Elara didn't sleep.
Not after the drive.
Not after the tape.
Not after hearing Amara's voice command her to do what no daughter should ever have to do.
She stayed up sketching war plans in the dark.
NUMA had burned her.
The Council had silenced her sister.
And now, the world thought she was insane.
Maybe she was.
But this time, Elara had control.
By morning, the entire living room floor was covered in names.
Pieces of paper. Maps. Threads. Digital printouts. Passwords scrawled in black marker like curses.
Khalid stepped over the chaos, a mug of coffee in his hand.
"You didn't sleep?"
Elara didn't look up.
He sat beside her, lowering the mug carefully.
"You're building a war table."
"No," she murmured. "I'm building a reckoning."
She tapped her finger on a name:
Chief Odenigbo — Council treasurer. Offshore properties. Three aliases.
Next to him:
Reverend Musa — publicly moral, privately monstrous. A man who funded silence with tithes.
And in the center of it all:
Senator Uzoamaka Diri.
Elara circled the name twice.
They started small.
A data drop into an old journalist forum. Just enough to spark questions.
Then came the burner X account masked as a whistleblower.
Screenshots. Blurred images. Partial ledgers. Nothing that could lead back to them. Just enough smoke to make people search for fire.
And it worked.
Within forty-eight hours, two local radio stations picked up the whisper.
Then a blog.
Then a respected journalist posted:
"There are patterns in the deaths.
And someone's finally pulling the threads."
Inside the safehouse, Elara and Khalid watched the story bloom like rot in sunlight.
The reposts. The debates. The sudden silence from certain offices.
Khalid grinned. "They're taking the bait."
Elara nodded.
"Now we give them teeth."
NUMA had wiped her trail clean.
But she'd missed one thing.
The internet never forgets.
Using Khalid's forensics software, they pulled a cache archive from NUMA's site — three months old.
And there it was:
File name: ORIGINS.
Encrypted. Hidden deep.
It took hours, brute force, and a few borrowed keys. But they cracked it.
Inside?
A full recording from a Council meeting dated one week before Amara died.
Elara pressed play.
The first voice was Diri's.
Cold. Direct.
"The girl knows too much.
We can't afford noise."
Another voice: male, older.
"Let the family contain it quietly."
Then Diri again.
"We've paid enough for her silence.
If they fail, we bury her legacy."
Elara didn't cry.
She just listened.
All the way through.
Then she uploaded the audio clip to every outlet that had ever doubted Amara's death.
No watermark. No tag.
Just the truth.
It exploded.
Within hours, it trended across the country.
By noon, Diri's press secretary was dodging cameras.
By nightfall, her house was surrounded by angry voices and placards that read:
"How many girls?"
"Silence is complicity."
And then the second spark lit.
One of the families long paid to disappear released a statement.
"We were silenced.
But no more."
Elara sat on the edge of the table, watching the chaos unfold like a carefully set blaze.
Khalid stood nearby.
"You started it," he said.
She didn't smile.
"This is only Chapter One."
Then she picked up a slip of paper Chief Odenigbo's name.
Struck a match.
And let the edges curl.
The name blackened. Folded. Turned to ash.
She poured it into a ceramic bowl.
"We'll bury them all."
Khalid nodded slowly.
"One name at a time."
Outside, sirens howled in the distance.
But inside?
Elara was steady.
For the first time in her life, she wasn't surviving.
She was orchestrating.