Page 8 of South of Justice

If she ran now, she’d leave a trail. Noise. Attention. And the first rule of surviving was simple: never run until you’re sure you have to.

SIX

Lucía yanked on her boots,tucked her go-bag under her arm, and stepped out into the walkway. The night outside was thicker than it had been an hour ago. The moon, once full above the roofs, had disappeared behind a stack of slow-moving clouds.

She headed for the edge of town, toward the only internet café that didn’t require ID and took cash up front. She walked fast and kept her head down, but her paranoia walked faster.

Somewhere behind her, footsteps echoed. Not urgent. Just…wrong.

She ducked into a cornertienda. Pausing at a rack near the door, she pretended to look at nail polish. The footsteps passed. She glanced up, muscles tensing, ready to bolt if necessary. It was a man with a limp and a blue baseball cap. Only when his back disappeared out of sight did she allow herself to breathe.

Behind her, the clerk asked her if she needed anything. She mumbled a reply, then bought a soda just to keep her hands from trembling.

Fifteen minutes later, she slipped into the café. The man behind the counter had a thin face and slimy eyes that tracked allover her, as if trying to peer beneath the layers of her clothing. She paid with a folded 200 peso note.

“Receipt?” he smirked.

She didn’t answer, just turned and walked away, still feeling his eyes on her.

She chose the furthest terminal. Plugged in her emergency USB. Ran the encrypted tunnel she hadn’t used in six months. She opened her offshore proxy.

Blocked.

She tried a second. Then a third. Every one of her safe routes—burned.

She stared at the screen, the cold of the café’s AC creeping up her arms like static. Not random. Not broad. Targeted. This wasn’t just someone poking around, it was someone watching. Someone who knew how to peel back her layers.

A name appeared in one header line, a server alias she remembered all too well.

“ElS-17”

El Escriba.

Her blood turned to ice. He had found her. Not just some unidentified “they.”

Him.

The one man who always understood how she worked, how she thought. The man who’d destroyed her life. The man she’d been hiding from ever since.

Lucía wiped her keystrokes and shut the system down. She pulled the drive and held it tight. A second later, she was out the door.

SEVEN

Back in her apartment,she repacked her go-bag. Clothes, new burner phone, USBs, cash in three currencies. Two of her IDs were still usable. One now wasn’t. She’d have to head for Oaxaca by bus.

Still, though, she didn’t run. Not yet.

El Escriba had found her. But she wasn’t leaving empty-handed. Because there was one last thing she had to do. One final piece to move on the board before she vanished again.

She sat at the table and opened her second laptop, the air-gapped one. It had no stickers and no serial numbers. No OS beyond a hardened Linux shell, and no preloaded programs that she hadn’t written herself.

She fished under the collar of her t-shirt, removing the cheap silver necklace that hung between her breasts. Uncapping the end of the pendant, she plugged the flash drive into the laptop and waited for the directory to populate.

Alpha_C3.bak

It looked harmless. A backup file. Three megabytes. Last modified: eighteen months ago. Her palms were sweating, and heat clung to her back.

She typed the decryption key by hand. No copy-paste, no saved credentials.