Kingpouge screamed her name as the Silk Worms swarmed him. But Laika was already gone, bounding across fire escapes and collapsing scaffolds, a mongrel ghost with a crown's worth of secrets in her teeth.
"The switch?" Laika's voice was almost amused. "I spent six months chewing through the relay wires, one strand of copper at a time. You never noticed. You only ever looked at the surface."
In the grimy, rain-slicked underbelly of Nova Bastogne, where corporate skyscrapers pierced smog-choked clouds and the poor lived in the shadows of neon signs that promised a better tomorrow, there was a legend. Not of heroes or saints, but of a ghost. They called him .
But even a king needs a court, and every court has its fool. Or, in this case, its hound.
In that instant, the Silk Worms' breaching charge blew the chamber doors apart. Kingpouge reached for his concealed plasma pistol, but Laika was faster. She didn't attack him. Instead, she lunged for the safe, her metal-reinforced jaws tearing through the biometric lock like wet paper. She grabbed the data-slate—the whole of his empire, the kill-codes, the blackmail files, the fortune—and leaped out the shattered window into the rain-slicked dark.