The city did not sleep.It pretended to—lights dimmed, streets quiet, shutters closed—but beneath the stillness, Garden City listened. After everything that had happened, sleep had become a performance, not a state. People lay on beds with eyes open, hands resting on radios that no longer crackled, on knives that had never been sharpened for show. The ground itself felt alert, as if it remembered learning how to fight back and hadn’t forgotten the lesson.Ethan stood on the upper maintenance balcony of Tower Seven, coat pulled tight against the night wind. Below him, the city stretched out in layered darkness, broken only by deliberate pinpricks of light—signal lamps placed not for illumination, but for coordination. Each one was manned. Each one watched another.The Whisper Team had gone quiet.That, more than anything, unsettled him.They had struck once already—fast, surgical, almost polite in the way only professionals could be. A relay sabotaged without collateral damage. A convo
Last Updated : 2026-01-01 Read more