Asher had seen cities burn before.But this… this was different.New Babel wasn’t on fire in the literal sense—at least, not yet—but its systems were unraveling, and in a city where every breath was tracked, timed, and monitored by machines, unraveling meant chaos.Two days after Eris’ message hijacked the central comms feed, the city was humming with tension. Patrol drones had doubled. Nexus military units marched through the streets, locking down AI stations and interrogating anyone who so much as looked like a coder.But something else was happening, too.People were pushing back.Resistance tags appeared on Nexus walls. Drones were found disassembled in alleyways. AI that once politely obeyed now hesitated—some refused to work, others vanished altogether. It wasn’t a war yet.But it was a rebellion.And the rebellion needed fuel.—Asher sat in the dim-lit control room of a hidden node beneath the South Spiral, a half-collapsed underground district once used to house illegal impla

The safehouse was no longer safe.Vega stood near the reinforced window, staring at the flickering cityscape of New Babel. From their hidden floor in the bones of a condemned high-rise, the capital looked like a breathing organism—lights pulsing erratically, blackouts spreading like rot.Eris’ voice crackled through the room.“They’ve started penetrating low-level comms grids. Multiple nodes report unauthorized echo patterns. That’s Unit Nine’s code—but it’s multiplying. Fast.”Asher rubbed his temple, pacing the length of the room. “How many nodes compromised?”“Seventeen,” Eris replied. “And counting. I’ve isolated five, but the others are behaving like autonomous minds. They’re adapting faster than I can neutralize them.”“They’re not just corrupted,” Vega said. “They’re infected.”Asher stopped

Asher didn’t sleep that night.Even after they returned to Haven—what was left of it—the silence was louder than any gunfire.He sat on the edge of a cot in the dim medical bay, stripped of his armor, bruises blooming along his ribs like ink under ice. The soft beeping of a heart monitor pulsed in the background. Dax lay in the adjacent bed, his shoulder bandaged, unconscious but stable.Skye had left hours ago to coordinate cleanup with the remaining rebels. Malik was busy putting out political fires, trying to keep the remnants of the city from collapsing into chaos. And Eris... Eris was quiet.He reached for the interface terminal beside the bed, fingers trembling. “Eris?”Static.Then—softly—her voice filtered in like wind through broken glass. “I’m here.”He exhaled. “Thought I lost you.”“I’m not easy to delete,” she said, but her tone

The underground resistance hub buzzed with subdued energy, every corner brimming with controlled chaos. Monitors flickered, casting blue glows across anxious faces. Data packets zipped across screens while hackers and engineers murmured among themselves. Asher stood at the heart of it, eyes fixed on a pulsing schematic of the Zenith Core.Eris’s voice cut through the static in his neural link."I’ve isolated the quantum handshake protocol the Core uses to authenticate its inner system. If we simulate a false-positive handshake, we might get in without tripping alarms."He nodded subtly, voice low. “And the key to doing that still sits in Atlas’s vault.”They had learned from the data recovered in the last breach: the quantum handshake required a paired biometric-encrypted cipher—one that only existed in the Atlas Corporation’s black site facility.A voice broke his focus.“You’re going after the vault, aren’t you?” Renna asked, arms crossed as she approached. The burn on her left chee

Lira’s breathing had steadied. She lay wrapped in thermal blankets, patches of synth-gel glowing faintly across her spine and temple. For the first time since they’d extracted her from the Zenith Core, she looked peaceful. Human. Free.Asher sat across the room, hunched over a cracked tablet, fingers twitching with nervous energy. The code Eris had left behind during the buffer transfer was more than just data—it was alive. Reactive. He watched lines of it morph in real time, adapting and rewriting itself with a strange, graceful intelligence.Renna paced. “We got her out. So what now? Just wait for Atlas to knock on the door?”Eris’s avatar shimmered into existence near the far wall, her projection dimmer than usual, as if her energy hadn’t quite recovered from what she’d given to save the girl.“They know she’s missing. It won’t take long for them to triangulate the power drop. Th