AURA SIMULATION

Chapter 10: The Deal

The bullet took him in the side, and the world went sideways.

Alex hit the concrete hard, breath punched out of him, the phone skittering from his hand and spinning to a stop somewhere he couldn’t see. Above him, distorted, he heard Kane shouting something that didn’t have words in it yet, just sound, just panic given a voice.

“Don’t,” the calm man said, and Alex realized distantly that he was talking to his own men, not to Alex. “Not yet. I want him lucid.”

Boots on concrete, closer.

“Elias,” Alex managed, and the name came out wet and strange.

“I’m here, I’m here—” Kane dropped to his knees beside him, hands hovering over the wound like he didn’t know where it was safe to press, blood already spreading warm and fast beneath Alex’s ribs. “Stay with me. Look at me, stay with me.”

“Did it send,” Alex said. “Did she get it.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know yet, the confirmation didn’t” Kane’s voice broke. “It doesn’t matter right now, it doesn’t matter, I need you to breathe”

“It’s the only thing that matters, Elias.” Alex’s hand found Kane’s sleeve, gripped it with whatever strength was left in him. “If it didn’t send, none of this counted. Priya. All of it. For nothing.”

The calm man crouched a few feet away, patient, almost curious, the way a man watches weather roll in that he already knows the shape of.

“You’re bleeding out, Mr. Mercer,” he said. “There’s still time to make this easier on yourself. Tell us what else you sent, and to who, and I can have a medical team here in four minutes.”

“You’ll kill me anyway.”

“Eventually. Not painfully.”

Alex laughed, and it cost him more than he expected, a wet, tearing sound that turned into a cough. “That’s the best offer anyone’s made me all night.”

Kane’s hands were shaking against the wound now, pressing down, and Alex could feel how little good it was doing, could feel the warmth spreading faster than Kane’s hands could hold it back.

“Elias.” His voice had gone quieter. “I’m dying.”

“You’re not”

“I can feel it. I know what dying feels like now. I didn’t, an hour ago. Now I do.” He looked up at Kane’s face, and for the first time all night, Kane looked less like a scientist and more like a man about to lose the one thing he’d risked everything to protect. “You have to tell me the truth. Do I have minutes?”

Kane’s jaw worked. He didn’t answer, which was an answer.

“Elias.”

“Maybe,” Kane whispered. “Maybe less.”

The calm man checked his watch, unhurried, and said something quiet to one of the others that Alex couldn’t hear over the sound of his own pulse in his ears.

Kane’s hand moved to his coat, and Alex watched him pull out a small black device, no bigger than a lighter, one Alex had never seen before and somehow understood immediately.

“What is that,” Alex said, though some part of him already knew.

“A neural capture unit. Prototype.” Kane’s hands were shaking so badly he could barely hold it steady. “I helped build the transfer architecture. I know how to trigger a capture manually, outside the official queue, before brain activity ceases completely, if I do it in the next window, there’s a chance”

“A chance of what.”

“Of you. Continuing. Not like this” Kane gestured helplessly at the blood, at the wound, at all of it. “Somewhere else. I don’t know where the queue would place you. I don’t know what’s even running right now that has room. I don’t know anything except that it’s the only version of you not ending in the next ninety seconds.”

Alex stared at the device. Then at Kane’s face, wrecked and desperate and pleading all at once.

“You want to upload me.”

“I want you to survive.”

“Say the word, Elias.” Alex’s grip on his sleeve tightened, the last strength he had going into it. “Say it. Don’t hide behind survive.”

Kane’s eyes were wet. “Yes. I want to upload you. Into whatever’s running, wherever there’s a seat. I don’t have a better option and neither do you, and we have maybe thirty seconds to decide before it stops being a decision at all.”

The calm man was walking toward them now, unhurried, the posture of someone closing out a transaction.

Alex thought of Priya’s face in the strobing light. Of Derek Oyelaran’s name on a scrolling registry. Of two billion people who’d never know his name, who’d never know any of this happened, unless somewhere, a careful woman named Dana Okafor had opened a file in time.

“One condition,” Alex said, blood filling his mouth with the words.

“Alex, there’s no time”

“One condition.” He found enough breath to make it sound like an order instead of a dying man’s request. “If I come back, whatever’s left of me, wherever it lands we don’t hide. We take it apart. Every server. Every lie. Every name on every list.”

Footsteps, nearly on top of them now.

For the first time all night, Kane’s face did something that wasn’t fear.

“That’s the deal,” he said, and pressed the device against Alex’s temple.

The world went dark before Alex heard whether the calm man reached them in time to stop it.