Zurich – 04:13 p.m., three weeks later.
Rain whispered against the copper roof of the safehouse: a converted attic of a watchmaker's workshop tucked above a tram line on Zeltweg. Manning had a view of the twin spires of Grossmünster, blurry from an all-encompassing mist-and, far below, the slow red pulse of the river Limmat. Everything looked peaceful; inside the attic, it was war.
Her laptop screen bore a chessboard blackened in whites, but, to the letters available, it was a corporate logos chess: Xu Group, Shen Conglomerate, Triad shell companies, and other behemoths from Europe in energy, as well as a dozen others she'd never heard of two months ago. A transaction was the sense of movement-a lithium mine in Chile, a cobalt refinery in Congo, a shipping lane through the Malacca Strait. Phoenix was gone, but the game had not stopped; it had merely splintered into smaller, sharper knives.
She pulled a rook-Xu Logistics-into a port block controlled by a proxy of Triad, and the software auto-calculation calculated: Estimated disruption: $1.7 billion in 36 hours. She clicked CONFIRM without blinking.
Behind her Xu Xiao was speaking low into a satellite phone, "Push the Ghana cargo forward two days. Yes, I know the weather window's tight. Lose the cargo and we lose the leverage."
He clicked off, crossed the attic in three strides, and poured coffee that tasted of rust and adrenaline. "Your mother's vitals are stable," he said. "Keller moved her to a sanatorium outside Montreux. Private wing, no visitors without your retinal scan."
Manning nodded but kept her eyes on the laptop. "And Wen?"
"Still in Geneva. Interpol lifted the lockdown after forty-eight hours. She walked out wearing a diplomatic passport-someone inside the Triad fixed the paperwork." His tone was flat, but the muscle in his jaw jumped. "She'll come for us."
"Let her," Manning brightened the laptop screen once more, as she closed it. "We'll be ghosts by then."
• 19:22 p.m.
The attic's only door opened on a whisper. Shen Yu entered, snowflakes melting in his hair, a courier envelope under his arm. He moved like a man who expected every floorboard to be wired. He tossed the envelope onto the table; inside were three new passports-swiss, canadian, new zealand-each with a different name, each photo taken that morning in a basement studio two blocks away.
"Took down shipping routes," he said, shrugging off the black parka. "I ghosted the manifests through five shell companies. Anyone tracing the cargo will end up chasing a defunct tuna cannery in Fiji."
He paused, studying Manning's face. "You're not sleeping."
"I dream of hallways," she said. "Every door I open has my mother behind it, but she is seventeen and burning. "
Yu's expression softened. He reached into his pocket, produced a small foil strip-two blue pills. "Keller's prescription. Eight hours, no dreams."
Manning hesitated, then shook her head. "I need the dreams; they remind me why we're still breathing."
• 22:07 p.m.
They ate hurriedly at the kitchenette-slices of rye bread and hard cheese, canned peaches consumed from the tin. There was a tram clang down the hillside outside and, inside, all the light came from the open refrigerator.
Yu-tap his phone; a hologram bloomed above the table-an image of three news feeds in Mandarin, French, English. Headlines flowed:
GLOBAL LITHIUM FUTURES SPIKE ON RUMORED SUPPLY DISRUPTION
SHEN CONGLOMERATE SHARES HALTED AFTER "IRREGULAR" BOARD RESOLUTION
TRIAD OF NINE ELDER FOUND DEAD IN MACAU HOTEL-SUICIDE NOTE QUESTIONED
Xu Xiao's mouth curled. "We didn't kill the elder. Someone inside the Triad did-scrambling to keep the money from bleeding out."
Manning wiped the peach juice off her lips. "Bleeding is the objective."
Yu was zooming in on the Macau headline. "Note was ghost-written two days ago. Typed using the elder's own phone with timestamps forced. They are going to be untangling this for months."
He closed the feed. "Next move?"
Xu Xiao pushed a thumb drive across the table. "This contains shard coordinates—where the seven Phoenix fragments were scattered. We have to decide which ones to protect and which ones to expose."
Manning picked up the drive. "Expose all of them. Let all the players scramble for pieces that don't fit together. Chaos buys us time."
"Chaos also gets people killed," Xu Xiao said quietly.
"People are dying already." She held his gaze. "We just stopped giving them directions."
• 00:45 a.m.
The attic was dark except for the glow on her laptop, casting luminescence on the chessboard. Manning removed the last piece, the media arm of Shen Conglomerate, and watched the cascade: stock drop, creditors panic, Triad proxies divest. In that hour, her reflection looked like a stranger-sharper cheekbones, older eyes.
Xu Xiao was in the doorway behind her and said, "You're destroying not letting win."
"Destroying is a kind of winning," she said. "Ask any phoenix."
He crossed the room down to kneel beside her chair. "When this is over, what do you want?"
She thought of her mother's vacant stare, the copper locket spinning into that alpine dark, the scar on her wrist that still itched when it rained. "A quiet room," she finally said. "With a window. Without locks."
He rested his forehead on her shoulder. "I'll build you ten."
• 03:12 a.m.
The chessboard was frozen-opponent had resigned. Manning closed her laptop, and the attic was silent apart from the rain and city hum in the distance.
She found Xu Xiao alone on the tiny balcony, coat collar up, phone dark in his hand. Snow was falling now-thick, heavy snowflakes melting away as soon as they touched the copper roof.
She slipped her uninjured hand into his pocket. Startled he was not.
"Tomorrow?" she asked.
"Tomorrow we buy ourselves a fishing boat in Montenegro," he said. "Rename it Second Life. Sail until the satellites forget our faces."
"And Wen?"
"She'll either find us or she won't," he said. "Either way the skies are on fire."
The tram below clanged again, Last run of the night. Manning watched the red tail light disappear into the snow. Somewhere in the city fortunes bled, empires cracked, and mothers slept under foreign names.
She leaned against Xu Xiao. "Three weeks ago, I was a beggar at a gate," she murmured.
"And now?"
"Now I'm the ghost who stole the future."
The snow continued to fall softly and endlessly, erasing footprints that had not yet been made. In the quiet, they listened to the war they had started-a war taking place in boardrooms and server farms, amid the whisper of numbered accounts and the silence of alpine graves.
It would last years, maybe decades.
But, for the duration of a single snowfall, the three fugitives in Zeltweg allowed themselves to dream of an after.