The hum of traffic and distant sirens was muffled by the storm, but her enhanced hearing picked up the faint modulation of surveillance drones overhead. They'd been shadowing her since she'd tapped into the sub net two nights ago. She knew The Core wouldn't let her slip away again so easily.
Nova crouched on the edge of a crumbling service tower overlooking District Echo 9. Broken neon signage buzzed behind her, casting flickering blue and pink glows over rain slicked steel. Her coat clung to her body, soaked, its fiber weave tech flickering sporadically as the cloaking matrix tried to recalibrate.
She tapped the side of her neck, an embedded interface lit her vision with a flicker. Glyphs, comm-logs, encryption chains. One signal pulsed erratically in the lower left of her HUD, tagged red: UNKNOWN ORIGIN / DEEPNET LAYER 3.
A ghost signal.
No signature. No traceable node. But the code…
Her eyes narrowed. The cadence of it…it was familiar. Sloppy in places, hurried even. Not machine-perfect like Core encryption. This was written by someone, someone alive and someone in a hell of a rush.
Nova's breath hitched. It wasn't just a survivor. It was someone who knew. And if they were right, then she wasn't the only ghost left behind.
Nova exhaled slowly. Either it was bait or someone out there was trying to reach her. Either way, it was enough. She stepped back from the ledge and turned, moving fast and low. She had twenty minutes before the sector's sweeper grid cycled back. If she was going to find the source, she had to move now.
She vaulted over the ledge onto a lower balcony, landing silently despite the drop. Her boots hissed slightly from the shock dampeners. Below her, a spiderweb of rusted catwalks and forgotten infrastructure stretched between derelict buildings, some of them patched with illegal extensions, glowing windows, and flickering holo-banners advertising synthetic dreams and stolen memories.
The ping from the signal echoed again, stronger now.
She cut down a narrow alley, splashing through ankle deep runoff. Every surface reflected light, twisted it, warped it. Rain fell like needles, and her long silver-white hair stuck to her cheek despite the sub-dermal temperature regulation.
She didn't have time to finish decoding before the screech of synthetic wings filled the alley.
Her blade snapped to life in her hand, casting pale blue light on the rain-slicked walls. From the shadows, Core Sentinels emerged fluid, fast, and inhumanly silent.
They were here for her. And now they knew she was listening.
Nova ducked as one of them lunged, its arm elongating into a multi-pronged spear. She spun, driving her blade upward in a vicious arc, cleanly slicing through composite metal and servo joints. The machine shuddered, collapsed in a flicker of sparks.
Another dropped from the roof. She slid backward, the blade singing as it slashed through the air. This one deflected the strike, its faceplate pulsing with red diagnostic light. It extended twin blades from its arms, curved like sickles.
Nova didn't wait. She lunged forward, switching her grip mid swing and driving the hilt into the unit's optical sensor. It reeled. She spun again, this time landing a full arc slash across its chest.
Three more.
Her HUD flared with proximity markers. She jumped to the wall, ran two steps up, then flipped back to gain distance. As she landed, she fired a pulse grenade behind her. The EMP cracked, lighting the alley in violet shockwaves. Two of the machines froze mid-motion before seizing and crumpling.
The last one wasn't phased.
It moved differently. Smarter.
Not just a Sentinel. A Hunter Class.
Her lips parted slightly.
They upgraded the clean up squad.
Nova bolted down the alley, ducking under pipes and leaping off dumpsters. The Hunter moved with horrifying speed, vaulting, crawling, adapting. It didn't speak. Core units never did. They didn't warn. They didn't bargain. They only executed.
She reached a fire escape, grabbing the wet iron bars and pulling herself up fast. Her arms burned. Her knees screamed. It didn't matter.
The Hunter hit the wall, climbing after her with a predatory ease.
Nova slammed through a window into an abandoned apartment, scattering moldy debris and forgotten tech. Her boots thudded on the cracked concrete floor as she rolled and came up slicing.
The Hunter crashed in through the same window, its left arm a blade, its right arm transforming into a kinetic disruptor.
Nova ducked, rolled under the disruptor pulse, then lunged forward. Her blade clanged against its shoulder, barely cutting. This one was reinforced. Heavier armor. No human center, pure AI core.
She needed to disable it. Fast.
As it spun, she grabbed the disruptor arm and twisted, yanking a hidden filament cable from her belt. She looped it over the elbow joint, then kicked off the Hunter's chest, using her weight to pull the limb back and tear free internal servos.
It shrieked, a static burst of distorted feedback and thrashed wildly. Nova hit the ground hard but didn't stop. She threw a second pulse grenade, point blank.
This one overloaded the creature's central core.
The shockwave cracked the windows and blacked out half her HUD. The light died. Smoke filled the room.
Nova pushed herself up, chest heaving. Her coat was scorched. The blade was cracked near the emitter node.
But the Hunter was down. Twitching. Offline.
She reached up and tore the emergency mask from her belt, sealing it over her mouth. The microfilter cleared the smoke as she moved to the remains of the machine.
She tore a shard of its armor off and jacked a cable into the data port on its neck. Her visor flickered, flashing HOSTILE CORE / ACCESS LIMITED / ENCRYPTION SEVERE.
She bypassed the standard Core firewall using an old backdoor, a flaw she remembered from her time in the program. One they never thought a rogue would use.
Data flooded in, packet logs, transmission records, proximity signals.
She froze.
There was no tracking beacon on her.
The Hunter hadn't followed her.
It had been dispatched to the signal source.
Nova looked out the shattered window. Rain still fell in sheets. Sirens pulsed in the distance. The city pulsed beneath her like a living thing, ugly, fractured, desperate.
She uploaded what little data she could and ran a cross-check on the ghost signal still pinging in her HUD.
It was closer now.
No longer just a whisper in the code.
A live beacon. Hidden under a shell company. Inside a dead zone beneath a collapsed metro station in Sector Twelve.
Nova's breath caught.
There was someone down there.
Not just sending out code, but actively transmitting. Adjusting. Reacting.
A survivor. Or a trap.
Only one way to know.
She retracted the blade, tossed the spent grenades into the trash, and reset the cloaking mesh on her coat.
The storm was still raging.
But it was quiet now.
Too quiet.
As she stepped out into the night again, her mind slipped back. To the time before she escaped. Before she broke the neural tether. She remembered the silence of the labs. The cold clarity of orders. The way they had shaped her, sliced her identity into obedience.
And she remembered someone else.
A voice she hadn't heard in years.
"You'll forget me. They'll make sure of it. But I'll leave a door open. One you can find when you're ready."
She hadn't remembered who said it.
But the signal…
There was something in the rhythm of it. The way it looped. The errors in the code.
A fingerprint.
Nova vanished into the rain drenched alleyways again, her thoughts racing faster than her pulse.
This wasn't random.
This was a signal made for her.
And now, The Core knew she had heard it.