Chapter 172

Amelia

The adrenaline from midnight hadn’t faded, but it had thinned into something brittle and stretched tight over nerves already frayed by hours of tension.

Screens refreshed in constant loops, each flicker resetting the room’s focus and dragging conversations into another spiral of uncertainty. Nathan stood at the front of the central hub, squared shoulders beneath his headset, commanding the comms team with the same calculated focus he’d once used in combat.

"Keep the western relay line clean," he said. "If anything routes through Gate Nine, I want it checked three times before it moves forward. Don't just assume a relay is clean because it passes a sniff test, no weak confirmations, no grey signals. I want hard proof for every single transmission, and I want a timestamped log to match. If someone tries to ghost a signal past us, I want the trail. We need to know what’s real and what’s been touched."

Simon, hunched behind him, monitored a spectral map on his tablet. Red rings pulsed from key district towers, signals that should have been stable. They weren’t. The resonance had shifted hours ago, subtly at first, but now the changes were precise and clearly intentional. His fingers moved fast across the surface of the screen, bringing up filters, diagnostic sweeps, and overlays.

"Bracken Ridge relays are spiking," he muttered. "Might be weather, but the rhythm's too clean to be natural."

"Flag it," Nathan said. "Reroute through southern nodes, isolate every duplicate, and run a fresh checksum. Save every echo. If they’re masking a breach, I want to see exactly where."

Votes from the Border Packs were pouring in inconsistently, and every update contradicted the last. Richard would jump ahead by half a percent, only to lose it minutes later as David surged back in. The fluctuations didn’t follow any demographic model. This wasn’t voter uncertainty; it was tampering.

The volunteers felt it too. They didn’t voice it, but their expressions were brittle and wary. They kept glancing between Nathan and me, as if waiting for someone to admit what they already suspected. I kept my shoulders high and walked the length of the room, letting them see me upright, focused, and unafraid.

I stopped beside a volunteer frozen in front of a stalled screen. "Try refreshing manually. Don’t wait for the system to prompt you. We move first."

He nodded quickly and obeyed. His hands were shaking. I rested a hand on his shoulder before moving on. I wasn’t there to inspire anyone. I just needed to look like I wasn’t unraveling, even if my stomach was curled in knots and my lungs couldn’t quite fill all the way. I didn’t let my voice waver, and when I smiled, it was the steady kind.

At the edge of the suite, Richard stepped up to the temporary podium. The livestream light blinked in the upper corner of the nearest screen. He didn’t need notes. He never did.

"We’re asking for more than votes tonight," he said. "We’re asking for calm, for discipline, and for strength, even when we don’t know what’s coming."

He looked around the room, then directly into the camera.

"We are not enemies, not here, not across the borders. How we behave right now is what they’ll remember. Not the margin."

He stepped down. No applause followed. People just returned to work.

We left the floor and entered the control room behind the glass. The lights were low and the air cooler. It was the only place that felt untouched by chaos. The table was cluttered with drives, files, and cables, but none of it mattered right now. Richard sat across from me and reached out without hesitation.

I met him halfway and our fingers locked. The bond between us didn’t burn or pull. It stayed low and quiet, a steady background thrum I could feel in my chest. Neither of us said anything. There wasn’t a need.

Then came the alert. A chime followed by a shift in the numbers. David had pulled ahead.

I leaned in, watching the data roll across the screen. The change was too sudden and too clean. It came from the exact districts we had flagged earlier in the night. My fingers tightened around Richard’s, but he was already standing.

Without a word, he walked to the door, nodded to the guards, and waited until they stepped out. Once the room sealed shut behind them, he slammed his fist onto the table.

The sound cracked through the air. Files scattered. A tablet skidded to the floor, but he didn’t reach for it. His jaw clenched tight, and his eyes had the same vacant glassiness I remembered from the Council vote, the one where Jenny almost didn’t speak to him. Then he turned and walked out.

I sat there a moment longer, staring at the numbers still crawling across the screen. My chest tightened. I knew that feeling, the one where everything starts to slip, and you’re just standing there, pretending it isn’t. I stood and followed him.

I found him at the north stairwell, near the open balcony door. Cold air spilled in. I was about to call his name when another voice cut through the dark.

"They’re catching the chips."

I froze. It was David.

I edged closer, careful not to make a sound. His voice was clipped and irritated.

"They found what we wanted them to. The primary bait, just enough tampering to draw their attention and make them think they caught the worst of it. Meanwhile, we used that window to inject false signals into the coastal relays and route backups through controlled servers. That gave us the buffer time we needed. If the jammers hold another hour, the eastern corridor collapses, the numbers flip, and by the time they realize what happened, it's already certified. They’ll scramble, try to reroute, scream about interference, but it won’t matter. It’ll be too late to unwind it cleanly."

A second voice responded, muffled, indistinct. David answered quickly.

"No. Don’t touch the backups. Let them feel clever. If they act too soon, it’ll just look desperate."

My stomach turned. The heat rose in my face, and my hands curled into fists at my sides. I saw Richard shift forward, ready to charge, and I moved before he could.

I caught his arm. "Don’t."

He turned, already bracing to argue, but I didn’t let him.

"You go in there now, it turns into a spectacle. We need records or timestamps. Something real they can’t spin to their advantage."

He hesitated. His jaw tensed like he was chewing the urge to fight. Then he stopped.

I stepped a little closer. The wind was cold, and the tip of my nose had gone numb. Richard still hadn’t looked at me, but I could feel the rage rolling off him like heat from a cracked engine.

Below us, the square lit up in flickers and cheers, the sound of celebration humming beneath everything like it belonged to another world. I looked down at the lights and thought of every person we’d told to trust the system. Every precinct that had handed their vote over and gone to bed hoping they mattered.

And I thought of the way David said it: Let them think they won something.

That wasn’t just manipulation. That was cruelty.

They were tampering with votes, not with arguments or scare tactics, but through embedded devices, signal hacks, and forged packet chains. We had heard it firsthand.

Now we had to prove it. Because if we didn’t, it wouldn’t matter what the truth was. No one would ever see it.