📍 Maka's Dorm Room – Next Morning 🕘 9:00 AM
The glow of her laptop painted Maka's face in a cold, blue light. Her mother's image filled the screen, her familiar smile a fragile shield against worry.
"Some men from a foundation came by yesterday, nne. Very polite. Asked a lot of questions about the shop. They said they were doing a… what did they call it? A 'community impact survey.'"
Maka's blood ran cold. The abstract threat had become concrete, landing at her mother's doorstep. "Just be careful, Mama. Don't talk to them anymore."
The door burst open without a knock. Bayo stood there, stripped of all pretense. The polished heir with the sculpted features and impeccable suit had vanished. In his place was a lean, tense young man in jeans and a dark shirt, a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. Every ounce of him radiated urgency.
"We need to move. Now," he said, his voice stripped of its usual cultivated cadence. "He cut me off. Everything. The corporate network, the trust fund, the apartment. It's done."
He threw a cheap burner phone onto her desk. It buzzed, lighting up with a news alert that made her stomach plummet:
ADEBAYO FOUNDATION ANNOUNCES "AJÉ PAY" – A NEW REVOLUTIONARY FINTECH PLATFORM. LAUNCH IN 30 DAYS.
"It's from the Phoenix Group," Bayo said, jaw tight. "They've made an offer: protection for you, funding for me to start over… in exchange for you."
Maka's fingers flew across her keyboard, pulling up her hidden monitoring system. A new log glowed back, cold and precise:
[POISON PILL]: TARGET ACQUIRED. AWAITING LAUNCH SEQUENCE.
Her silent weapon was now locked on its target. They had thirty days. Thirty days to protect her family, her code, and the future she had fought to build.
---
📍 The Dorm Room – An Hour Later 🕥 10:30 AM
Layo stood like a sentinel, her usual cheer replaced by sharp focus. The dorm room, cluttered with textbooks and art supplies, now felt like a war council chamber.
"My father didn't just work for her," Layo said, producing a heavily encrypted hard drive from her bag. "He was her keeper, her confidant. He saved this the day before they fired him." She laid the drive on the desk with reverence, as if setting a crown before a throne.
Maka plugged it in. The schematics that unfolded made her catch her breath.
"This… this isn't just code," she whispered, scanning the lines of complex logic. "It's a declaration of independence. Every node is both servant and master, a digital democracy that makes JAGABAN's central control look like a primitive dictatorship."
A "Decentralized Autonomous Network"—a DAN. A financial ecosystem beyond centralized manipulation.
"She was right," Maka said, eyes gleaming with strategic clarity. "He's building a dam with Ajé Pay. We won't fight the dam. We'll become the river—decentralized, relentless, and impossible to hold."
Layo nodded, her fingers tapping a rapid rhythm on the desktop. "We're not just defending KudiSync anymore. We're building something they'll never touch."
The stakes pressed in like the thick Lagos heat. Every second they waited, the Adebayo network replicated her work. Every moment, the Phoenix Group edged closer to turning her vision into their weapon.
---
📍 Abandoned Science Wing Basement 🕝 2:30 PM
The basement was a tomb, a cathedral of dust and forgotten tech. Layo's father's hand-drawn maps led them here, to a seamless concrete wall concealing history.
"There's no door," Bayo muttered, running his hands across the cold, unyielding surface.
"Not one you can see," Layo replied, pressing her quartz bracelet against the wall's blank metal plate. For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then a soft click, a shiver through the steel, and a nearly invisible seam slid open. A section of the wall swung inward.
Alimotu's secret handshake.
Inside, time had stopped. The lab was frozen in the 1990s: bulky monitors, towers humming with dormant potential. Maka spotted the journal on a dusty workstation. The final entry was stark, angry:
"He cannot own a river. He can only build a dam. And dams always break."
On an isolated server lay the original code for the DAN's core protocol. Maka scrolled through it, heart pounding.
"It's brilliant… but for a different internet," she said, her excitement melting into the cool clarity of problem-solving. "Encryption is obsolete. Network protocols are prehistoric. We can't just run this; we have to translate it. Build a bridge from her genius to our reality."
As they slipped back into shadow, Layo pressed her bracelet to the inner plate. The wall sealed with a soft sigh. "The ghost stays hidden," she whispered.
---
📍 A Modest Apartment in Yaba – That Evening 🕗 8:00 PM
They moved like ghosts through service tunnels, footsteps echoing against damp concrete. Emerging three blocks apart, they converged on the safe house, a single, cramped room above a cyber café.
"This was my aunt's first studio," Bayo said quietly, unlocking the door. "Before my father built his empire. She called it her 'idea lab.' I kept it… as a reminder of what our family could have been."
The air was thick with the scent of street food and tension. They were fugitives, armed with a ghost's blueprint and the weight of a looming digital war.
Layo assessed the room, smirk playing at her lips. "So. We're hiding from a billionaire, building a revolution with a ghost, and now… this." She gestured between Maka and Bayo. "Plot thickens. Try not to break the alliance, lovebirds. Both of you need to stay sharp." Claiming the single bedroom with a wink, she gave them space.
Alone, Maka and Bayo faced each other, the gravity of discovery and loss pressing in. The future was a terrifying, exhilarating void. For a heartbeat, they were each other's only anchor.
Then Bayo reached for her, or she moved toward him—later, neither would be sure. The kiss came born of adrenaline and shared desperation. Teeth and urgency, a silent acknowledgment that everything had changed.
For long moments, they just stood there, foreheads pressed, breathing the same air. Words were unnecessary; this was a pact sealed in quiet understanding.
The burner phone buzzed again—a second message below the news alert:
The market anticipates Ajé Pay. Your value increases as his deadline approaches. Our offer expires in 48 hours.
---
📍 The Safe House – Late Night 🕚 11:00 PM
In the quiet aftermath, they sat on the floor, shoulders touching, Maka's laptop glowing between them with the ghostly digital traces of Alimotu's DAN.
"My mother is in Geneva," Bayo said, breaking the silence. "She runs a foundation that protects whistleblowers. She was Alimotu's only ally. She could protect us."
A lifeline. A way out.
"But going to her…" He looked at Maka, eyes heavy with truth, raw honesty bleeding through the polished mask he'd worn for years. "It means surrendering KudiSync. Her foundation's charter forbids hosting active commercial platforms to maintain neutrality. We'd be safe, but your dream… it would die. The fight would end before it even begins."
He offered her a choice his father had never given, or his aunt—a path to safety.
Maka met his gaze, saw the boy who had given up a kingdom for a war he didn't start, and the ghostly blueprint promising a future they couldn't yet grasp.
Her voice, steady, resolute, carried the weight of defiance.
"We fight."