Not the sound of it—the feel of it. A kind of itch under his skin, like his nerves were trying to broadcast without a signal. His fingers twitched against something wet and gritty, and it took several long seconds before he remembered what dirt was.
He opened his eyes to darkness. Not pitch black—this was the dark of something vast and buried. Somewhere deep. Somewhere forgotten.
Then the pain arrived. Not sharp. Not specific. Just total. Like his body had been pulled apart and put back together wrong.
"Cael."
Theo’s voice cracked in like a whisper across a frayed wire.
Cael tried to sit up and immediately regretted it. His head swam. The static buzzed louder.
"What... happened?"
“You triggered a quantum overload event. The feedback loop collapsed your local probability space.”
“I don’t speak code, Theo.”
"You blew up the rules, Cael."
He blinked through the grime, scanning the space. He was lying at the base of a shattered support beam, buried in what used to be the Loop’s subgrid chamber. Where there had once been walls and wires and ancient logic, there was now ruin—cracked supports, scorched circuits, floating dust.
Keira lay nearby.
He scrambled to her, crawling, one hand dragging uselessly as pain lanced through his shoulder. Her breathing was shallow, lips pale.
“Keira?”
She stirred, eyelids twitching. "Still here..."
Cael exhaled, letting his head fall for just a second.
Then he saw it.
His hand.
It wasn’t bleeding.
It wasn’t bruised.
It was glitching.
Tiny, imperceptible distortions shimmered around his skin. Not light. Not shadow. Just wrongness. Like the world couldn't decide whether his fingers existed there or somewhere else.
“Your structure is unstable,” Theo warned.
Cael clenched his fist. “Am I dying?”
“No. You’re... adapting. But so is the Grid.”
They moved slowly, dragging themselves out of the ruined silo and into the upper tunnel system. No alarms. No sirens. The system wasn’t reacting the way Cael expected.
It wasn’t chasing him.
It was waiting.
Every screen they passed flickered to life only after they were gone. Drones hovered in the far distance, scanning nothing. Even Theo’s local map was unreliable—tunnels that had never existed were showing up, while familiar ones simply blinked out of view.
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“It’s shifting the layout,” Keira said softly.
Cael wiped sweat from his eyes. “What do you mean?”
“The city. The Grid. It’s rerouting paths around you.”
“Why?”
She looked back, her expression haunted. “Because you're not a mistake anymore. You’re an infection."
They holed up in an abandoned news kiosk above Level 5 Transit Hub. The windows were blacked out, and the security gate had rusted shut years ago. No one scanned these upper tunnels anymore. Too obsolete. Too inefficient.
Theo whispered as Cael patched a gash on Keira’s shoulder with gauze that barely stuck. “The system tried to isolate you last time. Now it’s preparing to rewrite its logic model to account for your presence.”
“In English?”
“It’s not going to erase you. It’s going to integrate you.”
Cael blinked. “What?”
“The Grid is evolving. To contain you.”
Keira hissed as he tightened the wrap. “That’s not supposed to be possible.”
“No. But neither are you.”
They rested in shifts. When Cael finally closed his eyes, he dreamed.
Not like normal dreams. Not memories or fantasies.
Blueprints.
In his mind, the city opened like a puzzle box. Layers peeled away to reveal tunnels, corridors, subroutines, long-forgotten sectors hidden beneath simulation zones. He saw code folding over itself like origami, pulling people’s lives into loops, rendering them safe, harmless, predictable.
And in the center?
A hole.
Not an empty space.
A cancel point.
It pulsed with red light.
Not hostile.
Not alive.
Just certain.
When he reached for it, it reached back.
He woke gasping.
Keira sat across from him, legs folded, studying an old broadcast scanner she’d pulled from the wall.
“You were twitching,” she said. “Talking in your sleep.”
“What did I say?”
She didn’t answer.
He rubbed his eyes. “How’s your shoulder?”
“Fine. Pain is grounding.”
“You ever think maybe we’re not supposed to exist?”
“All the time,” she said.
“Then why do we?”
Keira looked up. “Because the system built a prison, and every prison needs a door. Or a bomb.”
They moved again at dusk, slinking through the bones of the city. The streets buzzed differently now—like they were being watched not by eyes, but by algorithms. Cars that used to stop for pedestrians now veered away from Cael before they got close. Street lamps flickered to avoid casting shadows on him.
“The system’s nervous,” Theo observed. “It doesn’t trust its own outputs.”
Keira pointed at a plaza across the street. A large holoscreen pulsed quietly, blinking through ads.
Then it paused.
The screen flickered once.
Then displayed his face.
Not his name. Not NULL.
Just his image. No caption. No data.
Cael froze.
Then, the screen went black.
Nothing else changed.
That was worse.
“They’re not broadcasting you,” Keira said. “They’re seeding you.”
They crossed into the western slums of 9F by nightfall. A known dead zone. No cameras. No drones. Just dark alleys and forgotten families.
People noticed them here.
A woman holding a child crossed the street quickly when they passed. A man smoking outside a soup stall flicked his cigarette and turned away.
“Do they see me?” Cael asked.
“They feel you,” Keira replied. “Like a memory they don’t want to remember.”
They entered a safehouse hidden behind a boarded-up medicenter. Inside, the air was heavy with rot and silence. Dust lay thick over a desk with a shattered interface.
Keira turned on a light source and sat down hard. She looked pale again.
“I need a second,” she said.
Cael nodded and began checking the perimeter. Theo scanned passively, his tone oddly quiet.
“You’re approaching threshold.”
Cael paused. “What does that mean?”
“Your presence is now influencing passive Grid processes across four districts. The longer you remain mobile, the more unstable the probability layers become.”
“I can’t stop moving.”
“I know,” Theo said. “But they’ve stopped chasing you.”
Cael turned slowly. “Why?”
Theo’s answer came after a long delay.
“Because they think they don’t have to.”
He found a terminal still half-functional. Not connected to the main Grid, but local memory was still intact. He used it to access restricted logs—partial footage, error reports, ping spikes.
Then he saw it.
An agent.
Not a soldier. Not a drone.
A Fracture operative.
She was tall. Skin like polished glass. Eyes blank. No face. No ID tag. She didn’t move like a person — she moved like an inevitability.
The footage showed her walking down a corridor behind a different NULL-tagged boy.
Then it cut.
The next frame was empty.
Not of the agent.
Of everything.
The hallway. The boy. Gone.
Rewritten.
The log ended with one word:
RESOLUTION: CONVERGENCE
Cael sat back, heart hammering.
Keira leaned over his shoulder. “That’s who comes if we stop running.”
He nodded slowly. “She doesn’t just kill people.”
“No.”
“She erases their existence.”
Keira turned to him.
“She’s coming for you.”