You choose silence. You don't follow up. You don't check whether Isabella replied. You let the message sit in her inbox and tell yourself silence is a strategy. For two days, nothing. The dashboard hums. The market moves without urgency. You almost convince yourself the message dissolved into the ordinary noise of Blackridge's internal mail, one more forgettable note from a forgettable analyst. On the third day you try to open PRAP. The session loads normally, the familiar green and amber panels, the queue, the hold timers. Then, forty seconds in, the interface freezes. A grey overlay appears: `SESSION TERMINATED - CREDENTIALS UNDER REVIEW (REF: 8803-A)` You refresh. Same message. You clear the cache and try again. Same message. The account hasn't been deleted; it's been quarantined, still visible, still attached to a name, no longer allowed to do anything. A one-way mirror. You understand what happened. Isabella didn't reply because she didn't need to. She forwarded your message to Blackridge's IT security with a one-line note: *verify this sender*. They ran a routine check on Elliot Cinder's credentials, found inconsistencies in the onboarding trail (because there was no real onboarding, only the access you borrowed), and flagged the account. Your presence inside Blackridge is now the thing under review. No alarm bells. No confrontation. Just a quiet administrative process that closed your only door while you waited for a reply that was never coming. Mango's message arrives that evening. Two words: "You're done." The cell doesn't explain. It doesn't negotiate. In the purely digital ties of modern cybercrime, trust is just the absence of noise, and the moment your access point generated an IT ticket, the noise started. Compromised limbs aren't repaired here. They're amputated. [[The Aftermath|See the aftermath]]