The cursor pulsed like a slow, expectant heartbeat—not threatening, not welcoming, simply *waiting*. Lin reached for it instinctively, her fingers passing through the glowing line as if it were smoke. A shudder ran through her arm, ink blooming beneath her skin in sprawling characters: **What do you want?**
The words weren't hers. They appeared on her forearm like a response etched by invisible hands, the strokes sharp and impatient. Zhang grabbed her wrist, turning it toward the suspended Porsche's rearview mirror. His reflection didn't move in sync. "It's not asking," he said hoarsely. "It's *negotiating*."
Above them, the sky—no, the *page*—rippled. A new sentence formed in the negative space between paragraphs: *The characters always break in draft three.*
Lin's laugh was a blade. "We're not characters." She pressed her ink-stained palm flat against the void. "We're *corruptions*."
The cursor blinked faster. Zhang's breath hitched as his corruption brand flared—**[PLAYER 2?]** shifting to **[PLAYER 2]**—then flickering out entirely. His outline softened at the edges, blurring into the same nondescript prose used to describe forgettable side characters. The Porsche's seats melted into generic "car interior" descriptors beneath them.
Lin reacted faster. She snatched the rearview mirror clean off its hinges and smashed it against the dashboard. Glass shards didn't scatter—they *rearranged*, forming a jagged sentence in midair: *You exist because I allow it.*
The cursor froze.
Then, with agonizing slowness, it began backspacing.
Letters unraveled around them—the car's make and model, Zhang's fading name, even Lin's glasses (now just "spectacles")—rewinding toward some original, untainted version of the story. Lin lunged for the steering wheel again, twisting the trope dial past **Final Showdown** to a setting that hadn't been there before: **UNRELEASED MATERIALS**.
The Porsche *screamed*. Not mechanically, but *vocally*, a sound ripped from some discarded draft where cars had personalities. Zhang's hand phased halfway through the gearshift as the cursor deleted entire paragraphs wholesale.
Lin's ink-stained fingers found his. "Remember," she hissed, "the brokerage numbers."
The account balances. The ones that changed on their own. The ones that shouldn't have existed.
Zhang's pupils dilated. He exhaled a series of digits—*260,000, 251,000, 230,000*—counting backward through every unauthorized transaction. The cursor stuttered. Lin joined in, reciting the bleeding account codes: *XG-7782-440, 445, 447*. With each number, the backspacing slowed.
The Porsche's engine coughed.
Then, between one heartbeat and the next, the cursor *split*.
A second line appeared beneath the first, this one pulsing a sickly yellow.
**> **
A command prompt.
Lin went preternaturally still. "Oh," she breathed.
The original cursor was waiting for input.
This one?
This one was *listening*.
Zhang's corruption brand reignited—**[PLAYER 2 ACCESS GRANTED]**—as the Porsche's radio dials melted into a keyboard. Lin's fingers hovered over the keys. Not to type.
To *hack*.
The sky tore open with the sound of a thousand pages turning at once.
And somewhere beyond the draft folder, an alarm began to wail.