The Nest was silent, but Riven's mind wasn't.
The chip Ash left stayed sealed in its box. Untouched.Instead, Riven started sketching—fast, raw, unfiltered.
A vision had gripped him.
Not armor.Not weapons.Presence.
He wanted something no one could track. No one could follow.Something that let him move like a ghost in a city full of watchers.
He called it Ghostwire.
It started with an ultra-thin mesh—woven from salvaged stealth-thread and re-tuned magnetic ink. Wrapped around his jacket's lining, it emitted no heat, no signal.
Then came the pulse nodes:Micron-scale disruptors that bent light, bent notice, bent memory.
Ghostwire didn't just make you invisible.
It made people forget you were there.
The prototype nearly fried his brain the first time he powered it on.He collapsed, bleeding from the nose, vision glitching like a corrupted file.
He blacked out.
When he woke, it worked.
He walked through Scrap Mile in broad daylight.
Nobody turned.Nobody stared.One guy literally bumped into him, looked confused, and walked away.
"It's not stealth," Riven muttered, recording logs later."It's subtraction."
Ghostwire didn't hide him.
It removed him.
Back in The Nest, he updated the wall board:
TOOLHAND v1 ✅Ghostwire v1 ✅Lazarus: gone 🔥Smoke Circle: watching 👁️MINDVAULT: pending ☣️
And beneath it, a scribbled question:
"How do you build a future without becoming a weapon?"
He didn't have the answer yet.
But now he had time to find it—because no one knew where he was anymore.