"We can isolate this center," Meera said quietly. "Segment the grid, flip precedence for medical nodes. It'll cut power to whole districts, but it saves life-critical systems."
Someone had written BLOODSTREAM into a patch and called it salvation. Someone else had decided that salvation was a human face turning a wrench in a dark control room, picking which lights to kill so others might burn brighter.
"Origin obfuscated through three proxies," said Meera, the cyber forensics analyst, voice flat with exhaustion. "But the packet signature matches a pattern I've seen—calls itself Kuruthipunal protocols. Military-grade evasion."