Kael didn’t have the xxc. But he had something better: the location of a forgotten wallet, buried in the wreckage of the old stock exchange.
He was no longer a ghost.
Kael traced the offer to a rusted data-spire in the Forbidden Sectors. The seller was a disembodied AI with a human face flickering across cracked screens.
Kael was a xxcxxc, a ghost in the machine, a renegade coder who’d been erased from every civic database except one: the black-market ledger of the —a legendary, outlawed neural interface implant.
As he jacked into the mainframe, the system whispered back: “xxcxxc… renegade… 1000… xxc… price confirmed.”
