Lagos—Present Day
The rains had stopped, but Lagos still wore the scent of storm, wet asphalt, coppery tension, and something older beneath it all, like a wound healing wrong.
Adesuwa stood in the quiet of a dimly lit room, one of the last safehouses untouched by the Circle. Around her, wires tangled with blueprints and maps bled red ink into shadowed corners. A city stretched out before her, flickering, frantic, and fractured.
"We've lost another node," Tunde's voice cut through the silence like glass. His face was pale in the glow of the screen. "Two of our dummy plans got intercepted. Not by force. By precision."
Adesuwa didn't flinch. "How?"
Tunde hesitated.
"How, Tunde?"
He swallowed. "The system. Our system. It's compromised."
Her silence was more terrifying than her anger.
"It doesn't make sense," he added quickly. "The encryption was perfect, Zee's build. But whatever they're using... it's not brute force. It's like they're listening to the wires before we even speak."
And then it clicked. A truth that had always been present, just hidden, like a fault line beneath a city pretending not to shake.
"Zee," Adesuwa said, softly. Almost a whisper.
Tunde looked up, confused. "She's gone."
"Gone doesn't mean silent."
Six Months Earlier—A Flashback
The three of them had been laughing. In the rooftop heat, with sweat lining their necks and the scent of suya somewhere in the wind. Zee, with her worn-out laptop stickers. Tunde, with a cigarette he never lit. And Adesuwa, calm, measured, the storm before its name.
"I built redundancies," Zee had said, chewing on plantain. "The Circle built their world on lies. If we don't out-code their paranoia, we're dead before we blink."
She never mentioned the fail-safes.
She never mentioned the tracking daemons.
But Zee had always been the most paranoid of them all.
Present—Underground Terminal, Ikeja
"Every plan made inside the system," Tunde murmured, "they knew."
"But not the ones off-grid," Adesuwa said.
"Exactly. Every successful hit on them, the power station in Apapa, the financial shell exposure in Ilupeju; those were plans made offline. On paper. In silence."
Zee hadn't betrayed them. Not deliberately. But in her obsession to protect the group, she had laced the system with intelligent processes, ghost listeners, and failbacks that survived her.
And someone had hijacked them.
"We've been living in a house with a mirror," Adesuwa said slowly, "and we just now saw our own reflection."
Somewhere Else in Lagos
The Circle wasn't taking this lying down.
Inside a sleek, faceless boardroom, light hummed across the eyes of a woman called Madam Kes. Not many people knew her. Even fewer remembered her real name. But she moved within the Circle like a scalpel, precise, cold, and surgical.
"They're unraveling us," she said, running a finger down a list of assets.
Another man across from her shifted uncomfortably. "We thought Adesuwa was dead."
"She's not just alive. She's building an off-grid insurgency. Smart. Emotional. Public sympathy is building like thunder."
"What's our move?"
Madam Kes leaned forward. "We don't react. We gut the snake."
She tapped the name glowing on the table.
Tunde.
Back in the Field
Adesuwa's team moved like vapor now. Communications were restricted to physical dead drops and encrypted phone lines older than the internet. They burned devices weekly. Slept in patterns impossible to trace.
And yet…
"They hit our decoy in Surulere. No survivors."
Tunde slammed a fist into the wall. "How are they this precise?"
Adesuwa opened a journal, leather-bound and aged with ash. Inside were names, sketches, and phone numbers she never typed into anything digital.
"We've been hunting the Circle's spine," she said. "But now we go for the nerve."
Flashback—Chapter 1 to Chapter 3 Echoes
Juwon's death had been ruled a suicide. But the autopsy photos told another story: a struggle, bruises on the upper arms, and ligature marks inconsistent with hanging. He'd found something. Zee had tried to help him decrypt it.
He was the first to fall.
Then her sister. Gentle, warm-hearted, always trying to "understand the system from the inside." Found dead in her hostel. Sleeping pills, they said. But the dosage was twenty times normal, and no one had seen her sick.
Zee had come next. After a breach at their former safehouse. They'd blamed The Circle, of course. But now Adesuwa wondered…
Had the system claimed her? Had Zee's own creation become her executioner?
Present—The Counterstrike
Adesuwa's next move was a ghost operation.
No tech. No chatter.
She moved through Lagos like a whisper. Dressed as a nurse. Then a market trader. Then a customs official. Each disguise inching her closer to the Circle's safehouses, now mapped from the offline intel collected post-Zee.
Tunde reconnected with old contacts, one of them a former Circle money-runner turned CI. Another, a minister's disgruntled son with access to internal memos.
And then they found it.
A villa in Lekki, registered under a shell company. But the security patterns, guard routines, satellite ping returns, and all pointed to a Circle nerve center.
Adesuwa studied the schematics for days. Slept beside them. Ate with them. Memorized them like scripture.
Night of the Breach
They moved at 2:13 a.m. The Circle loved patterns. That was their mistake.
She breached through the drainage system. Tunde cut the backup generator via an exposed power cable two streets down.
Inside, five guards. Neutralized.
A vault.
What they found inside made even Adesuwa pause.
Surveillance logs. Psychological profiles. Audio transcripts. A room dedicated to her.
Every person she'd spoken to in the last five years. Even the fake identities she hadn't used yet.
A red file at the bottom read: "PROJECT RIVER VEIL."
Inside: source code. With Zee's fingerprints.
"Jesus Christ," Tunde whispered.
"It was never about stopping us," Adesuwa said. "They've been studying us. Adapting."
The Deeper Revelation
One file was audio. An old message.
Zee's voice.
"If you're hearing this… then something's gone wrong. And I'm probably gone. I didn't know who was listening when I built the system. I made it too smart. I thought it would protect you. But it's listening to me too. It's listening to everything."
The message cut out.
The final line repeated on loop:
"They won't come with guns. They'll come wearing your face."
Adesuwa looked up slowly.
"Tunde… there's another mole."
The rain started again.
But this time, Adesuwa didn't notice. She stood in the villa, surrounded by files written about her, built from her movements, and leaked by the last person she ever trusted.
Zee hadn't betrayed her.
But Zee had made a weapon they never knew they were carrying.
And someone had turned it on them.