The rain had a different sound in the inner levels of ChronoCity. It didn't fall—it leaked, dripped, slithered between cables and exposed beams like a nervous breath escaping the lungs of the dying. Eira stood beneath a collapsed service archway, his jacket hood up, the sleeve of his left arm rolled back to check the thin red band of light embedded beneath his skin.
Twelve minutes, forty-one seconds.
The sync hadn't held. The glitch from the drive had corrupted something in his implant, and his timer was shedding seconds like a faulty dam. Worse, his courier ID was still disabled. That meant no auto-refills, no access to the city's legal SyncGrid, and worst of all—no job postings.
He leaned back against the archway wall, breath clouding the air like it owed him time. Then, footsteps.
A child in a patchwork poncho watched him from the far end of the alley, then scampered off. A decoy, maybe. Eira turned his face deeper into the hood. You never made eye contact on the lower edge of District 12. The desperate could smell extra time, and even his leaking minutes would draw predators if he wasn't careful.
He activated his emergency ping. It was a last-resort beacon that sent a pulse to one person only—Juno.
Juno wasn't a friend. He was a fixer. He sold time illegally to people with corrupted implants or expired identities. He could be found in the remnants of Substation 7, buried beneath the southern tramline like a rot in the city's veins.
Minutes later, Eira moved fast, the shadows embracing him. He didn't sprint—sprinting cost breath, and breath was tied to BPM. The implant measured everything: heart rate, blood oxygen, fatigue. Go too fast, and it would deduct accordingly. The city didn't reward effort. It only counted cost.
Substation 7 had once powered the entertainment district. Now it was a ghost corridor of rusted terminals and flickering wall-ads, hijacked by black-market techies who sold second chances by the half-minute. He climbed down a bent staircase and stepped into a tight corridor glowing faint green from old emergency lights.
He found Juno hunched over a sync rig cannibalized from four different generations of hardware. Tubes snaked from it into the veins of a man slumped on a chair, his face gray. A sync in progress. The timer above his head read [00:01:22], flashing violently.
"You picked a bad day to leak, courier," Juno said without looking up.
"I didn't come for poetry."
"You never do." Juno finally looked. A man of indeterminate age, but too familiar with the art of decay. He was always surrounded by tech, most of it illegal, some of it semi-sentient. The small drone beside him blinked twice and moved to scan Eira.
"You're flagged," Juno said after the scan. "Half the city thinks you're dead."
"Do I look dead?"
Juno smiled. "You look expensive."
Eira tossed the sync stub—his last encrypted identity shard—onto the desk. "Patch me. I'm leaking."
"You're not just leaking," Juno muttered as he plugged it in. "You're hemorrhaging. Like your implant's been half-wiped by a security key that doesn't exist anymore. What did you jack into?"
Eira didn't answer.
Juno worked silently, then: "Your file's on the feeds. Dark ones. They think you're carrying ghost data."
Eira's heart stopped. "How much of it?"
"Not the contents. Just the shell trace. TIB signature, high-tier corruption tags. Real hush-hush. Which means someone was supposed to be dead. Maybe a lot of someones. Now they're not. Or worse—someone still is."
"I need to fix this," Eira said.
"You need to disappear."
"I don't have that luxury."
"You had five years you weren't supposed to, Courier. Seems like you already used your miracle."
Eira looked at his timer. Nine minutes, fifty seconds.
Juno adjusted a few settings and ran a patch. The implant lit up, stabilized, then shuddered. A spike. Eira dropped to one knee, clutching his chest.
"What the hell?"
"You're tagged. This isn't a glitch. Someone embedded a back-trace protocol into your extension code. You access the drive again, your timer bleeds."
Eira steadied himself. "Can you neutralize it?"
"Maybe. But it'll cost."
"I'll find the minutes."
"You better. Because I just used three of mine to stabilize your heart rate. You owe me."
He left the substation with ten minutes flat. Stabilized, but still hunted. The alley felt quieter now. Too quiet.
Then, a beep.
His HUD flickered. [Ping Detected – Triangulation in Progress]
Someone was following. No name. No ID. Just a shadow hopping frequencies.
Eira vanished into the smog, but not before checking one thing: the drive. Still in his pocket. Still humming faintly.
Like it was alive.
To be continued…