Phantom Transactions: A Ledger of Lost Names

The rain never stopped in her dreams. It fell in silver sheets, pooling in the cracks of a city that didn't exist on any map. She stood alone in an alley, clutching a locket that burned cold against her palm, its weight heavier than the gun at her hip. Numbers flickered in the air—strings of digits, endless, alive, whispering secrets she'd buried in code and silence. They weren't just numbers. They were names. Lives. Promises she couldn't keep. Mara Voss woke to the sound of her own heartbeat, louder than the rain drumming on the window of her one-room apartment. The locket was real, pressed against her chest, a tether to a brother who'd died in a ditch seven years ago. The numbers were real too, hidden in servers she'd once traced for faceless men in suits. She'd thought she could outrun them—become Elena Reed, the quiet librarian who shelved books and smiled at strangers. But ghosts don't run. They linger. And hers had found her, slipped into a library book like a blade between ribs. She sat up in the dark, breath fogging in the cold. The burner phone on her table was silent, but she knew it wouldn't stay that way. Somewhere, in a server farm humming with stolen lives, the Black Ledger was waking. And it knew her name. Not Elena. Mara. The rain fell harder. And in its rhythm, she heard the first lie she'd ever told herself: that she could ever be free.