Episode 7tarsi kraujo

I remembered the first time I saw the code. Not on a screen, but on a strip of silvered plastic, tucked inside a hollowed-out Bible my mother kept under her pillow. She called it duomenu apsauga—data protection—but she meant something else. She meant the names of the children, the safe house in the forest where the moss grew thick enough to muffle footsteps, the frequency we used to speak to the men who came in the night with radios and no faces. NATO o.radio rysys. The foil pages were the key to that frequency, etched with symbols that looked like runes but were really coordinates, compressed into a language only the desperate could read.

I spread the foil on the table. The kitchen light flickered—a bad bulb, or a signal. Outside, the snow fell in straight lines, as if the sky had been ruled. I traced the first symbol with my finger: a cross inside a circle, the Templar mark my father had carved into the doorframe of every house we ever left. Tamplieriu kryziu. He said it would keep the klauno away, the online clones that haunted the edges of the network, stealing faces and voices and turning them into weapons. I never believed him until I saw my own face on a screen in a bar in Norwich, mouthing words I had never spoken, selling a war I had never fought.