Page 183 - TruthAboutLyingFinal

Nicholas Boothman
Chapter 13:
The State of Nature
Henry was on the move.
Forty-eight hours. No sleep. Just the ghost networks he’d built, and the cold sweat of a man who knew exactly how hunters tracked their prey.
Because he’d taught them.
The Truth Collective was behind him. Purists. Zealots who thought honesty was a scalpel when it was a sledgehammer. They wanted his head. They wanted the man who’d blinked.
His satellite phone was a brick. Dark. Dead.
Jinji and Vincent had scrubbed his digital DNA from the decentralized web. But he wasn’t invisible. Not yet. He had one card left to play: an old, secure back-door terminal from his spin days. A relic from a time when a well-placed lie could stop a war.
He found a hole to disappear into, a museum archive choked with dust and the smell of decaying paper. Around him stood the bronze ghosts of diplomacy, statesmen, liars, legends. Men who’d built empires on the fine art of the half- truth.
He fired up the salvaged screen. Watched the world bleed in high definition.
Act Two was ending.
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