetlights, something inside her twisted — sharp, aching, impossible. Because every gesture, every look, every echo of her voice reminded Freen of a life that logic told her never existed.

'If it was just a dream, she thought, why does my heart still react like this?'

That night, the city breathed in grayscale — all glass and neon, all lies pretending to be light. Freen crouched on the rooftop across from the courthouse, her breath fogging faintly in the cool air. Below, through the tall windows, she saw Becky — hair longer now, movements sharper, the same faint frown between her brows when she read too fast.

For her it just few months had passed, but Becky was still her Becky — the one Freen couldn't forget, the one who shouldn't have been real.

But tonight she came here not for Becky specifically. Inside that courthouse, buried in an evidence locker behind biometric locks, was a hard drive — one that contained financial trails, political payoffs, and a list of judges who'd sold verdicts for favors.