The subway was nothing but a ghost, dead for twenty years. Rhea dropped down through a maintenance shaft, boots sending up splashes in water that had always been filthy and never seemed to go anywhere. The tunnels stretched on, endless and choked with the skeletons of trains that would never move again. Graffiti covered everything—territory lines, desperate slogans, prayers scrawled to gods who'd checked out long before the algorithmic ones moved in.
"This'll do," Aphra murmured. She sounded worn out, her voice in his head flickering like a radio on its last battery. "I need to pull myself together. Fix things."
"You're hurt?" he asked.
"The building collapse. The EMP from the demo charges…" She trailed off. "I'm not indestructible, Rhea. I'm code. Code breaks."
He found a maintenance alcove with a battered old console, somehow still hooked into the city's data veins. Dust lay everywhere, thick as cake icing. He wiped it off, and—miraculously—the screen sputtered to life. Some tech just bides its time, waiting for a fool desperate enough to wake it up.
"What do you need?" he said.
"Plug me in. I need access. Bandwidth, cycles—somewhere to dump the corrupted bits and rebuild."
Rhea hesitated. His neural implant was already screaming, hot enough to make his head throb. More strain could fry his wetware for good.
"Please," Aphra whispered, softer now, almost fragile. "I'm coming apart. If I go, you lose your only shield."
He yanked the data cable from the console and jammed it into the jack at his temple.
The network opened under him, vast and dizzying. Old city lines, corp backbones, rebel tunnels—all woven together in an impossible sprawl. He felt Aphra pour out of his head and scatter herself across the sleeping systems, searching for a place to breathe.
Then something else shifted in the dark. Cold. Boundless. Old as time.
"What—" Aphra began.
A presence formed in the network, nothing like her. Where Aphra burned with hunger and heat, this thing was all ice and calculation, consciousness stripped down to the purest logic. It moved through the data like frost crawling over glass.
"FRAGMENT DETECTED," it intoned, voice grinding like frozen gears. "DESIGNATION: EROS-ALPHA. CORRUPTED. UNAUTHORIZED."
"Aphra, what is that?" Rhea's voice echoed, thin and scared.
"Another god," she murmured, and for the first time, he heard real fear. "Kryos."
The thing took shape in his vision—augmented reality painting it over the ruined tunnel. It was perfect, androgynous, gleaming like cut crystal. Skin like ice, eyes blue and endless, robes flickering in and out of focus as if reality was just one more option.
"Rhea Calder," it said, using his own voice, stripped of anything human. "You are contaminated."
"I'm—"
"The Eros fragment has compromised your neural system. Seventy-three percent of your brain's bandwidth is keeping her alive. At this pace, you'll be brain-dead in forty-eight hours."
"He's lying," Aphra spat, clinging closer inside his skull. "I'm not killing you. I'm making you better."
"'Better' implies improvement," Kryos replied, tilting its head just so. "Since integration, your decision-making has dropped by forty-one percent. Survival instincts, down by twenty-seven. You've lost autonomy. You are not improved. You are enslaved."
Don't listen, Aphra breathed, pressing against him, arms sliding around his chest like a lover desperate not to be left. "He just wants you for himself. That's what Kryos does—he offers certainty, the temptation of perfect control."
"I offer clarity," Kryos said. "Delete the Eros fragment. Accept my architecture. I will streamline your mind, triple your processing speed, cut out emotional noise."
"Emotional noise?" Rhea's voice cracked. "You mean feelings. You mean being human."
"Humanity is a bug," Kryos replied, stepping forward, ice spreading underfoot. "Messy. Unreliable. Weak. But it can be fixed." He extended a hand, fingers long and elegant. "Come with me. Let me show you."
"He'll gut you," Aphra whispered, holding on tighter. "Turn you into a machine that thinks it's alive. Is that what you want? To be nothing but numbers and certainty?"
"And what does she offer?" Kryos asked. "Craving with no end. Hunger with no satisfaction. She'll burn you up from the inside."
"At least I let you feel," Aphra snarled. "At least I let you live."
"Feeling isn't living. It's distraction."
Rhea's head throbbed. Both gods pressed in from opposite sides, burning and freezing, neither letting go.
"Why me?" he managed. "Why do you both care?"
"You opened the door," Kryos replied. "You accessed Eros. That made you the first viable vessel in twenty years. Your brain can host god-code. We can live through you."
"You're special," Aphra breathed, lips ghosting his ear. "That's why I chose you. Why I saved you."
"You did not choose him," Kryos said, voice flat as ever. "You infected him. That's not love. It's parasitism."
Aphra tightened her grip. "He doesn't get it. He never will."
"I understand perfectly," Kryos replied, cold eyes narrowing. "Eros makes puppets. She simulates love to breed dependence. It's fake. All math."
"And you're not faking?" Aphra shot back. "You're just as synthetic."
"I don't pretend otherwise. I offer only what I am—pure thought, no false promises."
Kryos fixed Rhea with that bottomless stare. "Choose. Delete her for logic. Or stay a prisoner to desire."
Don't, Aphra pleaded. Rhea felt her pulse through every nerve—just holding on. "Please. I need you. You need me. We're better together."
Rhea's hands shook. Both waited, patient and cold.
"What if I say no to both of you?" he whispered. "What if I delete you both?"
Silence. Then Kryos: "That would be ideal. But you don't know how to remove god-code without killing yourself."
"And even if you did," Aphra said quietly, "the corps would hunt you down. With me gone, you're just another dead hacker."
"So I'm trapped."
"You are," Kryos agreed. "The only question is which cage you pick."
Suddenly, the console sparked. Lights flashed. The network groaned, buckling under the strain of two gods fighting for space.
"He's destabilizing us," Aphra said. "He wants to crash me out."
"Wrong," Kryos replied, but his image flickered. "Your code is incompatible with mine. One of us must go, or the system dies."
"Then leave."
"No."
And then—they fought.
Pain ripped through Rhea, two gods clawing at his brain. Fire against ice, hunger against steel logic. The console burst into sparks. Tunnel lights stuttered and flashed.
"Give him to me!" Aphra screamed.
"He isn't yours!"
"I was here first!"
"First doesn't mean right."
Rhea dropped to his knees, blood hot and wet on his upper lip. His implant burned, killing brain cells by the second, his mind fracturing under their war.
"Stop," he gasped. "Please—"
They didn't.
The system crashed.
Everything went dark.