The man who stepped from the shadows was thin, wiry, and ghost-pale under the flickering warehouse lights.
Layla didn't recognize him.
But his voice — she'd heard it once, long ago, behind a cracked office door in the Ministry.
"Reza Mounif," he said without waiting. "Senior analyst. Ministry of Internal Cyber Surveillance."
Layla didn't blink.
"You're one of them."
"Was," he corrected. "Now I'm what they erase when they start feeling nervous."
He held up a flash drive.
"Your brother got this to me two nights before they took him. He was being followed. Said if anything happened to him, I should find you. Said you'd understand what to do with it."
Layla took it. Cold in her palm.
"What is it?"
Reza hesitated. Then: "Proof."
"Of what?"
He looked around the empty warehouse, as if afraid the walls themselves might be listening.
"Project Safa. That's what they're calling it. It's not just surveillance. It's narrative architecture. They've developed software that maps your digital footprint—every post, every text, every email—and rewrites it in real time."
Layla's heart thudded. "To what end?"
"To turn enemies into ghosts. To erase history."
He took a breath. "Imagine you spoke out against the regime last week. Now your timeline shows you praising the President. Your photos are swapped. Your friends' feeds rewritten. And if you try to prove otherwise?"
He tapped the side of his head.
"No evidence. Because they own the evidence now."
Back in her hotel room, Layla inserted the flash drive into her offline laptop.
It contained one folder: "Eid_2023.zip."
Odd.
She opened it.
Hundreds of files. Photos. PDFs. Audio recordings. A few documents in corrupted code. A few text files in perfect, polished Arabic — messages from senior Ministry officials discussing implementation of Project Safa.
Then one file stopped her breath:
"Adam_Rami_Final.mov"
She clicked it.
Her brother appeared on-screen. Disheveled. Eyes bruised. Sitting against a concrete wall.
"I don't know how long I have," he began, voice tight. "They found the archives I was working with — the ones that proved they fabricated the death toll after the riots last year. They knew. They always knew."
He coughed hard. Blood on his lip.
"If you're watching this, Layla… I need you to finish what we started. Not just for me. For the ones who already disappeared."
The video glitched. Then cut.
She sat in silence.
Ten minutes passed before she stood.
At sunrise, she made a decision.
The evidence wasn't enough. The people wouldn't believe code, or documents, or some shadowy nerd in a warehouse.
They needed something bigger.
A symbol.
And there was only one way to expose Project Safa to the masses: by leaking it on government soil, in front of their own cameras, using their own voices.
She needed a platform.
She needed a name from her past.
She needed Minister Sami El-Amin.