Code of the Broken Loop

The Price of Freedom

The millions of red eyes staring from the dark abyss did not blink.

I stood in the wreckage of the control room, the gold fire still blazing around my hands. Commander Thorne coughed up a spray of dark fluid, pulling himself away from the broken glass. He did not look scared of the red eyes outside. He looked angry that his control room was ruined.

"You think you won because you broke a glass wall?" Thorne spat out, wiping his bloody mouth with the back of his sleeve. "You just opened the core directory. Every error file, every deleted memory, every broken version of you that we ever threw away is stored down there in the trash sectors. They are going to tear you apart piece by piece."

"Good," I said, stepping right over the broken glass and grabbing Thorne by the front of his uniform. I lifted him off the ground with one hand, my gold powers flaring hotter. "Then I will have plenty of things to punch."

Before I could throw him into the dark pit, a heavy blow hit me hard in the back.

I stumbled forward, dropping Thorne onto the floor. I spun around, ready to burn whatever had hit me, but my arms dropped.

Lyra stood right behind me. She was holding a heavy metal pipe she had picked up from the floor, her single violet eye fixed on me with a cold, hard look.

"What are you doing?" I asked, my chest tightening with a sharp pain that had nothing to do with physical wounds.

"Stopping you from doing something stupid," Lyra said flatly. She did not look sorry at all. She stepped past me and pointed her heavy gun right at Thorne’s head. "He is right about one thing. If you drop him into the core right now, the entire system will lock down before we can steal the master key. And if the system locks down, your real body back in the real world dies on the table."

Thorne let out a rough laugh from the floor, clutching the glowing white diamond in his chest. "You think she is on your side, Kiran? Ask her what happened to the last three guys who tried to help her break out of New Seoul. Ask her whose data she sold to buy that gun."

I looked back at Lyra. My heart felt heavy in my chest. "Is that true?"

Lyra did not blink. Her face stayed completely blank, hiding every thought behind that sharp violet eye. "Does it matter? Right now, he is the only one who knows the exit code. We need him alive."

"I am not giving you any codes," Thorne said, smiling through his bleeding lip. He pressed a small hidden button on his belt.

A loud alarm started to ring through the white room, flashing bright yellow lights. The millions of red eyes in the dark abyss began to move, swarming upward like a wave of hungry insects crawling toward the broken floor.

"The security sweep is here," Thorne said, his smile growing wide. "You are out of time."

Lyra cursed under her breath, turning away from me. She grabbed Thorne by the collar of his coat, hauling him to his feet with surprising strength. "Move, or we die right here."

"I am not going anywhere with her until she tells me the truth," I said, planting my feet on the metal floor. The gold fire on my hands flared up, casting long shadows against the crumbling white walls. I was tired of being lied to. I was tired of being treated like a piece of code that could be rewritten whenever someone got bored.

"There is no time for a chat, Kiran!" Lyra shouted, her voice finally losing its cool edge, showing a crack of real panic. "Every second we stand here, the system deletes more of your real memories. Look at your hand."

I looked down at my right hand. The skin was turning clear, fading away into tiny glowing dots like smoke blowing in the wind.

Panic hit me harder than the electric shock had. I clenched my fist, trying to hold my body together, but the fading spread faster up my wrist.

"The system is purging your ID," Thorne said, leaning against the broken wall with a smug look on his face. "You waited too long to wake up. By sunrise, Kiran Vance will never have existed at all."

Lyra did not wait for me to argue anymore. She lunged forward, grabbed my fading arm with her cold fingers, and yanked me hard toward the dark abyss where the red eyes were swarming.

"Hold on to me," she said, her violet eye burning with fierce determination.

"Where are we going?" I asked, my voice shaking as my legs started to turn clear too.

"To find the person who actually wrote this prison," Lyra said, and jumped straight off the edge into the dark.