The whisper had come from the shadows of the adjacent cell, a voice like parchment rubbing against stone. Darion didn't open his eyes immediately. He couldn't afford the sensory input. Every time he engaged his optic nerves, the Ghost Engine projected a shimmering, translucent overlay of the prison's digital security grid, masking the reality of his confinement with a nauseating tapestry of lethal voltages and surveillance vectors. To look was to invite the pain; to see was to suffer."Who’s there?" Darion rasped, his voice sounding like a stranger’s—thin, brittle, and stripped of the cadence he once possessed."Someone who notices when a man’s neural pathways are singing a dirge," the voice replied. A hand, gaunt and mapped with intricate, blue-tinged scars of illicit circuitry, reached out from the darkness between the cell bars. It hovered in the damp, stagnant air, fingers twitching as if plucking phantom harp strings. "You’re running an unstable version of the Ghost Engine, aren'

The air in the Correction Center was not merely stagnant; it was a physical manifestation of bureaucratic cruelty. It smelled of recycled air, ozone, and the sour, metallic tang of fear that clung to the uniforms of the guards and the skin of the inmates alike. Darion slumped against the cold, unyielding poly-steel of his cell wall, feeling the rhythmic, sickening hum of the Ghost Engine vibrate against his skull. It was a parasitic pulse, a heartbeat that was not his own, syncopated and dissonant.Vane, the man in the adjacent cell, shifted his weight, the sound of his movement like dry leaves skittering across pavement. He was a relic of a failed era of augmentation, a ghost in the machine who had survived the purge only to be hollowed out by the very tech he had once sought to master."You’re staring, Darion," Vane said, his voice a low, gravelly vibration that somehow bypassed the dampening field. "It’s a symptom of the drift. You’re looking for a logic gate where there is only en

The silence of the Correction Center was not a vacuum; it was a pressurized weight, a physical force that squeezed the air out of one’s lungs until every breath felt like a labor. Darion leaned his head back against the poly-steel plating, the cold seeping through his jumpsuit and into the marrow of his spine. The wall pulsed with a faint, rhythmic violet light—the diagnostic feedback of the dampening field. It was supposed to keep prisoners docile, a technological sedative, but for Darion, it acted like a jagged blade scraping against his nervous system.Vane was still talking. His voice, once grating, had smoothed into the rhythmic cadence of a lullaby for the damned. He spoke not of escape, but of surrender—a concept Darion’s mind fought with the ferocity of a trapped animal."You’re looking for a logic gate where there is only entropy, Darion," Vane continued, his silhouette barely visible through the gaps in the bulkhead separating their cells. "You think if you can just isolate

The silence of the Correction Center was not a vacuum; it was a pressurized weight, a physical force that squeezed the air out of one’s lungs until every breath felt like a labor. Darion leaned his head back against the poly-steel plating, the cold seeping through his jumpsuit and into the marrow of his spine. The wall pulsed with a faint, rhythmic violet light—the diagnostic feedback of the dampening field. It was supposed to keep prisoners docile, a technological sedative, but for Darion, it acted like a jagged blade scraping against his nervous system.Vane was still talking. His voice, once grating, had smoothed into the rhythmic cadence of a lullaby for the damned. He spoke not of escape, but of surrender—a concept Darion’s mind fought with the ferocity of a trapped animal."You’re looking for a logic gate where there is only entropy, Darion," Vane continued, his silhouette barely visible through the gaps in the bulkhead separating their cells. "You think if you can just isolate

The silence of the Correction Center was not a vacuum; it was a pressurized weight, a physical force that squeezed the air out of one’s lungs until every breath felt like a labor. Darion leaned his head back against the poly-steel plating, the cold seeping through his jumpsuit and into the marrow of his spine. The wall pulsed with a faint, rhythmic violet light—the diagnostic feedback of the dampening field. It was supposed to keep prisoners docile, a technological sedative, but for Darion, it acted like a jagged blade scraping against his nervous system.Vane was still talking. His voice, once grating, had smoothed into the rhythmic cadence of a lullaby for the damned. He spoke not of escape, but of surrender—a concept Darion’s mind fought with the ferocity of a trapped animal."You’re looking for a logic gate where there is only entropy, Darion," Vane continued, his silhouette barely visible through the gaps in the bulkhead separating their cells. "You think if you can just isolate