The Lupine code

Echoes in Sector 42

The rain hadn’t stopped since the blast. It came down in heavy metallic sheets that turned streets into mirrors, reflecting the fractured skyline. Somewhere between midnight and dawn, the city began to change tempo — faster, louder, like its pulse had spiked.

Caleb moved through the edge of Sector 42, the restricted zone at the heart of the Silver District.

He’d been here before — years ago, when CrossBio still owned the buildings and the only thing that leaked out of the labs was ambition. Now, the district looked like a carcass.

The skyline leaned inward, black windows like empty sockets.

Drone patrols zipped overhead, cutting through mist in tight grids.

Below, the city’s underbelly hummed faintly — generators, old subway lines, the invisible data arteries that kept the metropolis alive.

He adjusted the hood of his coat and kept moving.

Everywhere he stepped, puddles rippled with faint phosphorescence. The runoff glowed dull gold — traces of the same biogenic compound from the LUNACORE experiments. The rain was spreading it, washing the infection through the drainage system.

He crouched near a storm grate and listened. Beneath the city, something pulsed in rhythm with the thunder. Not sound — signal.

Each vibration carried a pattern, too deliberate to be random. He couldn’t translate it, but his body reacted instinctively. The hair on his arms stood up, and his pupils widened.

He muttered, “You’re learning to talk.”

A flicker of static in the distance caught his eye — light bending wrong. He followed it down a narrow lane lined with collapsed scaffolding and neon signs flickering between dead alphabets.

Halfway down, the wall itself was breathing.

Thin strands of bioluminescent growth veined across the bricks, pulsing like capillaries. He leaned closer. The material wasn’t organic or synthetic — it was both, living circuitry fed by electricity and moisture. Every pulse emitted a low hum, a language too deep for the human ear but clear to something inside him.

He pressed a gloved hand against it. His veins lit faintly in response.

For a heartbeat, the world tilted —

He wasn’t standing in the alley anymore.

He saw flashes: a sterile lab, walls of glass, men in containment suits feeding data into machines. His own reflection on an operating table, still human then, unaware of what he’d become.

A voice — faint, clinical, familiar:

“Phase Three will merge neural response with frequency adaptation. He’ll hear the city before anyone else does.”

Then the image shattered. Caleb staggered back, gasping, his pulse slamming against his skull. The wall dimmed, retreating into silence as if it had shared enough.

He whispered, “Phase Three worked.”

He scanned the alley again and caught the flicker of movement — a shadow darting behind a collapsed truck. Too fast for a human.

“Come out,” he called softly.

A child stepped out — maybe twelve years old, barefoot, eyes wide and pale. His skin glowed faintly under the rain. Lines of code — literal data strings — shimmered across his forearms before fading.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Caleb said.

The kid shook his head. “You shouldn’t either. They’re coming.”

“Who?”

“The Collectors.”

Caleb frowned. “Never heard of them.”

The boy pointed toward the towers. “They take the ones that hum too loud.”

Before Caleb could ask more, a low droning rolled through the air — mechanical wings slicing rain.

He looked up. Three shapes glided between the buildings — not drones, not quite aircraft. They were alive, or close to it. Machines with muscle. Their bodies shimmered with living alloy, tendrils hanging beneath like jellyfish.

The boy’s eyes went wide. “Too late.”

The creatures descended, scanning beams slicing across the street. When the light hit the bioluminescent veins, the growth reacted violently — pulsing, thrashing, as though it recognized its predators.

Caleb grabbed the kid’s shoulder. “Run.”

They dove behind a stack of rusted containers as the first collector landed. It unfolded itself — four limbs bending backward, face hidden behind a segmented visor. The hum from its chest matched the same frequency Caleb had heard in the storm drains.

He felt it crawling in his blood.

The boy trembled beside him. “They can smell the Code.”

Caleb could too.

He took a breath, forced his transformation halfway — not full, not yet. Just enough to sharpen his senses. His eyes burned gold, claws slid from fingertips. The rain hissed against his skin like acid.

The collector tilted its head, as if hearing something. Then it turned away, stalking down the street.

Caleb waited until the hum faded, then motioned the boy forward.

They slipped through a maintenance tunnel that opened into the old subway grid. The walls here were carved by decades of rust and graffiti — messages from people who’d lived and died under the city’s skin.

But beneath the paint, something newer gleamed.

Embedded in the wall were thin silver threads forming circuit patterns. They pulsed like veins when Caleb passed. The air vibrated with faint, musical tones — the city’s underground singing in code.

He followed it deeper.

After twenty minutes of winding through the tunnels, they reached a vast chamber — the old Transit Exchange 42, sealed since the early 2030s. Flooded, half-collapsed, but alive.

The water shimmered with light from hundreds of small devices floating on its surface — bio-cells feeding the growth. Across the far wall, an entire network of tendrils spread outward like roots.

And embedded in the center was something that didn’t belong — a server core, old CrossBio tech, still functional.

Caleb approached slowly. The machine recognized him before he touched it.

USER: MERCER, CALEB / ACCESS PRIORITY: PHASE ONE PROTOTYPE.

He froze. “You remember me.”

The console flickered to life, spitting corrupted data streams, looping partial logs.

“PHASE FOUR ACTIVATION… LUNACORE NETWORK INTEGRATION COMPLETE… NEW HOSTS ACCEPTED.”

He scrolled down.

“BIO-SIGNAL MAP: CITYWIDE. PRIMARY ANCHOR POINT: UNKNOWN NODE / FREQUENCY MATCH: 42.08Hz.”

Sector 42. It wasn’t just a district. It was the center of the system — the heart where the LUNACORE signal had nested.

The server’s hum deepened, matching Caleb’s heartbeat. The glow beneath the water began to rise, converging toward the walls.

“Get back,” he warned the boy.

But the light didn’t attack — it gathered. The threads of the biometal shifted, forming an image on the wall: a pulse map of the city.

Points of light flared across the grid — dozens, then hundreds.

Infected zones.

Everywhere.

The Code wasn’t contained to the Silver District anymore. It was spreading through the water lines, the power conduits, the telecom arrays. The entire city was an incubation chamber.

Caleb stared, his pulse thudding with the machine’s rhythm. “They turned New York into a living experiment.”

The map flickered again, zooming toward a blinking red beacon near the East River. A new label appeared, burned into the data:
“MOTHER NODE — ACTIVE.”

He didn’t understand the details yet, but the implications were clear. The Mother Node was the source — the mind behind the pulse, the one adapting the Code faster than any human could analyze.

And it was alive.

The machine began to shake, static roaring through the chamber. Caleb grabbed the kid’s arm. “Move!”

They sprinted back through the tunnel as the light intensified behind them, bursting through the water in gold plumes. The walls groaned, pipes splitting under pressure. The Code was trying to seal itself, protecting its core.

They reached the street level again, both soaked and gasping. The rain had slowed, but the sky had changed color — not gray now, but faintly luminous, as if veins of light moved behind the clouds.

The kid stared upward, whispering, “It’s in the air now.”

Caleb said nothing. He knew the boy was right. The infection had reached the atmosphere — airborne, unseen.

Somewhere out there, Dr. Evander Price was watching.

And the city was listening to itself breathe.