In a makeshift bunker beneath the ruins of an old library, Kirion watched his daughter bend over a spread of salvaged tech—routers with scorched ports, cracked monitors, and a tangled mass of cables she somehow made sense of. The air smelled of dust, solder, and quiet determination.
He never taught her this. Not directly.
But she had always watched—watched him rewire transmitters, bypass locks, strip old drones for parts. And she had learned.
Now she was beyond him.
"I isolated Kael's digital footprint," she said without looking up. "He's using a proxy loop, masking through six dead nodes, but he left a trace. Not enough to find him—yet. But enough to follow."
Kirion raised an eyebrow. "And you did that with… what, a melted laptop and a half-dead signal repeater?"
She finally glanced up, smirking. "And a drive full of old military firmware. You'd be surprised how lazy the government gets with their backdoors."
Nira, seated nearby and patching a wound on her arm, chuckled. "She's not just a hacker. She's a ghost in their machine."
Kirion walked over, crouching beside her. "You've gone beyond what I imagined. How long have you been doing this?"
His daughter hesitated.
"Since before the compound. Since… you started coming home with blood on your shirt."
The room fell silent.
"I wanted to help. Not just hide, not just be protected. I wanted to be part of this."
Kirion placed a hand on her shoulder, equal parts pride and worry flickering in his eyes. "You are. You always were."
She nodded toward a blinking monitor. "There's more. I've been mapping signals. I think I can find where they're staging the government's next major op. And… I'm close to finding where they took the others."
Kirion stood, voice low and serious. "Then you're not just helping anymore. You're leading."
She looked up at him—young, tired, and sharper than ever.
"Let's bring them down, Dad."
And in that dim, forgotten corner of a broken city, The Tech Whisperer declared silent war on the digital empire.