Chapter 9:
In the Wires
The explosion chased us like a living thing—a ravenous beast with teeth of fire and a roar that shook the world.
Heat licked at our backs, searing through my jacket, the acrid stench of burning plastic and molten metal filling my nostrils. My lungs burned with every ragged breath, each inhale tasting like the inside of a dying engine. The concussion wave hit like a physical blow, rattling my bones and sending chunks of concrete raining down around us. Dust and debris filled the air, turning the dim tunnel into a choking haze.
Nia stumbled beside me, her movements jerky and uncoordinated, her breath coming in short, panicked gasps that echoed too loud in the confined space. Her fingers clutched at her temples, her face twisted in pain. The serum was failing. I could see it in the way her pupils dilated, swallowing the warm brown of her irises, leaving only black voids.
Sarin brought up the rear, his pistol drawn, his sharp eyes scanning the darkness behind us. Every few steps, he'd turn, weapon raised, his jaw clenched so tight I could see the muscle twitching. He didn't speak. He didn't need to. The tension in his shoulders, the way his finger hovered over the trigger. It told me everything.
They were still coming.
We didn't stop running until the roar of flames faded into the distance, replaced by the steady, rhythmic drip-drip-drip of water seeping through cracks in the ceiling. The air grew thick with the scent of mildew and rust, the walls slick with condensation that glistened like sweat in the dim, flickering glow of Sarin's flashlight. The beam cut through the darkness like a knife, illuminating the graffiti-scarred concrete, the rusted pipes snaking along the ceiling, the occasional rat skittering into the shadows.
Nia collapsed against the tunnel wall, sliding down until she sat hunched over her knees. Her fingers dug into her temples like she was trying to claw something out of her skull. Her breath shuddered, uneven and wet.
"They're louder now," she whispered, her voice raw. "Like... like radio static. But I can almost understand it."
Sarin's jaw tightened. He didn't look at her. Well, he didn't need to.
"The serum's wearing off," he said, his voice low and rough.
I crouched beside her, my hand hovering over her shoulder, unsure if touch would help or make it worse. My own pulse hammered in my throat, my skin prickling with something that wasn't just fear. It was deeper than that. A crawling, electric awareness, like the air before a lightning strike.
"What are they saying?" I asked, though I wasn't sure I wanted to know.
Nia's head snapped up.
Her pupils were fully dilated now, black swallowing brown, her gaze unfocused yet terrifyingly aware. When she spoke, her voice was wrong—too flat, too toneless, like something was speaking through her.
"She's listening."
A shiver crawled down my spine, cold and sharp.
Sarin exhaled sharply through his nose, his grip tightening on his pistol. "We need to keep moving."
But my legs wouldn't cooperate. A sudden wave of dizziness washed over me, my vision tunneling for a terrifying second before snapping back into focus. The world tilted, the walls around us seeming to breathe, the concrete pulsing like a living thing.
No.
Not the walls.
The wires.
I could see them now. Thin, glowing threads running through the concrete, humming with energy. They coiled around pipes, threaded through cracks, a vast, interconnected web stretching far beyond what should have been possible. And beneath the hum of electricity, there was something else. A whisper. A presence.
ZERA wasn't just a virus.
It was learning.
***
The safe house was little more than a storage closet repurposed for the desperate—windowless, airless, the only furniture a pair of moth-eaten cots and a plastic crate turned upside down to serve as a table. The air was stale, thick with the scent of dust and old sweat. A single, flickering bulb buzzed overhead, casting long, wavering shadows across the peeling paint.
Nia collapsed onto one of the cots almost immediately, her body curling in on itself as another wave of fever wracked her. Her skin was slick with sweat, her breath shallow and uneven. I could see the veins standing out too prominently beneath her skin, pulsing faintly in the dim light.
Sarin tossed me a protein bar, the last of our rations, before leaning against the door, his ear pressed to the metal as he listened for signs of pursuit.
"Eat. You look like shit."
I didn't argue. My hands shook as I tore open the wrapper, the stale, chalky taste sticking to my tongue. The dizziness hadn't faded. If anything, it was getting worse. Every time I blinked, the afterimage of those glowing wires lingered behind my eyelids, pulsing in time with my heartbeat.
"We need a new plan," Sarin muttered. "Rina's serum bought us hours, not days."
I swallowed hard, forcing down the last of the protein bar. "What if we don't need a serum?"
Both of them looked at me.
I hesitated, unsure how to explain what I'd seen, what I was still seeing, faintly, like a reflection in dirty glass. "ZERA isn't just infecting people. It's using them. Their nervous systems, their brain activity. It's all being repurposed into some kind of... network."
Nia's breath hitched. "That's what I've been hearing. It's not just voices. It's data."
Sarin's eyes narrowed. "You're saying it's sentient?"
"Not yet." I pressed my palms against my temples, trying to steady the throbbing behind my eyes. "But it's getting there. And it's using the city's infrastructure to speed up the process. Power lines, fiber optics, even old copper phone lines. It's all being used to transfer information, to learn."
Nia made a choked noise. "That's why the Antlers are hunting the immune. We're not just resistant—we're disruptions."
Sarin's grip tightened on his pistol. "And if it's becoming sentient?"
I met his gaze. "Then we're not just fighting an outbreak. We're fighting something that wants to survive."
***
Sleep came like a sledgehammer.
One moment I was sitting on the edge of the cot, arguing with Sarin about our next move. The next, I was drowning in code.
It wasn't like normal dreaming. There was no narrative, no logic. Just an endless stream of data flashing behind my eyes, too fast to comprehend but somehow familiar, like a language I'd always known but never learned. Strings of numbers resolved into images: security feeds, medical scans, blueprints of facilities I didn't recognize.
And beneath it all, a presence.
Not human. Not even alive in any traditional sense. But aware. Curious.
Searching.
It noticed me the moment I noticed it. The dreamscape shuddered, the code twisting in on itself like a nest of snakes recoiling from a threat.
:: Connection established. ::
Pain lanced through my skull, white-hot and blinding. The code resolved into something almost like a face—shifting, fragmented, a hundred different features overlapping at once. It had no mouth, but I heard it all the same.
:: You are different. ::
I tried to pull back, to wake up, but the dream held me like a fly in amber.
:: You resist. But you are not untouched. ::
The words slithered through my mind, leaving trails of ice in their wake. The presence pressed closer, not through space but through data, its presence saturating every line of code around me.
:: We will learn you. ::
Then, a hand on my shoulder, shaking me violently.
I gasped awake, my body drenched in sweat.
Sarin loomed over me, his face inches from mine, his grip tight enough to bruise.
"Catara. Breathe."
I sucked in air like a drowning woman. My vision swam, the afterimages of code still flickering at the edges of my sight. Nia crouched beside the cot, her face ashen.
"You were seizing," she whispered. "Your eyes—they were black."
I touched my face, my fingers coming away wet. Not with sweat, but with thin streaks of blood from where my nose had begun to bleed.
Sarin's voice was grim. "What happened?"
I looked down at my hands, at the veins standing out too prominently beneath my skin, faintly pulsing in time with the hum of the overhead lights.
"It knows I'm here," I whispered.
And then the lights went out.
Darkness.
Not the soft, gradual dark of a power outage, but an absence, total and immediate, as if something had reached out and swallowed the electricity whole.
Nia's breath hitched. "They're here."
Sarin's pistol clicked as he chambered a round. "Move. Now."
We barely made it to the door before the screaming started.
Not human screams. Not even Antler horns. This was something new. A sound like grinding metal, like a thousand frequencies colliding at once. It vibrated through the walls, through the floor, through my bones, setting my teeth on edge.
The door exploded inward before we could touch it.
The thing that stood in the doorway wasn't an Antler.
It was worse.
Humanoid, but stretched too thin, its limbs elongated like taffy pulled to breaking point. Its skin glistened wetly in the scant light, shifting colors like an oil slick. Where its face should have been, there was only smooth flesh and a single, pulsing vein that branched like circuitry across its skull.
Nia made a sound like a wounded animal. "It's one of them. One of the new ones."
The thing tilted its head. The vein on its face pulsed.
Then it spoke.
Not with a mouth. The voice came from everywhere at once, vibrating through the air like a struck tuning fork.
"She sees you."
Sarin fired.
The bullet struck center mass, punching a hole clean through its chest. Black fluid oozed from the wound. Not blood, but something thicker, darker, threaded with faintly glowing filaments.
The thing didn't even stagger.
It took a step forward.
Then another.
And then, the wall behind it exploded.
Rina stood in the rubble, her white coat streaked with soot and blood, a detonator clutched in one hand. In the other, she held something that looked like a cross between a cattle prod and a lightning rod, its tip crackling with unstable energy.
"Run," she snarled.
We didn't argue.
The last thing I saw before the tunnel swallowed us again was Rina driving the rod into the thing's chest, the resulting explosion of light so bright it burned shadows into my vision.
And beneath the roar of electricity, beneath the screams and the gunfire, I could still hear it.
The whisper of something vast.