Trump announced a two-week US-Iran ceasefire. Oil prices plummeted 16%. Markets rallied. Then the sun rose over the Strait of Hormuz — and Iran shut it down.

Lin Xia arrives at Purdue's Electrical Engineering building — the condemned, the sealed, the origin point. Forty years of quiet breathing, forty years of waiting.

Oil prices plunged 14% in hours after Iran and the US agreed to a two-week ceasefire, reopening the world's most critical oil chokepoint. The world held its breath. Then the markets didn't.

In an air-gapped storage unit in Elizabeth, Lin Xia reads Marcus Chen's three-year research project — the pulse that beats inside every node, the map that shows where the network truly lives, and the reason the basement at Purdue has never been found.

Lin Xia arrives at the Fulton Street address — an unmarked door on the third floor of a building that predates the subway. Elena Vasquez is waiting. So is the name. What she learns in that room changes everything she thought she understood about how big this network actually is.