Chapter 27
The hours bled together in the dim,
flickering light of the safe house.
I spent the time monitoring the radio scanners I’d managed to patch into the apartment’s primitive wiring.
The airwaves were a mess of confusion.
Corporate security frequencies were being jammed by local police trying to assert control,
and civilian emergency channels were flooded with reports of riots and unauthorized access to secure government networks.
Vanguard was hemorrhaging control,
and the resulting power vacuum was being filled by local authorities who had no idea what they were dealing with.
I heard a report of a fire at the Vanguard archives in the city center,
likely an attempt by the surviving board members to scrub whatever physical records remained.
They were burning the house down while we were already miles away,
figuratively speaking.
I felt a grim sense of satisfaction.
Let them burn it.
The truth was already out,
spreading across the internet like a digital plague,
impossible to contain and even harder to cure.
I checked my watch: 2:00 AM.
It was time.
I shook Lily gently,
her eyes snapping open with the reflexes of someone who had lived on the edge of a blade for years.
"We move now,"
I told her.
She sat up,
rubbing the sleep from her face,
nodding once to indicate she was ready.
We gathered our gear,
minimalist and efficient.
We didn't need much;
what we couldn't carry,
we didn't deserve to keep.
The climb out of the basement was silent,
each step on the wooden stairs calculated to avoid the groaning floorboards.
Stepping out into the cool night air of Geneva felt like being birthed into a different world.
The city was darker now,
the power grid fluctuating under the strain of the ongoing chaos.
We stayed in the shadows,
hugging the sides of buildings,
avoiding the main thoroughfares where armored police vehicles were conducting random patrols.
It was a game of cat and mouse,
only the cat was a panicking government and the mouse was us.
We reached the edge of the city,
where the urban architecture gave way to the dense,
forested hills leading toward the French border.
The hike was brutal.
The incline was steep,
the ground slick with late-night dew,
and every snap of a twig sounded like a gunshot in the oppressive silence of the forest.
My lungs burned,
my legs screamed in protest,
but I didn't stop.
Stopping meant death.
Stopping meant the shadow of the machine finally catching up to us.
We reached the ridge by dawn,
the sun beginning to paint the sky in hues of violent orange and purple.
Looking back,
Geneva looked like a toy model,
a small,
contained box of madness that we had successfully escaped.
But the horizon ahead was vast,
an unknown expanse of risks and challenges.
I stopped to catch my breath,
leaning against a sturdy pine tree.
Lily stood beside me,
her chest heaving,
looking down at the valley floor.
"Do you think they're following us?"
she asked.
"They're probably scanning the traffic cameras on the highway,"
I replied,
wiping sweat from my eyes.
"They won't be looking for two people hiking the mountain passes in the dark."
It was a hopeful assessment,
one I wasn't entirely certain was true,
but it kept us moving.
We were out of the city,
out of the immediate reach of Vanguard’s core security teams.
May you like
Now,
we just had to survive the wilderness.
