Chapter 2

The woman climbed down and sat across from me, unwrapping her own energy bar.

"You're the seventh person who refused to pick an identity this month," she said between bites.

"What happened to the other six?"

She bit down hard, teeth cracking against her bar. "Dead."

I went quiet for a moment. Didn't ask how.

She said her name was Ivy White—someone who'd been off the grid for two years. A real ghost in the Dominion Network.

"Don't buy into their whole 'free choice' bullshit," she said. "You think they actually let you decide? They've already calculated what you'll pick. You're not choosing an identity—you're picking your own prison cell."

She smiled, but there was no warmth in it. "When you refuse to play along, you're basically flipping them off."

She said it so casually, but it sent chills down my spine.

We slipped into an abandoned maintenance tunnel in the subway. The place reeked of mold and felt like somewhere people went to disappear forever.

Ivy dug into her beat-up backpack and pulled out a small metal case. Inside was an old SIM card.

"Pop this in your phone. You'll get internet access, and the Dominion Network can't track you."

I hesitated for a second before taking it.

"Why help me?"

Ivy smiled, but her eyes turned cold. "Because people like you usually end up dead."

We slumped against the wall.

Ivy asked casually, "Do you know how long the Dominion Network has actually been running?"

I shook my head.

"Fifty years," Ivy said. "When they rolled it out globally, they said it was for efficiency, stability, and everyone knowing their place. But think about it. If people are just labels, are we even human anymore?"

I stared into her eyes, and for the first time, I felt scared.

Not of her, but of how comfortable my life had been for 18 years.

So comfortable that it took me until today to realize I was nothing more than a numbered tag on a chain.

"People like us? The government calls us 'identity traitors.'" Ivy let out a sneer. "More accurately—we're the virus in the Dominion Network."

She pulled a beat-up tablet from her backpack and showed me a list on the screen.

I found my number—10734.

The note beside it read: [High-risk target. Priority elimination.]

My palms went clammy.

Ivy watched me stare at the screen in silence, then slapped my shoulder. "Welcome to hell."

"Is there any way to survive this?" I asked.

Ivy lit up a cigarette and blew out a stream of smoke, her gaze hard as steel.

"Don't think about surviving. Think about how we're gonna take down the Dominion Network."

*****

We stayed up all night.

"When you're unbound," Ivy said, "you never really sleep."

She led me through the city's sewers—and I mean actual sewers, not some metaphor.

The air reeked of rust, decay, and something burnt that I couldn't place, like the whole city was rotting from the inside out.

I followed her through passages I never knew existed, until we reached a rusted iron door.

She knocked in some kind of code—one knock, then two quick ones, then one more.

The door opened a crack. A guy peered out with bloodshot eyes, his voice rough as sandpaper. "Password."

"Number 389, bringing back Number 10734," Ivy said.

"New traitor?" he asked, eyeing me with suspicion.

"Nope." Ivy grinned. "He's a Refuser."

Something changed in his eyes.

Without another word, the door opened.

This was my first real look at what they called the "identity traitors."

It was a run-down underground space that had been turned into a makeshift base. Walls made of scrap metal, spray-painted slogans everywhere. [The Dominion Network doesn't define us. We weren't born to be numbers.]

Not many people around, but everyone looked alert, focused, like they'd been through hell and made it out.

There were old people, kids, and teenagers who couldn't be much older than 18.

None of them had official IDs or system numbers.

But they felt more real, more human than anyone I'd ever met in the Network.

Ivy took me to a cramped little room. "Sleep for two hours. Then, we've got something for you to do."

"What is it?" I asked.

She tossed me a beat-up tablet. One line of text filled the screen.

[Simulated Network ID Intrusion Exercise.]

I frowned. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Ivy lit a cigarette and leaned against the door. "You refused their system, so now you're free. But if you want to survive, you need to learn how to pretend you're still their slave."

*****

Two hours later, Ivy kicked me awake.

"Training starts now," she sneered.

I sat at the computer. The screen flickered on, showing a fake citizen profile:

Name: Lucas Yuan

Age: 18

Identity: B-Class Logistics Worker

Marriage Status: Pending Assignment

Personality Tags: Obedient, stable under pressure, no rebellious tendencies

"You have 30 minutes to get this fake identity past their screening," Ivy said. "Mess it up and your stealth application gets rejected."

"What happens if I fail?"

She looked at me with dead eyes. "The system marks you as completely disposable."

"What does that mean?"

"It means they delete you. Like emptying the trash."

I stared at "Lucas Yuan" on the screen and felt my stomach drop. This wasn't practice anymore.

This was pass or die.

I had to become Lucas Yuan.

I had to learn how to play their game before I could figure out how to beat it.