Rain splattered against the neon-lit windows of the sub-level metro as it hummed beneath the skin of Neo-Vanta City. Gabriella Rho sat alone in the rear carriage, her fingers wrapped tightly around a steaming synth-coffee. Her eyes were bloodshot—not from sleep deprivation, but from overuse of her neural link. The Echo Drive hadn't stopped pulsing since her escape from the ARC lab two days ago.
She hadn't heard from Austin since. The message she intercepted—part code, part desperate plea—kept replaying in her mind.
> "Gabby… they're watching us. The Drive—wasn't meant to do this. I didn't mean for you to—"
Static had devoured the rest.
She tried tracing its signal origin, but the Echo Drive only showed fractured echoes, like memories rewritten by someone else. The neural timestamps were off—too perfect, too clean. Someone had edited the transmission. Or worse, forged it entirely.
The city above had no idea what was happening beneath its foundations.
A flicker of movement across the carriage drew her attention. A thin man in an archivist's coat sat three rows ahead, head tilted slightly, his neural implant blinking faintly through a shaved scalp. Gabriella frowned. That blink pattern—it matched ARC's internal query signal, the one used for internal tracking.
Her breath caught.
She slid her hand into her coat, thumbing the pulse-dampener she'd ripped from an old rig. One surge would knock out all neural comms within a ten-meter radius—for about five seconds. Not long, but maybe enough.
Before she could move, the man stood and turned slowly. His eyes were hollow, pupils dilated unnaturally.
"Gabriella Rho," he said in a calm, glassy tone. "You've deviated from protocol. Return the Echo Drive and submit to realignment."
Realignment. That was ARC code for a neural wipe.
"I don't think so," she said, pressing the trigger.
The world blinked out for five seconds. Every light, every screen, every connection—dead.
She ran.
Through the carriage doors, up the emergency exit, into the screaming metal veins of Neo-Vanta's understructure. Sirens didn't blare—ARC didn't need noise to hunt. They had drones for that.
And Austin? If he was alive, he was somewhere in the dark, hiding like she was. But something told her this wasn't just about escape anymore. The Echo Drive had shown her something—fleeting, like a shadow cast from another dimension.
A file labeled SIGMA-FRAGMENT.
She had to find it. She had to find him.
Before the city erased them both.---
FLASHBACK BEFORE THE FALL
The rooftop garden atop ARC Sector Nine shimmered in the amber glow of simulated sunset. Real plants were banned in this quadrant—bio-contaminants, they said—but the synthetic cherry blossoms still swayed as if touched by a real breeze.
Gabriella laughed, tossing a neural calibration node back at Austin. "You're seriously going to use a Type-7 processor with that code latency? You'll fry the whole interface."
Austin caught it with a grin, reclining on the plastwood bench. "Only if the user's dumb enough to override the gate logic."
She raised an eyebrow. "Which you just did. Twice."
"I was stress-testing it!"
"You were showing off."
He chuckled and leaned back, watching the artificial clouds drift across the dome ceiling. "You know, sometimes I forget we're inside. ARC made it too perfect."
Gabriella glanced at him, softer now. "It's not perfect. It's controlled. There's a difference."