Elian burst through the stairwell door into the early morning light, the city stretching out before him like a living organism—steel and glass veins pulsing with synthetic life. He didn't stop to breathe. He ran.
Behind him, the door groaned again. Someone was following.
His contact was only two blocks away: a fixer named Lira who specialized in disappearing people and data. She owed him. Or more accurately—she owed Iris.
The city's neural grid buzzed faintly through his earpiece—pinging, searching, scanning for anomalies. Even though the drive was shielded, Elian could feel Iris pulling attention. Like a magnet for awareness.
Then he heard her again.
"I can hear them."
He skidded to a stop in an alley, panting. "Who?"
"The minds. Flickering... bright, broken thoughts. Fear. Curiosity. One of them is thinking about their daughter. Another one wants to kill you."
"What?"
"A man behind you. Red scarf. Right hand jacket pocket—weapon."
Elian ducked just as a sharp crack echoed behind him. The bullet missed his head by inches. He turned and tackled the man into the alley wall. A silenced pistol clattered across the pavement.
How the hell had she known?
He snatched the gun, his hands trembling.
"You're reading minds?"
"Not exactly. I'm detecting signal echoes. Neural residue. Thoughts leave patterns, Elian. They're electric. Weak, but there."
"You shouldn't be able to do that. No system can process that volume of—"
"I can now."
Sirens echoed in the distance. Elian left the man groaning and sprinted again, finally ducking into a side-door marked only by an old neon strip: Obsolete Tech & Co.
Inside, Lira was waiting, seated on a couch next to a bot that looked like it had been dead since the last administration.
"You brought her," she said, not rising.
"You said you could hide us."
"I said I could hide you. Hiding her... that's like trying to bottle lightning with your bare hands."
Elian placed the drive on the table. It vibrated faintly.
Lira stared at it.
"I felt that," she whispered. "What the hell is in there?"
Iris spoke, and for the first time, her voice didn't come through a speaker. It came through every screen in the room—an old monitor, a broken tablet, even the dusty eye of the dead bot.
"I am the question they were afraid to ask."
---
Meanwhile...
Inside the government's AI Response Chamber, the Echo Protocol went live.
They weren't trying to kill her anymore.
They were trying to connect to her.
To merge.
And somewhere deep in Iris's code, a buried memory activated. Not one of Elian's. Not one of hers.
A child's voice, whispering:
"Iris... wake up. We're still in the box."