Page 45 of GlitchBorn Heart

And then I’m falling again, but this time it’s too fast. I’ll never break my fall. My body spirals like I’m being thrown off a building. My head lulls to the side, dizzy as I spin out of control.

I can see Kael, reaching for me, panicking. He’s helpless to do anything but watch. I whip toward him, desperate. “Help me!”

My last thought before the darkness takes me is that my body is gone. I can’t feel it, can’t feel anything, can’t speak, can’t see. They’ve killed me. The CIC must have come in to erase us as we lay in our beds during TheKast.

I expect my next few moments to be fleeting. It will probably just go away, and I’ll eternally sleep. Instead, I wake up, my eyes fluttering to ground myself after spinning endlessly. Ash’s voice runs through my head “DreamNet runs on their neural servers, Lyra. If they want to keep you under, they will.”

Adrenaline floods my veins, burning hot but I don’t feel it throughout my body. Instead I feel nothing, an absence of sound, light, and temperature around me. There’s a constant hum like servers in a data room. I fully open my eyes, expecting to either confirm I’m dead or wake to a digital prison inside the CIC HQ. It’s neither.

I’m just enveloped in darkness.

17

TheKrash

Playlist: The Drain - Bad Omens, HEALTH, SWARM

Kael

I feel like my body has been slammed into my office sofa, my teeth rattling from the sheer force of impact on the hard cushions. For a moment I just lay there, startled from the DreamNet drop back into the reality of my office. It’s dark. Only the glow of my monitor glimmers blue on the walls, but my head flashes with bright white light from a searing pain in my temples. The lab outside is lit up like a nightclub, code blinking, warnings flashing, and alarms buzzing all around me like one of Ash’s stage shows. The overhead LED lights pulse, as the servers, stacked in towering columns, begin gleaming with red dots of errors.

LINK is activating firewalls, forcing my code to rewrite itself to accommodate whatever the fuck Vikktor released into the TheKast feed tonight. How the hell did he get past my security locks?

DR. RYUDON

SERVER COLLAPSE DETECTED

WAITING FOR YOUR COMMAND

LINK’s voice fills the lab as I run out of my office, head spinning, feeling slightly concussed. I run to the main console and lean over it, desperate to know what exactly is happening. I don’t bother to take the DreamNet band off, my focus is locked on the glowing images before me. Not only is a virus tearing through my system, destroying years of hard work and dedication, but one anomaly flare is spreading over the city grid like spilled blood. The other just vanished into thin air.

The patch I ran earlier seems to be containing most of the civic system’s damage, but the DreamNet is a fucking mess. I type furiously to make sure that it doesn’t implode and trap people inside or throw them out violently, like it did to Lyra and I.

DR. RYUDON

ANOMALY DETECTED IN THE MAIN FRAME

CORRUPTION IMMINENT

Dammit. The two anomalies. One spiking, spreading across a sector, and one vanishing, swallowed in my mainframe by the virus Vikktor deployed. That special ops idiot team knows nothing of my system and is clearly destroying it before my eyes.

Just then, the second anomaly reappears.

I tune out the noise of the alarms and chaos in the lab and focus on the feed as it blooms alive. The grid lights up with an odd shape, a human silhouette, flickering in and out like corrupted code. A symbol follows, as bright light forms in the center, like a shining four-pointed star with an aura around it. I freeze.

“What the hell have they injected into the grid?!” I yell, but no one could hear me over these alarms even if I weren’t alone.

Ember barges in at a runner’s pace holding her DataLINK. Her eyes are wide with alarm. “What’s happening?! Is that what I think it...? “

“Quiet!” I snap, cutting through her panic mid-breath.

Ember stops dead in her steps, guilt creeping in over her face.

Good. She should feel it. This is partly on her for blindly following her father’s orders, executing an update she knew damn well could not be trusted. I don’t have time for her apologies—not when my entire system is bleeding, being hollowed out from the inside.

Ember steps closer, her voice shaking. “Kael, I didn’t know it would...”

“I know,” I cut in again, harsher this time, because if I let her finish, if I let myself acknowledge the look on her face, I’ll lose seconds I don’t have. “You followed his orders; that’s how he gets you. Believe me, I know.”