Page 53 of GlitchBorn Heart

The lab is silent again except for the faint hum of servers and the buzz of the drones outside. Fast moving images continue bleeding in from the city through the glass wall of windows.

Once again, I haven’t slept. Coffee cups litter my desk, half-drained, cold. Ember’s words replay like a looped error file in my skull: Her body was found. She’s gone...sort of.

No. That makes no sense. There’s no logic, no proof.

I stare at the grid projection hovering over the central console. What a fucking mess. Two anomalies lit it up last night, twin spikes in power that ripped straight through the system. One of them flatlined, presumed dead. The other, Eli, her brother. Still here. Still burning.

His magic signature is bleeding through the building’s architecture now, crawling along fiber lines and server stacks, threatening every piece of code I’ve ever written, every safeguard I convinced myself was unbreakable. The system is straining to contain him, and I can feel it; LINK can feel it, like a pressure valve waiting to split wide open.

Not gone, erased, or deleted. Why?

I swipe the feed, tracing the rogue signal. It should look like corrupted code, jagged edges, errors. Instead, it still moves, just physically contained. It resists confinement, mutates to avoid deletion. It shouldn’t be possible. No fragment of Vikktor’s virus should be capable of adapting like this. It must be Eli, and Vikktor has him here in HQ. But why?

My thoughts are interrupted by LINK:

DR. RYUDON

I’M SENSING AN ANOMALY BREACH

REQUESTING PROTOCOL: DELETION

Godsdamn Vikktor and his virus.

LINK pings, alerting me to the finished run of the GhostTracing patch I wrote a few hours ago. I log into the system. My console fills with black void code, streaming past like a mesmerizing display of zeros and ones. Something flickers from inside, a pulse of bright pink static against the dark, like a heartbeat. The virus? Maybe. Could it be Lyra trapped in DreamNet? Could I have found her this easily?

I slam the thought down. Can’t think that way. Dangerous. Exhausted. If I let myself believe, I’ll unravel. This could just be rogue code left behind from the aftermath of the virus. I see nothing in the output that suggests anything remotely human or anything related to an anomaly.

“LINK—begin deletion protocol,” I command. I want this out of my system. Now I’m even more determined to make Vikktor pay for it, pay for the lives lost, including Lyra’s.

YES DR. RYUDON

The screen shudders. I continue to watch the location grid as light races toward the anomaly then bursts, breaking apart as if an invisible force shoved it back. LINK responds immediately.

SYSTEM ERROR

UNAUTHORIZED MOVEMENT

ESCALATION REQUIRED

I lean forward, grip tightening on the console. The error code bleeds down the screen:

ENTITY NOT COMPLIANT WITH DELETION PROTOCOLS

“LINK—Run it again.” I sit back, ready to intervene.

The command executes. Again, resistance. Static hisses in my ears, and gods help me, I think I hear something like a laugh. Barely audible, like someone laughing under their breath, defiant and determined. I force myself to breathe, to not lose control in anger.

ERROR: DELETION FAILED

DR. RYUDON: HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO PROCEED?

My mind snaps back to the girl kissing me on the beach, eyes so intense, full of golden fire. Deep down, I want to fight back, want to avenge her. I whisper to the black grid. “You’re a threat. A shadow of the virus, and I’ll tear you apart before I allow you to take my system down.”

My hands tremble as I code the next attack. I’m not even sure she’s alive, have no idea where she landed. If she is in DreamNet, trapped like a star in a dark sky, then I have to guide her back to the light. It’s where she belongs. I will find her, but first I have to destroy everything this virus touches.

On the monitors, the anomaly flails, pushes at walls that aren’t walls, and collapses into a heap of blinding light. It’s almost beautiful...if it wasn’t gutting my architecture from the inside. A digital ghost, but more real than anything I’ve seen in years. It could be her, or it could be Vikktor’s virus. At this point my mind is reeling.

Eli’s bursts remain a low hum, no threat to the order. Vikktor must have him somewhere here, must be suppressing his magic, but I’ll have to focus on him later. Right now, I need to find out what happened to Lyra.