Chapter 25

**Sloane**

It starts with a ping on a line that should be dead. It’s an old comm channel I used once years ago, buried inside a protocol I wrote for myself. The kind of quiet back road you only take when you don’t want to be seen. No one else is supposed to even know it exists. But here it is, a single ghost signal flickering on my screen. “Sloppy,” I mutter. Most people would miss it. Even good