The sky above Syn City never showed stars—only static. Buzzing drones zipped between towers wrapped in advertising like skin, selling dreams coded in silicon and lies. Neon lights flickered like dying embers, casting long shadows on the rain-slick streets of the underlevel.
And through those shadows walked Ella.
No one dared call her by her full name. She was just Ella. Or that girl with the neural knuckles. Or the one who fried a corp sergeant's visor with a stare and a spark-glove. Names didn't matter when you had a reputation, and Ella's walked a few steps ahead of her, spitting on the pavement.
She wore a blood-red jacket patched with salvaged armor, its collar always up, framing a face set in defiance. Her right eye glowed faint cyan, a black-market optic mod she'd installed herself at fourteen with trembling fingers and a stolen scalpel. It clicked faintly every time she blinked. It made people nervous.
They should've been.
She moved like she owned the street—because in some ways, she did. The street knew her. Knew how she survived the Shard Riots. Knew she once hacked a corporate drone mid-air and redirected it into a patroller's skull. Knew that she didn't flinch when knives were pulled or when drones tracked her vitals through smog.
The city called her bad. She wore it like a crown.
Beneath her steel-toe boots was Zone 9—a forgotten sector of Syn City, where synth-junkies begged for stim hits and the air smelled like burnt coolant. Kids ran barefoot through puddles, dodging shock-patrols. Noise never stopped here. It just mutated.
Ella sat on the edge of a broken train platform, watching the electric fog roll in. The silence of the moment was strange. Unnatural.
Then came the buzz.
Footsteps. Soft, but intentional. Someone was approaching who didn't belong in Zone 9. She turned slowly, finger hovering near the emitter switch hidden in her sleeve.
A man—tall, polished, corporate-looking—stood at the edge of the alley. He wore a suit that shimmered with nanofiber threads, and his face was far too clean for this place.
"Ella R. Cortéz," he said with a smile too smooth. "Your reputation precedes you."
She didn't move. "You got three seconds to stop talking before I melt your veneers."
He chuckled, stepping closer. "I'm not here to fight. I'm here to offer you a job."
"I don't do jobs. I do revenge."
He raised a single silver card. A key-chip. The moment she saw the code etched into it, her heart paused.
That was her mother's sigcode.
"Where did you get that?" Her voice dropped like lead.
"From a vault. Level-12 encryption. Buried in a dead server farm two sectors out. Took my team six months to crack."
Ella stood, slow, deliberate. She took the chip. Her fingers trembled, just slightly.
"Why would someone like you dig up ghosts?" she asked.
"Because your mother was more than a ghost. She was a systems architect for Cognivault—before she vanished. And you're her legacy, Ella. Like it or not."
He turned and started walking away. "Meet me at Hub-6 tomorrow. You'll want to know what she left behind."
Ella stared after him until he vanished into the steam.
Her mother. The woman who'd disappeared without a trace when Ella was eight. Whispers said CorpSec took her. Others said she sold out and left. Ella had spent most of her life trying to forget the face that kissed her goodnight, then never returned.
And now that ghost was reaching out through encrypted legacy code?
She didn't trust it. She didn't trust anyone.
But she also couldn't ignore it.
Ella stood under the crackling sign of a derelict med-shop, the chip now warm in her palm. She jacked into her rig—an old neural wristport with more illegal patches than firmware updates—and scanned the key.
The interface flickered to life, casting pale light on her cheek.
> AUTHORIZATION: R.CORTEZ-PRIME
CONTENTS: LOCKED // VOICE-PRINT REQUIRED
MESSAGE: "Hello, my starfire. If you're seeing this… I'm probably dead."
Ella's breath caught.
That voice—it was real.
It was her.
She yanked the chip out and stood still, heart racing like a runaway train.
Tomorrow, she'd go to Hub-6. Against every instinct in her body. Against every hardened edge she'd built.
Not for the corp suit. Not even for the job.
But for that voice.
That fragment of her past.
That whisper of who she might've been before the streets claimed her.
And deep inside her, something stirred.
Not fear.
Not anger.
Hope.
It was terrifying.