The first thing I felt wasn't air. It was a roar. Not a sound, but a jagged, electric vibration that scraped against the inside of my skull. I tried to gasp, but my lungs felt like they were filled with cold mercury."Look at that. Spike in the neural feedback," a voice filtered through the haze. It was clinical, bored."Doesn't matter," a second voice replied, followed by the rhythmic tapping of a glass screen. "He’s been a vegetable for nine months. The brain’s just firing off its final sparks before the core gives out."Nine months? I forced my eyelids open. The light was a physical blow. The fluorescent tubes on the ceiling weren't just bright; I could hear them. A high-pitched, 60-hertz scream that pulsed in sync with the flickering gas inside the glass."Where... am I?" I tried to say, but my throat was a desert. It came out as a wet wheeze."Whoa! Doctor, he’s awake! The specimen is conscious!"A face leaned into my field of vision. Pale, thin, with spectacles that magnified ey

The heavy boots of the tactical squad thundered against the tiles, but the world was spinning. My chest felt like an empty hollow where a star had just gone out. I tried to lift my head, but the weight of nine months of atrophy slammed me back down onto the cold metal."Grab him! Move, move!" the lead soldier shouted, his rifle light blinding me."Wait! He’s unstable!" a frantic voice cut through the chaos. "If you jostle the core while it’s resetting, you’ll level the entire wing!"A small figure in a tattered, oversized nurse’s smock pushed past the front line of soldiers. She looked older, her face smudged with grease and her hair shorn short, but I’d know those eyes anywhere."Lyra?" I wheezed.She froze, her hand hovering over a tray of sedatives. She didn’t look relieved. She looked like she had seen a demon crawl out of the sewer. She stared at my face, her pupils dilating in sheer terror."Your eyes," she whispered, her voice trembling. "Elion, your eyes... they’re still gold.

"Elion, they’re closing in! Do something!" Lyra’s scream was nearly drowned out by the mechanical whirring of the Signal-Hounds.The lead Hound’s jaw was wide, the sonic disruptor glowing a lethal violet. My head felt like it was encased in a pressurized chamber, the blue bar in my vision flickering at the edge of my sanity.**[ NEURAL LOAD: 99% ]**"I can’t..." I gasped, the gravel of the rooftop digging into my knees. "The load... it’s going to kill me.""Then let it kill you later!" Lyra grabbed my face, forcing me to look away from the violet sensors. "Right now, you’re the only thing between us and those meat-grinders! Control them, Elion! You’re the Operator, aren't you? Fucking operate!"The "faceslap" of her words snapped something inside me. The fear didn't vanish, but it crystallized. I stopped fighting the flow of data and threw the gates wide open."Fine," I hissed, blood spraying from my nostrils. "You want to see what I can do?"I didn't look at the Hounds as physical ob

"Drop the girl and back away from the machine, or I'll see if your head sparks as much as your hands do," a voice grated, sounding like stones grinding together.I blinked through the haze of the data crash. The white-suited man and the Crown vehicle had been a hallucination of my fracturing mind—or perhaps a memory of what was to come. The reality was grittier. We weren't in the open; we were pinned against a wall of weeping pipes by the Solder-Sons.The leader, the one with the mechanical jaw that hissed with every breath, stepped forward. He didn't want the bounty anymore. He wanted something better."Look at the way his chest glows, Jace," a scavenger whispered, eyeing the golden light beneath my skin. "That’s pure, unfiltered Caster-energy. It’s better than a hundred stolen cells."Jace, the leader, pointed a rusted Solder-Torch at Lyra’s throat. "I heard you, kid. You said you're a battery. Well, it's time to earn your keep. My boys got five industrial cells that went dry during