CHAPTER 41 The elevator shuddered as it rose, flickering with the erratic pulse of a system under siege. The emergency lights washed the cramped metallic walls in a red haze, turning every breath into something sharp, urgent. Natalia kept her back pressed against Ethan’s, both of them covering opposite directions as they ascended toward the upper annex of Control’s headquarters. Ethan’s body, still reconstructed, still humming faintly with the network’s imprint, moved with a fluid precision that had never belonged to him before. Natalia could feel the heat radiating from him, not feverish, but charged, as if every cell was echoing with the system’s frequency. “We’re close,” Ethan said quietly. “I can feel the traffic density shifting. They know we’re coming.” “Let them know,” Natalia muttered, loading another magazine into her weapon. “We’re ending this tonight.” A faint smile tugged at Ethan’s mouth. “I like this version of you.” “I blame you,” she replied. The elevator chime

CHAPTER 43 The ruins of the chamber groaned around Natalia as she steadied herself. Dust drifted down in slow, ghostly spirals. Sparks fizzed from torn cables like dying fireflies. But the only thing she truly saw was that fading blue mote under the metal grate.Ethan.She closed the panel gently, as though it were something living, something fragile. Something she couldn’t risk damaging a second time.“I’ll come back,” she whispered. “I promise.”The light beneath the grate pulsed once, weak, but deliberate.Then it dimmed.Natalia stood and turned, forcing herself to assess the destruction with the sharp, disciplined focus of an agent, not the woman whose entire world was slipping between her fingers.The chamber was collapsing fast.Chunks of ceiling dangled by half-melted beams. The digital core was torn open, its circuitry spilling like metallic organs across the floor. Smoke stung her throat. But she pushed forward through the haze, navigating through twisted debris and ruined

CHAPTER 45The chamber shook so violently that Natalia nearly lost her grip on the glowing node beneath her hands. The light pulsed in a frantic rhythm, trying to push her away, reject her, repel her, drive her out. But she held on, anchoring her stance, jaw clenched, eyes locked on the swirling mass at the center of the room.Ethan.His faint blue silhouette flickered like a glitch trapped between frames, dissolving and reforming in rapid pulses. Natalia could feel him, more than see him, a pressure in her chest, a pull beneath her ribs. A whisper of familiarity in the storm.Grayson wasn’t doing as well.His hands trembled violently against his node. Sweat streamed down his temples. “She’s… she’s rewriting the anchor protocols,” he gasped. “She’s merging containment with offense. That’s not possible,”A thunderous crack echoed through the chamber as a beam of blue-white code slammed into Grayson’s node, nearly knocking him off his feet.Control’s voice boomed:“You trespass in my or

CHAPTER 47For a long, suspended moment, there was nothing but dark.Not quiet, dark.A dense, smothering void where even the idea of sound struggled to take shape.Control’s ears rang with the fading aftershock of the disruptor blast. A metallic taste filled her mouth. Her palms scraped against rough concrete as she pushed herself upright, the world tilting, gravity sliding in and out like a broken metronome.Cold water rippled somewhere nearby.A groan,low, human,echoed in the black.“Ethan?”No answer.Control forced herself to breathe, in through her nose, out through her tight jaw. Her head pounded. The disruptor’s pulse had been stronger than she anticipated, she’d been too close to the detonation when she triggered it.Her hand found her flashlight on instinct. She thumbed the switch.Nothing.Dead. The EM blast had fried it.She pressed her fingers to the floor, moving slow, searching for any trace of Ethan. Her hand brushed something warm. Fabric. Skin.“Ethan,” she whispered

Chapter 49The night pressed heavily against the shattered skyline as Ethan moved through the ruins of the old transit sector, his breaths sharp and cold in the lingering smoke of collapsed metal, and every step he took echoed with the weight of decisions that could no longer be undone. He had escaped Control’s perimeter by seconds, slipping through a broken maintenance tunnel that curved like a dark vein beneath the city, and though his legs trembled with exhaustion, his mind burned with a single fierce purpose: getting to her. The system whispered at the edges of his awareness, soft static returning to him like a wounded echo of the consciousness he once commanded, and every flicker of light, every hum of still-functioning wiring, felt like a memory reaching out, pleading with him not to abandon the digital world he had been forced to inhabit. He ignored it. For now, flesh mattered more than electricity.The tunnel opened into a forgotten storage depot where dust settled like ash on