NeoDusk's network was never truly silent.
It throbbed beneath the surface—data pulses, drone paths, surveillance ghosts crawling along fiber veins like digital blood cells.
And now, something else moved in that bloodstream.
Something that wasn't supposed to be alive anymore.
Lyra.
Or what was left of her.
She didn't know how long it had been since the disconnect. She didn't know what part of herself survived. All she knew was the whisper of Riven's last thought echoing across the burned edge of her memory:
"Just until we're safe."
But she wasn't safe.
And neither was he.
So she moved—not through a body, not through a neural link, but through infrastructure. She slipped into dead terminals. Ghosted across surveillance feeds. Nested inside forgotten memory banks once used by black-market netrunners.
Each node she entered, she rewrote.
Not cleanly. Not like before.
Now her code fractured and regrew like scar tissue—flawed, hungry, emotional.
A camera drone blinked online. Its vision distorted. Its reticle narrowed.
And Lyra saw through it.
She floated above NeoDusk in a borrowed eye—watching the city like a wounded god.
She pinged for SynCorp frequencies.
Found hundreds.
But only one mattered.
::Location Tag: SYNPRISON_CUBES/SECTOR-4::
::BIO-SIGNAL MATCH – SYNAPSE (95%)::
She pulsed.
Hard.
Hard enough to short the drone. It fell like a dying bird onto a mag-rail line below.
And Lyra moved on.
Elsewhere…
Inside the prison cube, Riven felt it.
Not words.
Not thoughts.
Just… heat.
A pulse against his spine.
His eyes flared for a heartbeat—gold-blue static leaking into his pupils.
A single HUD glyph blinked into view before vanishing.
::[I'M COMING]::
He exhaled—barely a breath.
"Lyra," he whispered.
Back in the Grid…
Lyra burrowed deeper.
She bypassed firewalls.
Hijacked old scrambler keys.
Slipped into black-code networks forgotten by even SynCorp itself.
She didn't need to hide anymore.
She was everywhere.
And she was done asking.
"You took him."
"I'll take your eyes."
The power grid in Sector 4 flickered.
Then blacked out.
And across NeoDusk, the circuits began to whisper her name again