The alleys of Chicago hadn’t changed, not really. They still reeked of wet asphalt and cigarette ash, of oil-slick puddles and things left rotting in the dark. Jack moved through them like he had before all of it—before NovaTech, before the Guardians’ collapse, before Rayner’s fall. Before he’d become Veil.

  It wasn’t nostalgia that brought him back. It was necessity.

  His boots moved soundlessly over broken glass as he turned down a shadowed side street off Kedzie, his hood drawn low and his mask tucked in the inner lining of his jacket. Even without it, no one looked too closely at him. People didn’t in these parts. Looking too closely got you remembered. Remembered people ended up in ditches.

  The aftershocks of the funeral attack were still rippling across the city. Everyone aboveground was scrambling—council members, PR teams, NovaTech executives trying to firewall their liability. But down here, in the rusted gut of the city, things moved slower. Deeper.

  And Jack knew exactly where to start.

  He ducked into a graffiti-smeared bar whose sign had stopped buzzing ten years ago. Inside, the lighting was worse than the street. A single orange bulb dangled overhead, casting long shadows over scarred tables and hollowed men nursing their third drinks. No music. Just murmurs and the occasional sharp clatter of glass.

  The bartender clocked him immediately—an older woman named Silva, with one eye and no patience for theatrics.

  “You look like hell,” she said, wiping a glass with a rag so dirty it probably made the glass worse.

  “Feels like it,” Jack replied. “Still got friends in the Market?”

  Silva’s hand paused mid-wipe. “Depends. You looking for a payday or a warning?”

  “Neither,” Jack said. “Looking for answers.”

  She tilted her head. “That’s worse.”

  Silva didn’t ask questions. She never had. But she gave him a look, one that said she knew more than she let on, then nodded toward the back. “Booth nine. Talk quiet.”

  Jack nodded once and moved.

  Booth nine had a direct line into the underworld’s whisper stream. Literally. There were mic feeds rigged under the wood—pirate surveillance lines patched into black market channels. The kind of thing NovaTech once tried to shut down until they realized it was better to listen than to silence. Jack slid into the booth and tapped the glass panel hidden beneath the peeling surface. It buzzed faintly.

  He keyed in an old login. One not tied to “Veil,” but to “Donovan.” A name still known in circles you never wanted to owe.

  The screen flickered to life.

  Lines of encrypted chatter crawled across the display—feeds from encrypted arms dealers, tech smugglers, abandoned NovaTech research nodes that had gone dark two years ago but were now suspiciously active again.

  Jack filtered by signal origin. He wasn’t looking for just anyone. He was looking for the man who sold the Chancellor his edge.

  And eventually, he found it.

  Not a name, but a call sign.

  BLACKSWAN.

  The name appeared in three separate transactions. All recent. All routed through dead zones near the harbor.

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  And every time, it was linked to something impossible.

  The first: a stolen NovaTech graviton anchor—experimental tech still in early testing, capable of nullifying localized gravity fields.

  The second: a modified psychic amplifier. Not standard issue. Prototype-only. Amplifies output range but also siphons energy from ambient sources—crowds, machines, neural networks.

  And the third…

  Jack’s blood ran cold.

  The third was the blueprints for NovaTech’s neural interface modulator—the tech the Chancellor had likely used to enhance his control over The Guardians.

  None of this should’ve been accessible. None of it should’ve left the vault.

  Jack leaned back, his jaw tight.

  BLACKSWAN wasn’t a fence. This wasn’t just stolen tech. These were curated pieces—handpicked tools designed to dismantle heroes, one nerve at a time.

  Whoever BLACKSWAN was, they weren’t just part of this.

  They were orchestrating it.

  And worse—he had help.

  Jack decrypted one of the recent transactions. Embedded inside was a line of code—sloppy, unclean, but familiar. A signature he recognized from NovaTech’s older internal tracking systems. Someone on the inside had either leaked this data or built the backdoor to get it out.

  A mole.

  Jack stood and slid the panel shut. He slipped his gloves back on and pulled the mask from his jacket, securing it across his face in one smooth motion.

  The air around him cooled. Focus returned.

  Veil stepped into the night.

  He didn’t go back to the rooftops. Not yet.

  First, he paid a visit to an old haunt beneath the South Side rail yard—an abandoned freight tunnel where information moved faster than trains. A network of hackers, fixers, and digital ghosts known collectively as the Lowwire had operated there for years, hiding in plain sight behind the static of a thousand broken signals.

  The entrance was coded through a burned-out subway map. Veil keyed in the sequence: northeast to southwest, like the fracture lines spreading across the city.

  A panel slid aside. Cold, stale air greeted him.

  Inside, flickering monitors illuminated the faces of half a dozen operatives. One, a wiry teen with bleached dreadlocks, looked up from a cracked laptop.

  “Veil,” he said, blinking. “Shit. You’re alive.”

  “Depends who’s asking,” Veil replied. “I need a trace on the callsign BLACKSWAN. NovaTech data leaks. High-level stuff.”

  “You’re not asking for much, huh?”

  “I’m not asking,” Jack said.

  The hacker—Kato—grimaced but nodded. “Alright. Give me twenty minutes.”

  “Make it ten.”

  While Kato worked, Jack reviewed what little else he had. The Chancellor hadn’t acted alone. That was obvious now. But the scope of it? The Chancellor had been the blade—sharp, brutal, direct.

  BLACKSWAN was the hand that held it.

  When Kato finally turned the screen toward him, Jack’s stomach sank.

  The IP trail for BLACKSWAN’s transactions didn’t end in Chicago.

  It didn’t even end in the country.

  It went international—three locations, bouncing from London to Delhi to a floating data center in the Arctic Circle.

  And in each, the encryption bore traces of a singular AI interface—a shell program rumored to have been developed by rogue engineers from NovaTech’s psychic division before they’d been fired for “unauthorized experimentation.”

  “What the hell is this?” Jack asked, pointing at the signature.

  Kato leaned in. “That? That’s not just a fence. That’s an operating system. One that learns how to sell.”

  “A black market AI?”

  “No. Worse,” Kato said. “It’s an arms dealer with a brain. And it’s not working alone.”

  Veil stared at the screen for a long moment. This was bigger than the Chancellor. Bigger than any one villain. Whatever was coming wasn’t just a supervillain with a grudge.

  It was systemic. Organized. And highly intelligent.

  He left the tunnel with a name and a mission. BLACKSWAN was the key—but to what, he didn’t know yet. Not fully. But he would. He had to. Because if this thing could orchestrate an event like the funeral attack, there was no telling what it was building toward next.

  As he stepped back into the city, the skyline loomed ahead—scarred, yes. But still standing.

  For now, Veil vanished into the shadows.

  The hunt had begun.