The glow breathed. That was the only way Lina could describe it—an inhale and exhale of light that passed through the walls, through her, as though the entire chamber was alive and aware of her presence.Ward stood unmoving, her silhouette cutting sharp against the shifting radiance. She hadn’t come closer, but her presence filled the space like a shadow that could not be banished.Lina’s voice came out hoarse. “What is this place?”Ward’s eyes flicked upward, toward the curvature of the endless ceiling. “This is not a place, Lina. It is a construct. A holding vault built for minds that should not exist.”Her chest tightened. “And I was brought here because…?”Ward’s gaze fell back on her, hard and deliberate. “Because you are not just carrying the code Kael spoke of. You are the code. Your body is the machine. Your consciousness is the access key.”Lina’s breath hitched, the words striking like an iron weight. “That’s not possible. Kael said—he said I was programmed, but I—”“You bel

The words still burned on the walls, seared into Lina’s mind:ACCESS REQUEST: CORE STABILIZATION INITIATED.Her chest rose and fell in panicked bursts. The air in the chamber thickened, vibrating with the same rhythm as her pulse until she couldn’t tell which belonged to her and which belonged to it.“Fight it,” Ward said. Her voice was steady, like water sliding over stone. “Or it will teach you that resistance is impossible.”“I am fighting it!” Lina shouted, though her hands trembled, her knees weakening against the glow. “You’re just standing there—tell me what to do!”Ward tilted her head slightly, as though listening to something beyond Lina’s reach. “Instruction is a cage. You want freedom, not a tighter leash.”Lina swallowed against the dryness clawing at her throat. The lines of code stretched again, folding closer, humming like a throat clearing before a verdict. She raised her hands, desperate. “Then tell me something! How do I break it?”Ward’s gaze pinned her. “Break wha

The blackout had left the city raw.Kael moved through it like a blade through smoke—silent, certain, but carrying the smell of fire on his coat. Half the blocks were still in chaos. Generators coughed, emergency lights stuttered, and the air carried that charged, metallic tang of a grid trying to right itself after being torn apart. He didn’t slow. Every step carried him deeper into the marrow of the disruption.Because somewhere inside that fracture, Lina’s signal had gone silent.She wasn’t lost—Kael refused the word—but the absence gnawed at him like a phantom limb. He’d mapped her code across the grid, he’d traced the surge when the blackout hit, he’d followed the aftershock into the deeper nodes. And then—nothing. Like she had been swallowed.The kind of silence only a trap leaves behind.His boots struck the hollow stairwell of an abandoned relay tower. The upper levels hummed faintly, some nodes still alive despite the outage. He didn’t trust them. The Syndicate built redundan

The interior of the tower was not walls and corridors—it was a labyrinth of light. Projection arrays lit every surface, shifting symbols alive with Syndicate code. Each glyph pulsed in rhythm, a thousand beating hearts all tied to one unseen core.And in between them, Lina’s signal fluttered.Kael pressed his palm to a glyph. The surface burned against his skin. He closed his eyes and let the rhythm pierce him.For an instant, he heard her.Kael…The sound was fragile, like a breath pressed against glass. His body froze, his chest tightening as though the voice had hooked into his ribs.“Lina.”But the voice dissolved, replaced by static. The glyph beneath his palm pulsed red. ACCESS DENIED.Kael’s teeth ground together. He struck deeper, hacking past the glyph’s lock. His own blood smeared across the projection as his palm blistered under the heat, but he didn’t pull away. Pain was meaningless. Only forward mattered.⸻He fell into the system’s memory vault.Rows upon rows of light—m

The Syndicate doors shut behind him with the finality of a vault.Kael didn’t move. The sound of the steel locks driving into place reverberated down the frozen corridor, a low metallic growl that seemed to echo inside his chest. He stood there with his palms pressed against the cold surface, as though keeping contact might force it to open again. But the metal was implacable, smooth with frost, and the Syndicate had decided.They would not give him the algorithm.They would not even grant him the dignity of refusal. No negotiation, no explanation—only silence and the sharp glint of amusement in their eyes as they watched him unravel.The cold bit through his coat, numbing his fingers, stiffening his jaw. His breath hung in pale clouds before him, dispersing too quickly to warm him. He pressed harder into the steel until his skin burned with the contact, a futile attempt to anchor himself.At last, he pulled away, leaving no mark behind. No blood. No trace. Nothing to prove he had eve