The screens died at 3:47 AM.
Elara's fingers froze over the keyboard as every monitor in her apartment went black. Six screens. Six hundred hours of work. Gone in a blink.
"No. No, no, no—"
She slammed her palm against the desk, coffee sloshing over scattered energy drink cans. The deadline was in four hours. Four hours to crack the security algorithm that would keep her rent paid for another month. Four hours that just became impossible.
The darkness pressed in around her. Her apartment had always been small, but without the glow of her screens, it felt like a coffin.
Then the hum started.
Low at first. Barely there. Like the building itself was breathing. Elara's skin prickled as the sound grew louder, resonating in her bones. The kind of frequency that made your teeth ache and your stomach drop.
"What the hell—"
The screens flickered. Once. Twice.
They blazed to life with a white light so bright she had to shield her eyes. Not her work. Not anything she'd been running. Just walls of scrolling text in a language that looked like code but moved like something alive.
Elara squinted at the nearest monitor. The characters shifted as she watched, rearranging themselves into patterns that hurt to look at. Geometric shapes that couldn't exist. Equations that bent the wrong way.
Her hands moved before her brain caught up, typing commands to shut it down. Nothing worked. The code kept coming, faster now, filling every screen until—
The explosion wasn't loud.
It was a whisper and a scream at once. Glass didn't shatter—it dissolved. Her monitors imploded in perfect synchronization, the screens collapsing into themselves like dying stars. Smoke curled up from the wreckage, smelling like burning copper and something else. Something organic.
Elara stumbled backward, her chair crashing to the floor. Her heart hammered against her ribs as she stared at the destruction. Three grand in equipment. A month's worth of freelance work. Her entire life.
Gone.
But that wasn't what made her breath catch in her throat.
In the smoke, in the space where her center monitor used to be, words carved themselves into the wall. Not spray paint. Not projected. Actually carved, the drywall peeling back like skin to reveal dark grooves underneath.
THEY'RE COMING FOR WHAT YOU TOOK
Elara's legs felt like water. She hadn't taken anything. Hadn't hacked anywhere she shouldn't have. She was careful. Always careful.
The grooves in the wall started to bleed.
Not paint. Not rust. Blood, dark and fresh, seeping from the carved letters and dripping down to pool on her desk. The smell hit her—iron and rot and something ancient.
She should run. Should grab her phone and get the hell out. But her feet wouldn't move. Her eyes locked on the blood as it continued to flow, far too much to be coming from shallow carvings in drywall.
Something glinted in the pooling liquid.
Elara's hands shook as she reached forward, her fingers hovering over the blood. Don't touch it. Every instinct screamed at her. But she'd never been good at listening to instincts.
She plunged her hand into the warm blood.
Her fingers closed around metal. She yanked it out, blood dripping from her fist as she opened her palm.
A pendant. Silver, or something like it. Circular, about the size of a half-dollar, with symbols etched into its surface. The same impossible symbols that had scrolled across her screens. They seemed to move in the low light, shifting and rearranging themselves.
The moment the pendant touched her bare skin, ice shot through her veins.
Elara gasped, her knees buckling. The apartment spun. Images flashed behind her eyes—not memories, but something older. A laboratory filled with tanks of green liquid. A woman's scream. Hands covered in code, actual code, growing like vines under the skin.
And a voice, cold and without gender, whispering in a language she shouldn't understand but did:
You were always ours.
She hit the floor hard, the pendant clutched against her chest. It pulsed. Actually pulsed, like a second heartbeat syncing with her own. Warm now, almost hot, the metal seeming to melt into her palm.
When Elara managed to open her eyes, the blood was gone. The wall was smooth, unmarked. Her monitors were destroyed, but that was it. No carved message. No impossible bleeding.
Just her, on the floor of her trashed apartment, holding a pendant that shouldn't exist.
Her phone buzzed. Once. The screen cracked down the middle, spiderwebs spreading across the glass, but the notification still glowed through:
Unknown Number: Tomorrow. Old Metro Station. Section 7. Come alone, or don't come at all. Your choice, Elara. But they already know you have it.
The pendant burned hotter.
Elara scrambled to her feet, yanking the chain over her neck without thinking. The moment it settled against her skin, the burning stopped. It felt right there. Like it had always belonged.
She looked at the message again. Section 7 had been closed for fifteen years after the collapse. No one went down there. No one sane.
But whoever sent this knew her name. Knew about the pendant. Knew she'd have it before she did.
Elara grabbed her jacket, shoving her cracked phone into her pocket. Her hands were steady now. That was good. She'd need steady hands for what was coming.
She didn't know what "they" were. Didn't know what she'd supposedly taken. But she'd built her entire life on solving puzzles, on cracking codes that weren't meant to be cracked.
This was just another puzzle.
A puzzle that bled and pulsed and whispered in dead languages.
Elara touched the pendant through her shirt. It hummed against her fingertips, warm and alive.
"Alright," she muttered, locking her apartment door behind her. "Let's see what you are."
The hallway lights flickered as she passed. In the darkness between flickers, she could have sworn she saw symbols crawling across the walls. The same symbols from the pendant.
The same symbols that were now burning themselves into her dreams.
She didn't look back.