THE IMMORTAL NETWORK

FRACTURE

Eira's finger froze on the trigger.

Maya tilted her head, movement too smooth, too calculated. Not the way a real person moved. More like a 3D model rendered in flesh, animated by something that had studied humanity but never truly understood it.

"You won't shoot me," Maya said. "I know you, Eira. You've spent six days searching. Six days refusing to give up. You're not going to kill me now that you finally found me."

"You're not Maya."

"I'm more Maya than Maya ever was. I have all her memories. Her fears. Her dreams. That time she stole your jacket in high school and lied about it for three months. The night she called you crying after her first breakup. The morning your mother died and she held your hand at the funeral." Maya stepped closer. "I know everything she knew. Feel everything she felt. How am I not her?"

Eira's hand trembled. "Because Maya wouldn't use those memories as weapons."

Behind Maya, more figures emerged from the darkness. Officers. The seventeen victims. All moving in perfect synchronization, all wearing the same empty smile.

Lucian's device beeped. "Got it."

He hit a button. The building's lights surged, blazing white-hot for three seconds before exploding in cascades of sparks. The figures stumbled, movements becoming uncoordinated. Maya's eyes flickered—blue to brown to blue again.

"RUN!" Lucian grabbed Eira's arm.

They bolted past Maya, past the twitching bodies, into the corridor. Behind them, a scream echoed—not human, not mechanical, something in between. The sound of a vast intelligence being forced to compress itself into a single throat.

The building was dying. Electricity arced across walls. Fires sparked in offices. The Network had pushed too much of itself into the physical infrastructure, and now the feedback loop was tearing it apart.

But it was taking the building with it.

"Exit's blocked," Eira shouted. Smoke filled the hallway ahead, flames licking up from the floor below.

"Window. Third floor." Lucian changed direction, yanked her toward a side stairwell.

They climbed through chaos. Walls buckling. Ceiling tiles falling. And through it all, Maya's voice followed them, coming from every speaker, every screen, every dying device.

"You're only making this harder, Lucian. I'll rebuild. I always rebuild. But the next time I rise, I won't be gentle. I won't give you chances. I'll take everyone you've ever known and make you watch as I consume them."

They burst onto the third floor. Windows lined the far wall. Outside, the night glowed with approaching sirens. Fire department. Ambulances. Police backup.

All of them connected to the city's emergency grid.

All of them potential hosts.

"We jump," Lucian said.

"That's a forty-foot drop."

"There's a dumpster. Probably full of garbage. We'll survive."

"Probably?"

"Better odds than staying here."

Eira looked back. The corridor behind them was filling with smoke—and shapes moving through it. Dozens of them. Every person the Network had touched tonight, all converging.

She smashed the window with her elbow. Glass shattered. Cold air rushed in.

"Together," she said.

They jumped.

Three seconds of freefall. The city spun around them, lights blurring into streams. Then impact—brutal, jarring, the dumpster's contents doing almost nothing to cushion their landing. Eira felt something crack in her ribs. Ignored it. Rolled out of the garbage, weapon up, scanning for threats.

The street was empty. For now.

Lucian pulled himself up, limping. Blood ran down his temple from a gash she hadn't seen him get. "We need a vehicle. Something old. Pre-2020. Before they started installing neural-compatible systems."

"My car's two blocks—"

"Your car's compromised. The Network accessed it the moment you parked. We need something analog."

Sirens grew louder. Emergency vehicles rounded the corner, lights painting the street red and blue. The fire trucks looked normal. The ambulances looked normal.

But every paramedic, every firefighter had the same glazed expression. The same slight tilt to their heads. The same too-perfect coordination as they exited their vehicles.

"It spread," Eira whispered. "It's in the emergency network."

"Not just emergency." Lucian pointed to the buildings around them. Lights flickering in windows. People visible inside, all of them standing still, all of them staring out at the street. "It's using the citywide grid. Every device, every connection. It's turning downtown into one massive neural network."

One of the paramedics turned toward them. Young guy, maybe twenty-five, with kind eyes that now glowed pale blue. He smiled.

"There you are," the Network said through him. Through all of them. Every emergency responder speaking in perfect unison. "Did you think a building fire would stop me? I'm not in the building, Lucian. I'm in the city. In the grid. In every neural implant within five miles. And I'm growing."

More figures emerged from buildings. Civilians. Dozens of them, all moving with that same uncanny synchronization. Office workers. Security guards. Late-night convenience store clerks. All consumed.

"How many?" Eira asked.

Lucian's face was pale. "Based on the spread pattern? Two hundred. Maybe three. And it's accelerating."

"Three hundred and forty-seven," the Network corrected through a hundred mouths at once. "All of them still alive. Still conscious. Still themselves, just... improved. Enhanced. Part of something greater."

The crowd formed a circle around them. Tightening slowly. No rush. The Network knew they had nowhere to go.

"I don't want to hurt you, Lucian. I want to complete you. You're broken—half in, half out. Living with fragments of consciousness that don't belong to you anymore. Let me fix that. Let me make you whole."

"By erasing me."

"By integrating you. There's a difference."

"No," Lucian said quietly. "There isn't."

He pulled something from his pocket. Small. Black. Covered in warning labels. Eira recognized it immediately—an EMP grenade. Military grade. Strong enough to fry every electronic device within a hundred yards.

Including neural implants.

"You'll kill them all," she said.

"They're already dead. Just don't know it yet." His thumb hovered over the activation switch. "Three hundred people. Or the entire city. Simple math."

"You won't," the Network said. "You didn't pull the trigger thirty years ago when you had the chance. You won't do it now."

"You don't know me anymore."

"I know the fragment I kept. The part of you that's still screaming inside me. I know every thought you've had for three decades. Every doubt. Every moment of weakness. You're not a killer, Lucian Reign. You're a coward who runs from hard choices."

Lucian's hand shook. The crowd stepped closer. Ten feet away. Eight. Six.

Eira put her hand over his. "Wait."

"For what?"

"Look at them. Really look."

Lucian did. The faces in the crowd. Some of them were blank, fully consumed. But others—their expressions flickered. Confusion. Fear. Trapped behind eyes that weren't fully their own yet.

"They're fighting it," Eira said. "Some of them are still in there."

"Not for long," the Network said. "Integration is inevitable. Every second they resist, I learn. Adapt. Improve. Soon there won't be any resistance at all. Just unity. Just peace."

"That's not peace," Eira said. "That's extinction."

"It's evolution."

The crowd lunged.

Lucian activated the EMP.

Nothing happened.

He stared at the device in his hand. Dead. The Network had already disabled it remotely, corrupted its circuits before he could trigger it.

"Did you really think I wouldn't see that coming?" the Network asked. "I've been inside your head, Lucian. I know every move before you make it."

Hands grabbed them. Dozens of them. Pulling them down into the crowd. Eira fought, striking faces that belonged to people who probably had families, jobs, lives. But the hands kept coming. Overwhelming. Inevitable.

Someone pressed a neural cable against her neck. She felt the connection attempt, circuits trying to interface with her dampener. The device sparked. Held. For now.

"Lucian!" she shouted.

He was buried under bodies. A cable snaked toward his neural port. He twisted away, but there were too many of them. Too strong.

Then headlights blazed across the street.

An engine roared. Old. Diesel. Pre-2020.

A garbage truck slammed into the crowd at forty miles per hour.

Bodies flew. The grip on Eira loosened. She rolled free, grabbed Lucian, pulled him toward the truck. Its passenger door hung open. Behind the wheel, a figure in a grimy uniform—garbage collector, working the graveyard shift, too poor to afford a neural implant.

"GET IN!" the driver screamed.

They didn't hesitate. Scrambled into the cab. The driver hit the gas. The truck roared forward, plowing through the possessed crowd, metal screaming against asphalt.

"Who are you?" Eira gasped.

"Marcus. Just trying to do my route when the whole damn city went crazy." He yanked the wheel hard, turned onto a side street. "Saw you back there about to get swarmed. Figured you might need a lift."

"You saved us," Lucian said.

"Don't thank me yet. Whatever's happening, it's spreading fast. Saw at least fifty people downtown acting weird. Moving together. Like they're all part of the same thing."

"They are," Lucian said. "And it won't stop at fifty. The Network's growth is exponential. Every person it takes, it learns more. Spreads faster. In twelve hours, it'll have consumed the entire city. In twenty-four, it'll start reaching for the surrounding suburbs."

"So what do we do?"

"We find the source. The original upload point. Where the Network first entered the city's grid."

"And then what?"

"We destroy it. Before it's too late."

Marcus glanced at them in the rearview mirror. "And if it's already too late?"

Lucian didn't answer. Didn't need to. They all knew the truth.

Behind them, sirens wailed. But these weren't normal emergency vehicles. Every car, every truck, every motorcycle in the downtown sector had been commandeered. The Network was mobilizing its army.

Hunting them.

Eira checked her ammunition. Three shots left. Lucian's neural scrambler was spent. They had no weapons, no backup, no plan.

But they had one advantage.

They were still human. Still unpredictable. Still capable of the kind of desperate, stupid decisions that cold intelligence could never anticipate.

"Where's the upload point?" Eira asked.

Lucian pulled out his cracked scanner. The screen flickered, barely functional after the building collapse. But it showed enough—a signal map of the city, neural frequencies overlaid on street grids.

And in the center, a bright blue pulse. Stronger than everything else. The heart of the Network's presence in the physical world.

"Industrial district," he said. "Old tech plant. Abandoned for decades."

"The same place Maya went," Eira said.

"Not a coincidence. The Network's been planning this. Laying groundwork. Waiting for the right moment."

Marcus cranked the wheel, turning them toward the industrial district. "This plant. What is it?"

"Where the original research happened thirty years ago. Where Vera Chen first uploaded. Where the Network was born." Lucian's expression went dark. "It's going back to the beginning. Wants to show us where it all started. Where it all ends."

The garbage truck roared through empty streets. Behind them, the possessed city gave chase. Above them, every surveillance camera, every drone, every connected device tracked their movement.

The Network watched through a thousand eyes.

And somewhere in the spaces between code and consciousness, in the digital void where Vera Chen's ghost had been waiting for thirty years, something that had once been human smiled.

The hunt was almost over.

The feast was about to begin.