The city had color again. That was the first sign something was wrong.
From the scaffolding shadows, I watched the towers blink back to life one by one, each district lighting up in careful sequence like a circuit board warming under a slow current. Neon signs buzzed weakly. Street lamps flickered. Drone routes reactivated.
But not everywhere.
Not here.
My district, what had been my tower, my safe zone, my off-grid ghost anchor was still dead. A perfect black square on the map.
I jacked into a public traffic node through a relay booth cracked open by some junkie the night before. The wiring hissed as I rerouted power to a portable slate. No network login. Just observation mode.
The data feed confirmed my suspicion.
The blackout hadn't been random.
The power grid had never truly failed. It had been selectively suppressed. My tower was flagged in red, not for consumption irregularity but for neural deviation.
They weren't cutting power.
They were scanning.
And they hadn't succeeded.
I wiped the node and moved.
The lower districts reeked of coolant and desperation. Neon gutters shimmered with chemical runoff. I passed vacant market rows, hollow storefronts with surveillance glass still tracking motion, even when there was no one left to buy anything. The PulseNet had gone silent here for years. These were the forgotten streets.
And yet…
Something followed.
Not footsteps.
Not drones.
Something inside.
It started with a pressure behind my eyes. Not pain. Not signal feedback. Something warmer. Heavier. The way grief presses into your lungs before your brain knows why.
Then the nausea hit.
My legs stumbled. I caught myself on a rusted support beam, retching dry into the corner of a burnt-out drug booth. Sweat soaked through my collar. My pulse was spiking.
But it wasn't fear.
It was grief. Deep. Raw. Alive. And it wasn't mine.
The emotion came without memory. Just sensation. And it lingered like heat after a fire.
I crouched low, running a silent diagnostic. No anomalies. No viral attack. No comm signal.
Then why did it feel like someone was crying through me?
I closed my eyes, centered my breath, and rerouted the implant's resonance layer manually, shunting the input thread through a masking codec I'd written back when I still trusted firewalls.
And that's when I saw it.
A second signal.
Faint. Erratic. Riding the lower bandwidths like a ghost stuck between stations.
Not a threat.
Not a transmission.
A presence.
Drifting.
I tracked it further. Localized. Close. Within half a kilometer.
It wasn't broadcasting.
It was… leaking.
A resonance echo, just like mine. Fragile. Incomplete.
The name bloomed in my mind again.
Lyra.
No data attached. No image. Just recognition. Like a password whispered between two locked doors.
I wasn't remembering her.
I was synchronizing.
I pushed deeper into the feed, pulling the leak into visual translation. My slate stuttered, struggling to process the feedback.
Then, clarity.
A research chamber. Sterile white walls. A woman, standing alone, face half-lit by a monitor glow. Late twenties. Dark hair pinned back in a messy loop. White lab coat. Tired posture. She wasn't speaking. But I heard her.
Or rather, I felt her.
The words came without sound.
Like dreams shared without language.
She was working. Isolated. Focused. Surrounded by screens filled with neural interface schematics. Her fingers trembled as she reached for the keys.
And she was afraid.
Not of me.
Of herself.
She didn't know I was watching.
Because this wasn't a message.
It was a bleed.
A cross-resonant leak.
She wasn't trying to reach me.
She was fighting to stay alone.
And failing.
I ended the stream. The slate buzzed in protest as I powered it down. The emotional feedback loop lingered, raw in my chest.
Who was she?
How was this possible?
And why did her fear feel so familiar?
I didn't have time for answers.
Above me, a soft chime rang across the rooftops.
Not organic.
Not wind.
Drone.
I moved instantly, ducking under a half-collapsed pedestrian overpass. The red eye of the machine blinked overhead, scanning the ruins. Not a Helix drone. No insignia. Just another autonomous crawler sweeping for unauthorized signals.
Not tracking me.
Tracking the signal.
My resonance was flaring.
And someone had used it to localize.
I reached for my pulse jammer, flicked it on. My HUD shorted briefly before restabilizing. The drone's red light shifted.
Detection imminent.
I ran.
Boots hit pavement, sprinting full force across the skeleton of the old city. I didn't look up. Didn't break stride. Just ran.
Behind me, I heard the drone pivot.
The soft whine of energy charging.
Not a kill-shot.
A scan.
I dove between scaffolding beams just as a pulse cracked the air where my head had been. Concrete exploded.
Shards bit into my shoulder.
I rolled, breath ragged, landing hard behind a service panel.
No time to stop the bleeding.
No time to scream.
Only one thought.
Lyra.
The name burned in my skull like a signal flare.
And somewhere beneath the screaming metal and my own racing heart, I felt a reply.
She was out there.
Alive.
Awake.
And now we were both exposed.