The screen showed fragments of a girl—maybe fifteen, with braids and a fierce smile—scattered across corrupted frames. But one frame pulsed with life. Her eyes blinked.

Riya “Razor” Kaur wasn’t a hacker. She was a retrieval specialist—someone who found lost things in the digital wreckage. Her client tonight was a man named Elias Voss, a pale, twitching historian who smelled of old paper and fear.

The Proxy tilted his head. “His daughter. Voss’s daughter. She was the first test subject of the Accord’s memory-wipe program. He hid her mind inside the MKVs before they could destroy it entirely. But now… the files are waking up.”