08 — Chez, Off-Grid

April 18, 9:11 PM (Safehouse ‘Threadbare’, D2)

The laundromat’s sign still buzzed OPEN even though no one had washed a shirt here since before the last blackout. Chez liked it for the noise; noise hid thinking. The hum and buzz covered the way his thoughts tried to eat each other alive when it got too quiet.

The place smelled of detergent gone sour and coins that hadn’t been touched in a decade. Machines sat in rows like retirees at a wake, doors cracked, drums open, rust stains bleeding down their sides.

Chez had punched three mesh nodes into a loop that looked like a mistake and wasn’t, and now the Eidolon RSVP list lay in front of him like a hymn book rewritten by drunks. Every entry was another tether: wristbands paired to wallets, wallets paired to private decks, decks paired to appetites with names like Custom Curations and Experience Alchemy.

His spiders crept in. Soft code. Polite code. Code that smiled at security like a good guest, asked for a glass of water, and left with the silverware.

Names scrolled. Politicians. Heirs. Corp handlers with taste for things you couldn’t buy in daylight. Chez tagged and mapped until the connections glowed like a spiderweb under UV.

Then one name blinked with a little corporate halo:

MAX CALDER.

Status: VIP.
Memo: HANDLER ADJACENCY — DISCREET.

Chez’s fingers stilled. The crawler underlined the name twice as if it knew trouble when it smelled it. He tagged the profile with his hungriest script, a digital lamprey, then leaned back in his chair.

He typed in the ops log:

LEILA — WATCH THIS ONE.

A washer kicked on by itself, ghost power hiccuping through old circuitry. The drum turned slow and empty, sloshing nothing.

Chez chuckled. “Same.”

He bit into a donut that had lived too long in a vending bag. Chalk and old sugar. He washed it with coffee that tasted like surrender.

The guest list filled itself into a lattice. When his script finally hissed:

KEYLOGGERS SET: 187.

he let himself lean back, fingers tapping out nervous rhythm on his thighs.

“Tomorrow we rob the rich of their secrets,” he said aloud, as if Bruce Lee’s poster could hear him from back at the Nest.

The buzzing sign over the door spat sparks. It was as close to an amen as he was going to get.

And still — Max Calder’s name pulsed in his mind like a warning beacon.