Page 29 of GlitchBorn Heart

“Where do you think?” Ash’s voice is immediately defensive. “Bro, it wasn’t me. I was at the club until TheKast. Crowd loves me...what can I say? Standard set tonight, no extra spice. Don’t tell me this is about work again.”

“Of course it’s work. What the hell else would I have?” I snap, leaning hard into a turn that sends sparks off the bike’s footrests. “The readings are off the charts. Looks like both were inside VikkCorp Towers. I just figured it was you with that much surge.”

A pause. Then Ash’s tone shifts, the easy humor draining into serious sarcasm. “I haven’t slept with anyone in VikkCorp Towers in months.”

Cocky but effective.

I refuse to laugh. On the other end of the line, he goes quiet in a way that means his brain is moving faster than his mouth. For once.

Then he mutters to himself, “That’s...weird.”

“Weird how?” I snap, leaning the bike hard around a glowing roundabout.

“If there was a huge surge,” he says, “like a really big one, then I should have felt it.” Another pause. “It doesn’t feel right.”

My jaw tightens against the helmet. “Explain.”

Ash exhales slowly. “Usually when magic spikes like that, I feel it first. Vibrations ripple through the grid, through me.” An even longer pause this time. “I didn’t feel that usual anomaly hum.”

I hear him get up and start walking. He begins humming, barely audible against the roar of my engine and the wind rushing past me. “Wait...I feel it, not the usual vibe though, a glitch, like a DJ remixing a track.”

My grip tightens on the throttle.

“You think this is her?” he mumbles to himself. “Yeah. Yeah, it has to be. Must be her.” His voice drops, trailing off. “Only she could bend it like that without setting off every alarm.”

He doesn’t finish what he’s saying, and that’s worse than if he had. The city continues to smear past me in streaks of neon.

Ash finally clears his throat. “I didn’t feel the vibration because it wasn’t intentional, Kael. It was accidental magic, uncontrolled, a slip-up.”

I don’t answer right away because I don’t like where this is going.

“What?!” I bark. “She? Her who?”

He ignores my question. I can hear him muttering something and his fingers flying over his keyboard as I slow my bike to a purr. The faint click of keys echoes through the comm. “I’m scanning the rebellion boards, encrypted channels, community rooms, any info pertinent to tonight.”

The bike bucks slightly as I take the corner leading into VikkCorp’s campus slowly. “Anything?”

“Nothing there...nothing...” He pauses. “Wait!”

“Ash?” I question him impatiently, my voice tuning into a low growl.

“Yeah, yeah, hold your murder-cycle,” he says. “Someone just flagged an outage. One of the systems inside KrossCorp.”

My stomach drops. “KrossCorp?” I say. “Like the GameNet KrossCorp?”

“That’s the one,” he replies. “Private diagnostics went dark for almost sixty seconds. Not a crash, more like it voided some code. Everybody dropped out right before TheKast.”

That’s not possible. Not without authorization. I personally sign off on GameNet code; KrossCorp just holds the servers.

“KrossCorp’s been sold for years,” I say. “VikkCorp owns GameNet now. I maintain GameNet. I would’ve seen—”

“A corporate alarm go off?” Ash cuts in. “Sure. If it was corporate. But this was an anomaly, remember?”

The rain stops as I pull under the giant awning leading to VikkCorp HQ. My thoughts race just like my bike.

“KrossCorp still owns the servers, the actual hosting,” Ash continues. “GameNet’s architecture, the old skeleton under all your polish. Dax Kross never let that part go. Sold the dream, kept the bones.”

I frown. “I know, but Dax Kross is a ghost, a billionaire recluse. No public appearances in years. He couldn’t care less about it.”