The old corridors of Lower Sector 9 hadn't seen maintenance in over a decade. Filthy neon signs flickered above rust-stained synth-metal, and the air smelled of ozone, oil, and desperation. It was a graveyard of obsolete tech—and of mistakes buried by those who had moved on.
Gabriella moved quietly, the hum of her cloaking field a soft purr in her ear. Tao had argued against her coming alone, but this wasn't something she could send a drone to handle. The node wasn't just a blip on a screen. It was a ghost. A memory clawing its way back through the code.
She found it behind a defunct data café, wedged between crumbling smart-wall panels and a drain where scavengers burned copper wire. A handheld scanner confirmed it: Node 37-Aleph, last synced with a test Echo Drive... ten years ago.
Her fingers hesitated above the interface port. Just touching it made her chest ache. This was Austin's node.
Before the fallout, before the betrayal, Austin Vale had been her partner in building the neural lattice—the code, the structure, even the empathy-based heuristics. They'd practically lived inside each other's minds through the early Echo tests.
Gabriella jacked in.
The world dissolved into noise—fractal memories, scrambled emotions, digital echoes of thoughts long past. And then, like a thread through the chaos, a voice.
"Gabi?"
Her breath caught. It wasn't a recording. It was live.
"Austin?" she whispered.
Silence. Then static. Then again—
"If you're seeing this... you were right. I never meant to hurt you. But they—VantaCore—they're not launching Echo Drive. They're weaponizing it."
The signal cut.
Gabriella staggered back, hand clutching her chest. The node's housing sparked, then died.
Around her, the shadows shifted. A pair of low-humming drones uncloaked above, red lights pulsing.
VantaCore had traced her.
Fractured Allegiances
Austin Vale(Austin's perspective)
The hum of the mag-rail pulsed beneath his feet, the rhythm echoing in his skull like a heartbeat out of sync. Neo-Vanta City blurred past the window in shades of violet and steel, all neon veneer and corporate bones. Austin leaned back against the seat, his VirexCorp ID glinting faintly in the ambient light — a badge of honor, or maybe a chain, depending on the day.