Chapter 17 · The Fuse
Silas sat at his desk and finished reading the post-operation report on Sahel.
The report was long, the language calm, the data analysis thorough — every conclusion cross-verified by at least three independent data sources. But after reading it, Silas swiped it off his terminal, leaned back in his chair, and stared at a point on the ceiling for nearly five minutes without a word.
Twenty-three terminals intercepted. Fifteen people arrested. Four strongholds dismantled. Over three hundred terabytes of data seized.
But the core targets — Farhan and Lu Yuan — were not among them.
Milan had kept them out of the operation. During the pre-operation intelligence screening phase, Milan had crossed those two names off the “permitted to strike” list. His reasoning: “They are technical sources. Their value alive exceeds their value captured. Continue tracking.”
When Silas saw that annotation, his knuckles cracked audibly.
He stood up and walked to the floor-to-ceiling window of his office. Outside was the nightscape of Shenzhen’s Nanshan Science and Technology Park — countless white windows arranged on black building facades like a massive circuit board. His reflection floated faintly on the glass, expressionless, like a sculpture frozen in cold light.
He understood Milan’s “precision operation.” He understood Milan’s desire to let the line run long to catch the big fish. He understood Milan’s need to map the complete organizational topology by monitoring Data Party activity. He understood all of this — at the strategic level, he understood.
But he no longer accepted it.
Sahel Operation had been a perfect trap, but Milan had turned it into an identification tool — twenty-three lives exchanged for the confirmation of Isabel Krause’s identity. Milan had not followed up with pressure, had not launched a second wave of strikes while the Data Party was in disarray, had not sealed the SkyWalker vulnerabilities. He had done nothing. He had returned to that Belgrade office, sat, watched, and waited.
Silas didn’t know what Milan was waiting for. But he knew one thing: Milan’s “precision operation” was consuming his patience, and patience was the shortest resource Silas possessed.
He walked back to his desk and pressed the intercom.
“Liu Yang. Get me a record — Shenzhen Municipal Children’s Hospital, patient Lu Zijing’s Starlink medical authorization file.”
A second of silence on the other end. “Chief, medical data —”
“I’ll sign the authorization.”
The medical information system of Shenzhen Municipal Children’s Hospital received a flagged directive from the Starlink Asia-Pacific Security Center at 2:37 AM.
The directive was not intercepted, not audited, did not trigger any alert — because its source IP belonged to thelegitimate operation subnet of Starlink Security, the signature certificate was valid, and the authorization code was A3 — lawful authorization for security investigation purposes. The hospital system completed verification in a fraction of a second and automatically executed the flag.
Patient ID: GDSZ-LL-2052-07-4417 Name: Lu Zijing Current medical authorization status: Normal
New flag: Pending review — possible fraudulent usage Flag source: Starlink Security · Authorization code A3-SEC-ASIA-7712 Action taken: Remote medical service orders subject to 72-hour manual review Effective: Immediately Estimated review completion: 72 hours (auto-calculated)
No one was notified. No popup alert appeared. When the doctor opened his workstation the next morning, he would not see a red warning — he would simply find that when he tried to initiate a remote specialist consultation request, the system displayed a line of gray提示 text:
「This account has ananomalous flag. Remote medical services have been suspended. Please contact your Starlink customer manager for more information. Reference number: SEC-HOLD-7712-4417.」
No phone call. No email. No appeals channel.
Just a quiet, gray, unremarkable page redirect.
Lu Yuan received the call at eleven the next morning.
He was in the shielded room at the base, debugging the new modulation parameters for SkyWalker — after Sahel, Farhan had added a security layer, requiring both parties to verify identity through a set of dynamically generated QKD noise patterns before each communication. He had just flashed the new parameters into a test terminal and was about to start the first closed-loop test.
His phone vibrated. The screen lit up: the caller ID read 「Shenzhen Municipal Children’s Hospital · Neurology.」
He answered.
“Hello, this is Dr. Zhao — Lu Zijing’s father, right?”
“Yes, Dr. Zhao.”
The tone on the other end was normal — but Lu Yuan’s signal-analysis intuition, cultivated over years in Huawei’s labs, caught a subtle stillness in the background noise. Not a normal clinic background. Dr. Zhao might have moved to a place with no one around to make this call.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” Dr. Zhao said, his speech slightly slower than usual, each word carefully weighed. “This morning when we tried to transmit Zijing’s overnight imaging to thespecialist at Beijing Tiantan Hospital, the system popped up a message — saying your account’s remote medical services had been suspended. Reason given: accountanomalous flag. The review period is seventy-two hours.”
Lu Yuan’s hand holding the phone didn’t move. But in a fraction of a second, his brain completed a multi-layered parse of that sentence: Remote medical services suspended. Accountanomalous flag. Seventy-two hours.
“Dr. Zhao — when was Zijing’s next scheduled remote consultation?”
“Originally, tomorrow afternoon. But if the service is suspended —”
“Will she be able to see the specialist tomorrow?”
There were a few seconds of silence on the line. When Dr. Zhao’s voice came again, it was lower, like saying something he didn’t want to say: “According to the system rules — if no one processes the flag within seventy-two hours, the service will be automatically restored. But ‘restored’ means entering the manual review queue, not direct approval. The actual wait time… the longest I’ve seen was six days. Usually one to two.”
Lu Yuan felt his thumb pressing too hard against the phone casing. The plastic let out a faint creak.
“Who placed this flag?”
“The system only shows an authorization code. No name, no department. But —” Dr. Zhao paused again, longer this time. “In my twelve years working with this system, this type of flag usually comes from Starlink’s Security department. Not from internal medical auditing. Medical audit flags carry a ‘MED’ prefix. This one carries ‘SEC.’”
SEC.
Security department.
Lu Yuan closed his eyes. Behind his shut lids, he didn’t see darkness — he saw a face. Not Milan’s face. Another one. A person he had seen photos of in Data Party files but had never met in person. Silas Chen. Director of Asia-Pacific Security.
The failure of Sahel hadn’t made Silas back off. He had simply switched tools.
“Thank you for telling me, Dr. Zhao.”
“Mr. Lu — I know you’ve been having difficulties dealing with the hospital lately. If you need any help — there’s not much I can do, but if you need me to contact the Tiantan experts through personal communication channels —”
“No need. I’ll handle it.”
He hung up.
The light in the shielded room was cold white, glowing uniformly overhead. The test terminal was still waiting for his command, the status bar blinking 「Awaiting user confirmation.」 Lu Yuan stood in front of the workbench, looking at the screen but not seeing the parameters.
He felt something strange flowing through his veins — not fear, not panic, but an emotion he had never experienced so clearly in his life. Anger. Pure, transparent anger with no杂质. It rose like a slow-rising liquid level, starting from his abdomen, flooding over his ribs, his chest, his throat.
Milan’s control was a net. The logic of the net was constraint, guidance, waiting — it wouldn’t strangle you, but it would keep you moving only within the space it permitted.
Silas’s method was different. Silas’s method was to grab your throat directly. Your daughter needs remote specialist consultation, your daughter needs AI image analysis, your daughter needs every piece of medical data transmitted through Starlink — he could freeze all of it. Not a threat, not a warning, not giving you any bargaining chips. He had simply changed one field in the system and cut off your daughter’s access to medical treatment.
Lu Yuan put the phone in his pocket and pushed open the shielded room door.
His daughter was drawing on a mat in the corner of the base. She was lying on her stomach, her little legs swinging in the air, drawing two people — one tall and one short, holding hands, standing on something green. She saw her father approaching and held up the paper: “Daddy, look! This is you and me!”
Lu Yuan crouched down and looked at the drawing. The people in the picture had big eyes, their mouths curving upward, both seemingly smiling.
“Zijing,” he said, his voice hoarser than he intended. “Daddy needs to go out for a bit. Stay with Sister Shen, okay?”
The little girl’s smile faded slightly, but she didn’t ask why. She just nodded and bent her head back over her drawing. As Lu Yuan stood up, he saw her adding stars to the sky above the figures — drawn with a yellow crayon, lined up neatly across the top of the paper.
He turned and walked toward Farhan’s cage.
Farhan was analyzing Milan’s logs — after Sahel, he had poured all his energy into the search for the nested backdoor. On the screen before him, firmware disassembly windows were densely stacked, the cursor blinking at a memory address offset, surrounded by handwritten annotations.
“Farhan.”
Farhan didn’t turn around, but his hands stopped.
“Zijing’s remote medical care has been frozen,” Lu Yuan said. “Silas did it. Seventy-two-hour manual review. Knowing Silas’s style — it won’t be unfrozen after seventy-two hours either. He’ll drag it out until I do something. Or do nothing and let her miss her consultation.”
Farhan turned around. His eyes were bloodshot from consecutive nights of work, but his gaze was completely sober.
“He’s forcing your hand. Silas knows you’re in the Data Party. He can’t touch us — Milan protecting us from physical strikes. So he went after your daughter.”
“I know.” Lu Yuan’s voice was quiet to the point of transparency, like a metal wire stretched to its limit, emitting that purest, sharpest vibration before snapping. “So the plan moves forward. We act now.”
Farhan looked at him and didn’t answer immediately.
“The plan isn’t ready. The search for thenested entry point isn’t complete — I haven’t found Milan’s backdoor address. Without that entry, SkyWalker can only be a covert channel, not a way to create an autonomous domain in Starlink’s core network.”
“We don’t have time to wait for it to be ready.”
“If we force injection now — the probability of failure —”
“I know.”
Lu Yuan stood at the entrance of the cage, the cold white light behind him casting a sharply defined shadow in front of his body. He showed no agitation. His hands hung at his sides, not clenched, not trembling. But in his eyes was something Farhan had never seen in him before — not madness, not impulse, but something deeper, heavier, colder.
“Not for the Data Party,” Lu Yuan said. “Not for a free internet.”
He paused.
“For my daughter. And for Milan’s daughter. And for every child held hostage by this system.”
Farhan was silent for a long time.
Then he took something out of a drawer — a black encrypted communication terminal, slightly larger than a phone, with a metal casing and a physical switch on the side. He pushed it across the desk to Lu Yuan.
“The number Mia left you is still active. Milan’s private encrypted channel — she activated it after you first contacted her. She said if you ever needed to talk to him directly — dial this number.”
Lu Yuan picked up the terminal. The metal casing was cold, slowly absorbing his body heat in his palm. He found the number in the call history — a sixteen-digit string, not stored on a SIM card, hardcoded into the terminal’s encryption chip.
He pressed the dial key.
The waiting tone before connection was a chaotic white noise with no frequency characteristics, specially processed. It rang four times.
Then the line connected.
No one spoke on the other end. But Lu Yuan could hear breathing — even, steady, the kind of breathing节奏 unique to someone alone late at night.
“Good afternoon, Lu Yuan.”
Milan Vojnović’s voice came through the line. Lower than Lu Yuan had imagined, lacking the authority he had预期 — not weakness, but an extremely restrained calm, like a lake frozen very thick.
“I’ve been waiting for your call.”
Lu Yuan held the terminal in the center of the shielded room. The sounds around him — keyboard clicks, fans, distant voices — all became very distant in that moment, separated by a layer of slowly thickening water.
“Do you know what your people are doing?” he said.
“Silas.” Milan’s voice held no surprise, like a man stating an experimental result he had already seen. “I know. That wasn’t my order.”
“Then stop him.”
Milan was silent on the other end for a moment. When his voice came again, it carried something Lu Yuan couldn’t identify — not apology, not justification, more like… waiting.
“Why should I?”
Lu Yuan’s fingers tightened on the metal casing of the terminal. He felt the anger that had just subsided surging back faster — but he suppressed it before it could cross his throat.
“Because your daughter is on my side.”
After he said it, the silence on the other end became a silence of a different quality. Not the blank of a disconnected line — a silence being filled by something, undergoing a chemical reaction.
“And you still love her,” Lu Yuan said.
When those words came out, even Lu Yuan was surprised. He hadn’t planned to say that — it came out of his mouth on its own, like a thought that had been waiting for its moment, finally finding an exit.
The breathing on the line changed. Not faster, not heavier — but a nearly inaudible pause appeared. Like a person walking steadily suddenly stumbling, losing rhythm for a fraction of a second, then quickly recovering.
But in that fraction of a second — Lu Yuan caught it.
“Your daughter is at a Data Party base, writing letters to her mother every day, saying she doesn’t hate you.” Lu Yuan’s voice was no longer urgent; each word was as clear as a stone washed by water. “She thinks we don’t know who she is. We do. But we haven’t used her against you — not because we didn’t want to, but because she chose her own side. You designed a system that can lock all of humanity inside. But you couldn’t lock your own daughter in.”
Silence. A long silence.
Lu Yuan could hear Milan’s breathing growing deeper on the other end — not tension, more like a person deliberately adjusting their breathing frequency before making a decision that required significant internal resources.
“Milan — her name is Mia. She’s twenty-six years old. She writes code in a Berlin underground base, and her circuit board layouts are better than most full-time engineers in the Data Party. She doesn’t carry your name, but she does what you do — she builds things. If you don’t help her, she might one day be found by Silas’s people. I don’t know if Silas knows she exists — but if he does, you know better than I do what he’ll do.”
After he finished speaking, he didn’t continue. He held the terminal between his shoulder and ear, waiting.
When Milan’s voice came again, it was lighter than anything he had said before — not in volume, but in age. Like a forty-seven-year-old man saying something he should have said when he was seventeen, but had put off until now.
“Lu Yuan. Do you know why I never sealed that vulnerability?”
Lu Yuan didn’t answer.
“I spent thirty years building this system. In those thirty years, I left doors in the firmware countless times — not for myself, but to test whether anyone could find them. The first six years, no one. The next ten years, five people found the first layer. The seven years after that, no one reached the second layer.”
His voice paused.
“You are the first to reach the third layer. You don’t realize it yourself — but you’ve already arrived. Farhan caught up because of your direction. My daughter decided to make that call because of your existence.”
“So you weren’t waiting for me to beg you,” Lu Yuan said. As he spoke these words, he felt himself slowly understanding something — not all of Milan’s calculations, but some underlying structure of the man. “You were waiting for me to come to you.”
Milan didn’t answer. But the non-denial itself was confirmation.
“Fine. I’m here.” Lu Yuan said. “You have two choices now: let him drag this out until my daughter misses her consultation. Or you open that door. Not for me — I mean, for yourself.”
“For myself what?”
Lu Yuan held the terminal, looking at the fine copper mesh on the wall of the shielded room. The copper mesh gleamed with a dull metallic luster under the light, like a wall woven from silence.
“To help your daughter. You haven’t repaired a real line in thirty years. You have a chance now — not to connect the world — to connect the line between you and your daughter.”
The silence on the phone stretched for a long time. So long that Lu Yuan began to wonder if the line had been disconnected.
Then Milan’s voice came again. Just one sentence, calm almost to a whisper:
“I’ll deal with Silas. Seventy-two hours — I’ll buy you seventy-two hours. Once the window opens, you decide your next move.”
The call ended.
Lu Yuan lowered the terminal and saw his hand trembling slightly — not from fear, but because he had just done the boldest thing he had ever done in his life. He had spoken directly to Milan Vojnović. He had jabbed directly into the man’s deepest裂缝. He had mentioned Mia.
Farhan stood at the entrance of the cage, watching him. His expression was not a question, but a reevaluation carrying somethingapproaching awe.
“What did he say?”
“He gave us a window.” Lu Yuan put the terminal back in Farhan’s hand and walked toward his daughter. “Now we need to find the real backdoor Milan hid in the firmware — within those seventy-two hours.”
He crouched in front of his daughter and straightened her collar, which had been rumpled by the drawing paper. The little girl looked up at him, her eyes as clear as two water-polished glass beads.
“Daddy, are you done with your call?”
“Done.”
“Who did you call?”
Lu Yuan looked into her eyes. He thought for a moment.
“Someone who, like Daddy — also has a daughter.”
The little girl didn’t quite understand the answer, but she didn’t press. She held up the paper, with two people holding hands on green grass and yellow stars overhead.
“For you,” she said.
Lu Yuan took the drawing. His gaze lingered on the paper for a long time, so long that his eyes began to burn.
He didn’t let the tears fall.
But in his heart, he did something he had never done before — he said a sentence to Milan Vojnović, one Milan would never hear:
We are both fathers. We both protect our children in our own ways. But my daughter — I will not let her become like yours. I will not let her need to write letters to tell me how she feels.
He carefully folded the drawing and placed it in the inner pocket of his chest — right next to the key Amina had given him, right next to the letter that had not yet been delivered to Belgrade.
Belgrade.
After Milan put down the phone, he sat in the dark office for a long time.
He didn’t turn on the light. Outside the window, the Sava River glimmered faintly in the night, the rooftops of the old town sketched in模糊 gray outlines in the moonlight. The computer screen before him had already switched to standby mode, an occasional cursor blinking on the black背景.
Beside his hand lay the leather-bound diary. The open page was still blank.
He picked up his pen. The nib hovered above the paper.
He wanted to write many things. He wanted to write about Lu Yuan — the first person who made him feel he couldn’t fully predict. He wanted to write about Silas — he had crossed the line; touching a child’s medical file wasn’t security investigation, it was hostage-taking. He wanted to write about himself — sitting by the phone waiting for a Chinese man’s call for two full days, and when the phone finally rang, finding his fingers trembling as he picked it up. He hadn’t trembled in many years.
He ultimately wrote one passage in the diary. His handwriting was not as controlled as usual — some letters curved beyond his customary boundaries, like a man who, after long suppression, had finally allowed his hand to write what it truly wanted:
October 2057. I don’t remember the exact date.
A moment ago, I took a call. A man I’ve never met, using the existence of my daughter as leverage, demanded that I stop my own security director from hurting his child.
I didn’t refuse him.
I don’t know whether I didn’t want to refuse, or couldn’t.
He closed the notebook without signing it.
Outside the window, a Starlink satellite was crossing the Belgrade night sky at a uniform speed. It looked no different from any other star — cold, precise, carrying no warmth. But inside the firmware running within this satellite, a section of code that had never been recorded in any document was quietly waiting. It had existed in Milan’s mind for six years, slept in the firmware for four years, and had never been activated by anyone.
Milan stood up and walked to the window. He watched the satellite’s light point gradually merge into the denser constellation of lights in the night sky — those one hundred and twenty thousand silent stars arranged above him in a net with no end.
He thought of his father.
The line must be open.
But open to where? To what extent? If there was no one at the other end of the line — or if the person standing at the other end was his own daughter — then was an open line still truly open?
Milan didn’t answer his own question.
But he didn’t delete thenested entry point either.
