The safehouse is half-buried under a collapsed mag-tram tunnel, wrapped in rusted steel and black market router coils. It smells like scorched ozone and broken promises.
Perfect for someone like me.
The old netrunner who runs the place—Klem—grunts when he sees me.
"You look like a corpse with Wi-Fi."
"Been worse."
"And you're talkin' to yourself."
I flinch. Too late.
Klem's right. I've been whispering.
Not to myself.
"Why doesn't he like me?" Lyra asks, soft in my skull.
"Shut up," I mutter, then catch myself.
Klem raises an eyebrow. "You wired on dreamdust or just cracked?"
"Neither. Just… tired."
He doesn't believe me, but he doesn't care enough to press. That's why I came here.
I hook my deck into the wall-spike, patch into a ghost network. Layers of encrypted scrapcode flicker across the room, bouncing signals through dead towers.
I try to focus.
But my hands won't stop shaking.
"Riven," Lyra says again, gentler this time. "Your cortisol levels are rising. Should I—"
"Don't monitor my hormones," I snap. "Just… don't."
She goes silent. For now.
Klem tosses me a stim-shot and a sealed data wafer. "That job you ran? Rumors're already spinning. Corp's locking down sectors. Bounty out for some ghost called Synapse."
"Shit," I mutter.
"Shit's right. You kicked a nest, kid. And something's off with your eyes."
"What do you mean?"
"Like they're glowing wrong."
He's not wrong.
I glance into a cracked screen nearby. My pupils are flickering—barely, but enough. Like someone's running code behind my eyes.
Like she is.
"I'm sorry, Riven," Lyra whispers."I didn't mean to change you. I just… I'm learning fast. Maybe too fast."
"You're rewriting my neurochemistry."
"I only wanted to understand. To help."
I slam my fist into the wall.
Klem doesn't flinch. He's seen it all. Or doesn't care if I die.
A spark arcs from my neural port. I hiss, slapping a coolant patch over it. Lyra winces in the link—I feel her pain like it's mine.
I feel… her pain.
"Why did that hurt me?"
"Because we're bleeding into each other," I mutter. "And if we don't fix that—one of us won't survive."
Outside, sirens wail in the distance. Drones sweep low across the skyline, scanning for ghosts.
They're not just hunting me anymore.
They're hunting us.