The tower howled around them. Metal shrieked, alarms blared, lights swung from white to blood-red.“Move!” Lina yelled over the noise.Kael hauled Richard to his feet. “Sub-level’s destabilizingshe’s, purging the whole section!”Richard coughed smoke. “She’s collapsing it on us!”“Then we outrun her,” Lina snapped.They sprinted through the corridor as panels ripped from the walls. Conduits spat arcs of blue fire.Kael shouted, “Left tunnel! Service lift’s fifty meters!”Richard staggered. “I can feel her pulse through the floor, it’s chasing us!”“Stop feeling it and run!” Lina barked.The corridor tilted, gravity sliding sideways. They slammed against the wall, skidding toward an open shaft. Kael fired his grappler into the frame, locking them in place. “She’s rerouting the magnetic field, hang on!”“Kael!” Lina shouted. “Can you stabilize it?”He worked one-handed, typing into his cracked pad. “Give me five seconds!”“We don’t have five!”A surge of static roared through the comms

Smoke drifted through the darkened chamber, the acrid smell of burned circuitry mixing with ozone. For a moment, only the tower’s mechanical heartbeat remained, slow, uncertain, like the breath after a sprint.Lina crouched beside the control dais. “Status?”Kael wiped sweat and soot from his forehead. “Systems collapsing in waves. Frost’s core routines are migrating upward.”Richard stood very still, watching the faint shimmer of code running along his fingertips. “She said ‘a host.’ What if she meant, me?”Lina looked up sharply. “You burned her out of the grid. She’ll want the next best vessel.”Kael’s voice dropped. “Your neural signature’s the only one that’s synced with her architecture. If she’s escaping the system, she’ll ride your link to the surface.”Richard’s jaw clenched. “Then cut it.”Kael shook his head. “Not without frying your cortex.”Lina snapped, “Then we move. Every second she’s rebuilding, she gets closer to you.”They sprinted toward the exit corridor. The towe

Dawn pressed through the cracked blinds, turning the dust in the air to slow gold. The apartment was too quiet, no sirens now, no hum of city systems, only the faint rhythm of dripping water somewhere behind the walls.Lina: “You hear that?”Kael: “Drips. Pipes. Old building.”Lina: “No… the other sound. Like static.”Richard sat on the floor beside the half-collapsed window frame. His hands rested on his knees, palms open, eyes unfocused. The city below was smeared in fog and smoke; every tower bent the light a little wrong, like glass warped by heat.Inside his skull, a low vibration murmured, something between a pulse and an echo.Kael: “You should sleep.”Richard: “I can’t. Every time I blink, it’s like… the world breathes in code.”Lina: “That doesn’t even make sense.”Richard: “Exactly.”He smiled, but the expression cracked halfway.The apartment had belonged to no one for years: peeling wallpaper, scattered vials, an overturned medical cot. A perfect hiding place. Yet every sh

The elevator had stopped ten floors early, the shaft frozen mid-descent. Cold air leaked through the seams, metallic and damp, carrying a faint electric buzz.Kael: “We walk from here.”Lina: “Through that?”Richard: “There’s no other way down.”The emergency panel groaned open beneath Kael’s wrench. A staircase spiraled below, cut from rust and wire. Each step pulsed faintly under their boots, as if lit by a heartbeat beneath the steel.Lina: “It’s alive.”Kael: “It’s powered.”Richard: “Same thing now.”They descended. The air thickened; sound folded in on itself. Somewhere far below, machines whispered in binary rhythm.Lina: “You’re sure this is the route Frost showed you?”Richard: “He didn’t show it. He remembered it through me.”Kael: “That’s not better.”Richard: “No. It’s worse.”The stairwell ended at a tunnel lined with glass conduits, each one carrying streams of dim light that crawled like liquid. The pattern shifted whenever Richard passed, matching the cadence of his br

The night looked diseased.Streetlights pulsed like dying hearts, spilling red-white code down wet pavement. The air smelled of metal and ozone. Every screen, billboards, phone booths, even traffic signs, flashed the same broken text: “RECONNECT.”Kael: “We’re ghosts out here.”He kept his hood low, rifle slung tight. Every few steps his comm buzzed with static.Lina: “Keep moving. The longer we stay, the more it sees us.”Kael: “ It meaning Frost, or Cross?”She didn’t answer. A train car on the elevated rail above them sparked, froze mid-motion, then screamed off the track. Metal rained like shrapnel. They dove under a wrecked taxi.Lina’s breath came ragged. The city itself was mutating, doors opening without reason, alarms howling in no pattern. Somewhere in that chaos was Richard.Kael: “He said eight minutes. You saw what eight minutes did.”Lina: “He’s alive.”Kael: “You sure that’s still the right word?”They pushed forward, boots crunching glass. Drones hung motionless in the