A soft ping from the rack announced another alert. Maren rotated to face the wall of monitors. The map showed a cluster of nodes blinking like a constellation—each a municipal sensor, a traffic controller, a hospital triage tablet. Someone, somewhere, had flipped a remote kill. The pattern didn’t fit a random failure; it read like intent.

“And if we don’t try, the triage tablets die in two hours.” Maren’s voice steadied. “We make the token transient, verifiable only for the next handshake

“Who?” Maren whispered, more to the monitor than to him.

Jace set the slate down and rubbed his temples. “Which means?”

Maren didn’t look away. “Kernel patched, sandbox isolated. The OS won’t accept new drivers. Firewall has a hardware lockdown. But the process is still… throttled. User space’s blocked threads are in a limbo. We can’t get signatures through.”