The apartment was not hers. It belonged to a friend of a friend who hadn’t asked questions. It was too central. Too visible. She’d only planned to stay two nights. This was the third.

Ava sat at the table, scrolling through her NOSTR feed. Half her posts from the past week were gone. Not deleted—scrubbed. Removed from indexing, orphaned from their relays. Her account still existed. It was just... dimmer.

She ran a query on @dao_meta. Shadowbanned.

Another name in a long list.

She moved to her inbox. Two bounced emails. One marked “delayed indefinitely.” A contact in Athens had gone quiet. Another in Lisbon messaged: “We’re being watched. Careful what you publish.”

Then the ping came. Not from her network. From the outside.

> 1 new image received.

She clicked.

It was her. From behind. Taken that morning. Crossing the plaza with a tote bag and a hood up. High angle. Surveillance-grade.

She didn’t panic.

She stood. Closed the laptop. Pulled the battery. Switched off the phone—hard power kill.

Walked to the window. Nothing out of place. No black vans. No men with earpieces. Just the ordinary shape of a city she no longer trusted.

She sat back down and opened her notebook.

On one page: Toward a Lottery Constitution.

On the opposite: a sentence in Alias’s handwriting, copied years ago from Borges:

“Like all the men in Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave.”

She drew a single line through the page. Not to erase. To finalize.

Then she packed everything she could carry into one backpack, left the rest behind, and slipped out the back staircase.

By morning, she would be somewhere else.

Not gone. Just no longer visible.