BEHIND THE CLOUD

Chapter 17 — Dark Discovery

Dissecting the kill-switch protocol, Amara discovers that the entire tech grid is chained to municipal power and telco towers. To shut off the cloud manipulation, she must orchestrate a staggered brownout—one that risks plunging half the town into darkness and chaos.

She sketches brownout maps on her mother’s old barometer logs, calculating which neighborhoods can tolerate hour-long outages and which critical systems (hospital, water) must be spared.

The complexity is crushing. She tests the plan on simulations, seeing some paths ending in disaster—lives lost if she pulls the wrong lever. A different kind of courage is required: to act, but to act precisely.

She writes a contingency plan, ready for one final gambit.

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