Inside her bedroom in the Rivers family home, Aliya was face-down on her bed, her phone buried in the mattress. The device was vibrating so violently against the comforter that it sounded like a trapped hornet.
"Oh my god," she groaned, flipping over and holding the phone directly above her face. "This is a literal natural disaster."
Ever since Jake's broadcast ended over at Veyra One, the digital landscape had ceased to function normally. It was currently crawling past 20:00, yet the digital shockwaves from the live interview had cascaded far beyond the financial sectors. Veyra's thirty million citizens were locked into a collective frenzy, and a terrifyingly sharp subset of that population had spent the last hour digging through historical digital footprints.
It hadn't taken long. Someone on a local lifestyle forum had unearthed an old clip from her archives and linked her handle, @Aliya_Rivers, directly to the man currently holding the entire country by the throat.
