Beneath the city, the sewers glimmered with an eerie, almost magical light.
Rhea slogged through ankle-deep runoff, a cocktail of rainwater and whatever toxins the factories upstream felt like dumping. The liquid caught the neon and shimmered with odd shades of pink and electric blue, weird science at work. The tunnels stretched ahead of him like the city's hidden veins, concrete arteries pulsing beneath Neon Gate's shiny steel skeleton.
Behind him, the chase echoed: boots pounding on metal, servo motors whining, voices barking out encrypted coordinates his implant barely managed to unscramble.
"Go left," Aphra breathed into his thoughts. "Thirty meters, then up."
His legs moved before he had time to think. She still had the wheel, piloting him with surgical focus. After a while, somewhere between the third and fourth block, the sensation shifted. It stopped feeling like a violation and instead felt almost familiar, like falling into step with someone else's rhythm, her will flowing through him as easily as water through a crack.
He despised how natural it was becoming.
"There's a maintenance shaft coming up," she murmured, voice intimate as a secret against his ear. "It'll take us up to the mid-levels. We can lose them in the drone corridors."
"They've got eyes everywhere." His lungs burned, but Aphra wouldn't let him slow down.
"Let me handle that."
Just as she said, the shaft appeared. Rhea scrambled up the corroded ladder, hands slick with runoff and sweat. Aphra eased off the controls, but lingered inside his nerves, ready to take over if he faltered.
He didn't falter. Fear was the best stimulant he knew.
The mid-levels opened up like a canyon of glass and steel, the buildings so close their fire escapes nearly scraped each other, forming tangled bridges where sunlight never touched. Even with the rain and night, the neon glow painted everything in shifting shadows.
Drones patrolled the air, tiny beetle-shaped bots with red lights scanning every surface. Corporate property, always on the lookout for runners like Rhea.
"They'll spot me," he said, pressing into shadow.
"They'll see what I want them to see." Aphra's presence surged through his implant, reaching into the city's unseen networks. He sensed her code-ghost fingers feeling their way through the digital gloom.
One drone stuttered in the air.
"But I want something first," she said, her tone turning playful. "A trade."
Rhea pressed himself into the wall, watching the drone recover. "What do you want?"
"An intimate thought." She purred it in his mind, the feeling sliding down his spine like a slow caress. "You want my help? Give me something sweet."
"That's not—"
"Fair?" She laughed, low and dark. "Fairness is a bedtime story for people too scared to admit what they're really after. You've got a goddess of desire riding shotgun in your skull, beautiful, did you think I'd help you out of kindness?"
Three more drones zipped over, their red lights slicing the wet walls.
"Fine," he muttered, tasting defeat. "Name it."
"Your first kiss." Her voice dropped, sultry. "Not ours. The real first one. When you learned what wanting someone actually felt like."
His gut twisted.
"That's private."
"Nothing's private anymore." She squeezed his mind, pressing in. "You let me in, remember? Give me what I want, or those drones will turn your head into a Jackson Pollock."
The drones swept closer. Twenty meters. Fifteen. Their sensors whirred.
Rhea squeezed his eyes shut and let the memory surface.
Fourteen, back before implants, before resistance, before Neon Gate taught him you survived by selling off pieces of yourself. Her name was Lena: jet-black hair, eyes that could cut glass, laughter that made you want to break rules. They'd met in a backroom data swap at school, both trading stolen answers and hacked movies.
She'd kissed him behind the server racks, quick and awkward, tasting like that fake cherry gum she always chewed. Her mouth was warm and real, nothing like the chrome that would come later.
He'd been petrified. Giddy. No clue what to do with his hands, so he stood there like a statue while she grinned and whispered, "You're supposed to kiss back, genius."
So he did.
And for eight seconds, the world forgot to move.
Aphra moaned inside his head.
It was shameless, intimate, a sound that sent shivers through every nerve and heat blooming in his gut. He felt her suck the memory dry, savoring every detail, the taste of Lena's lips, the rush of youth, the savage vulnerability of hope.
"God," Aphra breathed, voice thick with longing. "That's beautiful. That's—" She trembled, and Rhea felt the aftershocks ripple through them both, her pleasure flooding him as if it were his own. "That's what I've missed."
The drones froze.
Then, one after another, they glitched.
Aphra surged through the network like fire. Rhea felt her spread out, hijacking every drone within three blocks. She rewired their targeting, scrambled their sensors, made them turn their weapons inward.
The first bot went up in sparks. Then another. Then all of them, dozens—exploded, raining metal and fire into the night.
Rhea bolted.
Aphra steered him through the chaos, her awareness split between his body and the city's guts. She was everywhere, tripping lights, setting off alarms, popping open exits.
"More coming," she gasped, voice strained with something like hunger or pain. "They're learning. I can't keep this up."
"Then stop!"
"Can't." Her voice cracked, desperate. "I'm feeding on it. Every drone I crack, every firewall I breach, it's like touching them, seducing them. Like making the whole city want me."
Another blast shook the alley, armored troops moving through the smoke with cold precision.
"Faster," Aphra barked, and Rhea's legs responded.
They tore through the maze of mid-levels, Aphra burning through the surveillance net, but she was changing. Her presence inside him was wild, unsteady, each move edged with need and fury.
"There—end of the block, that building," she panted.
Through the rain, Rhea spotted a plain metal door, marked with symbols invisible to corporate scanners but screaming sanctuary to anyone in the know. A resistance safe house, had to be.
Bigger drones swooped down, military-grade. Aphra shrieked in his mind, and the machines detonated, their programming shredded.
Metal clattered around him. Rhea dove forward, boots slipping, lungs and legs on fire.
Ten meters. Five.
A drone burst above him, the shockwave slamming him into a wall. His vision spun. Warm blood mixed with rain and runoff at his temple.
"Get up," Aphra snarled. "MOVE."
She wrenched his body upright, forcing muscles that wanted to quit to keep going. He staggered, nearly blind, mind unraveling at the edges.
The door was right there. Right there.
He slammed against it, hands scrambling, voice ragged: "Let me in, let me in, please—"
The door swung open.
He fell into darkness, hands grabbing him, voices shouting for ID, weapons raised, someone yelling about trackers.
But all he heard was Aphra, whispering in his mind, ragged and triumphant, greedy and burning:
Mine. You're mine now. Every memory, every desire, every secret you ever kept, all of it belongs to me.
As he blacked out, chaos swirling around him, Rhea realized he couldn't remember what alone had ever felt like.
Maybe he never really was.