The smell of burnt polymer lingered inside her skull, hot and acrid, like solder dropped onto raw meat. Chanda opened her lids. Nothing. No neon bleed from the canal alleys, no flash of diagnostic code across her retinal field, no light at all. Just an absolute, suffocating void. A scream scraped against her throat, but all that came out was a dry rasp. Her hands flew to her left temple. The skin around the input socket was blistered, swollen shut around dead silicon. A heavy, muscular bulk shifted against her ribs. Warm fur, thick and coarse, pressed into her flank, followed by the wet puff of breath against her cheek. Sokha. The clouded leopard gave a low, rumbling chuff, resting his broad chin across her knees. "Easy," a voice rasped from the dark. "Don't rip the dressing off. You're bleeding through the gauze." Chanda went rigid. She shoved herself backward until her shoulder blades struck corrugated iron. Her fingers curled into claws, catching Sokha's scruff. Sokha didn't snarl, which meant whoever stood before her posed no immediate physical threat, but the voice belonged to a ghost she had excised days ago. "Arthit?" "Don't move, please." Footsteps shuffled forward, halting and clumsy. A metallic clatter—a basin, water sloshing against zinc. "I'm putting a clean compress on. Just... hold still." A coarse cloth touched her temple, cool and damp. His hand shook. The rough calluses of his fingers brushed her jaw, trembling with a pathetic, reverent caution that made her stomach twist. For three years, that hand had barely touched her unless he was reaching past her for a set of keys or tossing an itinerary onto the breakfast table. "Get away from me," she said, her voice flat, stripped of its old, pliant cadence. "I brought you down to the low tier," Arthit murmured, ignoring the command. He sounded wrecked, his ribs audibly whistling with every inhale. "The under-canal pipes near Phra Khanong. No scanners down here. Even the municipal drones avoid the methane pockets." A ragged pause. "I had to drag you three blocks after your friend ditched the bike. You weren't breathing right, Chanda. You stopped breathing for almost two minutes." "You should have left me." "I couldn't." The words came out thick, cracked down the middle. "I spent three years walking past you in my own halls like you were furniture. You held my entire corporate ledger in your palm, and I treated you like... like an embarrassment. I watched you bleed on that temple floor because of me. If I leave you, I have nothing left to look at in the mirror without vomiting." "Your guilt doesn't interest me, Arthit. Give me my satchel." He hesitated. She heard the drag of his injured leg as he turned. The sound was pathetic—a billionaire heir whose bespoke Italian loafers were probably soaking in rancid canal runoff, reduced to a limping orderly. "The boy took your comm-rig," Arthit said quietly, returning. "He said it was fried anyway. But I... before I followed your tracker into the lower grid, I broke into the central archive at the Tevan estate. The physical vaults. You always said digital records could be rewritten, but paper leaves an ash trace." A heavy bundle of fibrous stock dropped onto her lap. It smelled of mildew, age, and cold cellar vaults. Old vellum. Real cellulose, untouched by the net for decades. "Read it," Chanda commanded. She hated the helplessness, hated the pitch-black fog blinding her, but the burning ache in her skull left her no alternative. "Page by page. Don't editorialize. Just the data." Arthit pulled a match or a lighter; she heard the strike of a spark, smelled sulfur, then kerosene. A lantern hissed to life, casting warmth she could feel against her skin even if she couldn't see the flame. "It's an old trust deed," Arthit began, his voice raspy. "Dated thirty-two years ago. Tevan Somchai... your father. An out-of-court settlement with an extraction technician from the Rayong refineries. A woman named Sunee." Chanda's brow furrowed. "My father had no dependents outside my mother's lineage." "He did," Arthit countered softly. "There was a child. Male. Born with severe neural dysplasia, born during the early trials of the Tevan bio-mesh implants. The estate settled, scrubbed the registry, and cut them off. The child was sent to an offshore orphanage in Koh Kong. Look at the lineage profile attached to the bloodwork—wait, you can't see. Chanda..." His hand reached out, hovering near her sleeve before pulling back in self-loathing hesitation. "Speak, Arthit." "The mitochondrial markers match your maternal line's cross-indexing, but the paternal sequence is a direct eighty-eight percent parity to yours. Half-sibling. The boy's registered name on the birth certificate wasn't Phirun." "What was it?" "Pran Tevan. Alias added twenty years later in the maritime registry: Phirun." The name struck like a hammer against her ribs. Phirun. Her gentle, patient mentor. The man who had met her in the dark corners of the Silk-Net Enclave when she was nineteen, who had praised her raw code, who had guided her fingers across decryptor decks when her father ignored her. He hadn't stumbled upon her by accident. He had hunted her. "He was never my guide," Chanda whispered, the realization tasting of bitter iron. "He was stripping my armor. He guided me into marrying you. He suggested you." Arthit made a choking sound. "What?" "Three years ago. Naga-Zero received an anonymous prompt pointing toward the Kasem family's logistics contract. Phirun told me you were an arrogant, predictable mark—easy to hide behind, easy to control if I wanted to disappear from the Tevan clan's scrutiny. He set me up in your path. He wanted me docile, trapped in a dead marriage, isolated from my family's board." And then, the hospital. The white tiles. The sudden, agonizing cramps that had ended her pregnancy at twelve weeks. The physician who logged a spontaneous termination while administering a synthetic sedative provided by an off-grid courier. *He supplied the private ward's floor plan.* Phirun had not merely observed. He had poisoned the clinic's nutrient drip. He had killed the child to prevent a direct heir from securing the Tevan trust, ensuring the conglomerate would fracture when Somchai died. "He killed my baby," Chanda said. The words didn't come out as a sob. They were cold, calcified stones. Beside her, Arthit dropped to his knees. The concrete thumped beneath his weight. He seized the hem of her jacket, his head bowing until his forehead touched her boots. "Chanda... God, Chanda, I blamed you for that. When you lost the child, I walked out. I went to Maliha's apartment because I couldn't handle the silence in the house. I left you alone in that room while you were dying..." He wept into the dirty leather of her footwear, shoulders jerking as his composure rotted away completely. It was repulsive. It was utterly useless. "Get up," she said coldly. "I don't deserve to breathe the same air as you," he choked, clutching the fabric tighter. "Tell me what to do. Tell me who to kill. I'll take a blade to Phirun's throat myself, Chanda, please—just let me bleed for you once—" *BAM.* The rusted iron door of the maintenance shed buckled inward with a violent crash. Sokha lunged to his feet, a guttural roar ripping from the feline's throat, claws digging into the stone floor. "Down, cat! Down!" Kiet stumbled through the ruined threshold, his platinum hair plastered to his forehead with grease and rainwater. His designer jacket was shredded, exposing bruised ribs and an arm wrapped in improvised tourniquets. He kicked the door shut behind him, jamming an iron rebar through the handles. "Save the groveling for the funeral, Kasem," Kiet spat, chest heaving like an overtaxed turbine. He aimed his stare at Chanda's deadened gaze and the charred socket beneath her hairline, checking his balance against the damp wall. "He broke through the municipal firewall." Chanda tilted her head toward the sound of his ragged breath. "How long?" "Three hours," Kiet said, his voice ragged. "Phirun hijacked the Grand Canal sub-station. He’s draining the grid to power a system-wide broadcast scrub. In three hours, Krung-Thep Nova goes completely dark—and when the backup generators kick on, every Tevan database, every record of Naga-Zero, and your legal identity will be permanently zeroed."

The Blind Spot