It was a gamble. A full wipe would cripple operations for days. But letting Tether keep the keys to the kingdom? That was a death sentence.

Leo did the only thing he could. He stopped hesitating.

For a single, eternal second, nothing happened. The taxi entered the tunnel, the overhead lights flickering in a strobe of orange and shadow. Then, Leo's own phone screen went black. Not a shutdown—a Miradore-initiated, hardware-level obliteration of every byte. In the taxi's cupholder, the driver's company-issued tablet, used for fare processing, flickered to life with the warning: DEVICE COMPROMISED. REPORT TO SECURITY. Then it, too, died.