Chapter Eight

Sara sat in her rental car outside the FBI building, engine off, letting the Phoenix heat build until it became unbearable. Through the windshield, she watched agents and reporters moving like ants around a disturbed hill. Everyone urgent, everyone certain of their purpose.

She wasn’t certain of anything anymore.

What was the source? The question Alex had left hanging in the desert heat between them.

Sara pulled out her notebook and started writing, not for any story but to think on paper the way she’d learned to do fifteen years ago when the world still made sense.

Riley didn’t wake up one morning and decide to spread hate. These things happen gradually, then suddenly, like erosion that undermines a foundation until the whole structure collapses.

But that was the surface. Sara had spent months mapping extremist networks, watching how they transformed isolated people into true believers. She’d documented the algorithms that fed anger back to angry people, the platforms that monetized outrage, the foreign actors who amplified every division.

Still just symptoms.

She thought about Linda Martinez’s manila folder, filled with printouts and handwritten notes tracking forces she couldn’t see or name. A mother fighting an enemy that had no address, no face, no phone number to call.

The source isn’t online. The online world just reveals what was already broken.

Economic anxiety, sure. Social isolation, definitely. The collapse of traditional institutions, the loss of shared narratives, the death of local news, the atomization of communities into digital tribes that never had to encounter disagreement.

But deeper than that. Older than that.

Sara had covered enough stories to recognize the pattern. People needed someone to blame when their lives didn’t match their expectations. They needed simple answers to complex problems. They needed to feel special, chosen, part of something larger than their own disappointment.

We’ve always had demagogues. We’ve always had conspiracy theories. We’ve always had violence. What’s different now is the speed and scale. What used to take years now takes minutes. What used to affect hundreds now affects millions.

The technology wasn’t creating the toxicity. It was weaponizing impulses that had always existed, turning individual resentment into collective rage, personal failure into political warfare.

Riley had understood this. Not the full scope, maybe, but enough to position himself at the intersection of ancient grievances and modern amplification tools. He’d taken centuries-old patterns of scapegoating and given them contemporary language. Made hatred sound like patriotism, fear sound like wisdom.

And someone had built infrastructure to weaponize his death before it happened.

Sara closed her notebook and started the car. The air conditioning fought against heat that felt biblical, supernatural. Outside, Phoenix stretched endlessly in every direction, a city that existed because humans had decided it should, despite every natural law that said it shouldn’t.

The source is us, she thought. The source has always been us.

The technology, the algorithms, the foreign interference—all of it was just efficiency improvements on humanity’s oldest export: the willingness to destroy others rather than examine ourselves.

Sara put the car in drive and headed back toward the command center. She had work to do, even if she was no longer sure what good it would accomplish.

The heat shimmered off the asphalt like a mirage, making the whole city look like it might disappear at any moment.