Khalid didn't return that night.
Elara woke up to silence so loud it felt wrong. The air was still. The screens were dark. NUMA was gone. The burner phones weren't ringing.
And Khalid's side of the mattress was cold.
She didn't panic not at first. He did that sometimes. Vanished for hours chasing a signal, a scrap of code, a whisper on the dark web. But by noon, when his laptop hadn't been touched and the car was still outside, her chest tightened.
She checked the street cams.
No glitch. Just a blind spot exactly two minutes of blank footage at 3:47 a.m.
By sunset, she knew.
Khalid was gone.
She worked through every encrypted line. Every relay, every backup safe house. Nothing.
NUMA returned just past midnight, winded and furious. "He's not answering either line. Not even the emergency one."
Elara simply nodded, staring at her screen like she could will it to change.
A moment later, her phone buzzed.
Unknown number. One attachment.
A photo.
Khalid. Bloodied. Gagged. Tied to a metal chair. Eyes open—wild, scared.
Elara dropped the phone.
NUMA moved fast. Plugged into her terminal. "If they used Council bandwidth, it'll be scrubbed. But I can look for the gaps."
Three days passed.
On the fourth, Elara received a GPS ping. Not a message. Not a call. Just coordinates.
They drove without headlights, through silent back roads and forgotten industrial zones. Lagos thinned. Then vanished. The air got heavier.
The location was an abandoned private rehab facility — a shell of wealth turned to rot.
NUMA stayed in the car, rigging a remote camera on the exit. Elara went in alone.
The inside stank of bleach and silence. Every hallway was still, the walls yellowed, the corners dust-choked. The overhead lights flickered like a warning.
She found him in a room with no windows.
Khalid sat strapped to a chair bolted to the floor. Wrists red. Face swollen. Dried blood on his collar.
His eyes were open, but they didn't focus.
She approached slowly. "Khalid…?"
He flinched.
"Elara," he whispered. "Is it real this time?"
She moved closer, crouched in front of him. "It's me. I'm here. You're safe now."
His eyes brimmed but he didn't cry.
They escaped through a tunnel NUMA hacked open.
The ride back was quiet. Khalid said nothing. Just stared ahead, shoulders hunched, hands clenching invisible ghosts.
At the safehouse, he collapsed onto the floor, breathing shallow.
Only later did he speak.
"They lied to me," he said.
Elara turned to him.
"They showed me things. Said you sold me out. Said you were working with him."
"They're trying to break us," she whispered.
"They almost did."
He didn't sleep that night. Sat by the window, a knife in his hand, watching for movement that never came.
NUMA left tea by his side. He didn't drink it.
By morning, Elara found him burning one of the Council files over the sink.
"They don't deserve exposure," he said. "They deserve collapse."
Elara touched his arm. "We do this smart. We plan—"
He cut her off. "Smart hasn't worked. They play dirty. We've been playing clean."
She looked at him.
The boy who once joked through chaos now stared at her like steel.
"We don't leak anymore," he said.
"We bury them."
Elara wasn't sure if she'd gotten her brother back.
Or if she'd just helped build the man her father was hoping for.
But either way Khalid had changed.
And there was no undoing it now.