The probe pierced the node's skin and Lucy felt it open like a predator's eye—alive, aware, watching. Her HUD filled with cascades of black lattice: active heuristics, watchdogs spinning like teeth, port gates flexing in steady rhythm. It wasn't passive. It was hunting her the moment she stepped in.
A process labeled BLACKSHADE-3 snapped awake. The deck buzzed hard against her palms, a static bite that crawled up her arms into her skull. It wasn't just code—it was hostile design, meant to induce panic, force a drop, seize control of the uplink.
"Hello to you too," Lucy muttered through gritted teeth.
Max didn't twitch. He stood angled toward the racks, rifle down but optics burning. "Contain it. Don't fight on its ground."
"I know," Lucy hissed, fingers dancing across keys. She flared the bait—an admin handshake spoofed from old Militech firmware—and BLACKSHADE lunged. It hooked the handshake, expanded into a forked thread…and landed straight in her sandbox.
The deck rattled like it wanted to jump off the table. A flood of phantom diagnostics screamed: memory overrun, thermal spike, bad sector. All fake. Lucy's sandbox sealed shut and bled those lies into a dead loop. BLACKSHADE slammed itself against the trap like a shark in a tank.
"Got it," Lucy said, a bead of sweat cutting through the grime on her brow.
V's whisper carried sharp over comms. "Movement. Two heavies at the end of the hall. Looks like they know someone's tickling their wires."
"Hold them," Max said simply.
Lucy tuned them out. She deployed the rot—thin threads of code creeping into replication keys, peeling them away like layers of paint. The host noticed. The red blink of Node Three quickened. New watchdogs spun up, firing off probes that sniffed for intrusion.
One of them brushed Lucy's probe. Pain slammed behind her eyes, a hot spike that made her vision stutter white. She bit her lip until she tasted blood and forced her fingers steady.
"Almost there," she breathed. "Just a few more…"
The rot latched onto the replication table. One by one, keys invalidated—clean cuts replaced by noise that looked right but would never fold. The host tried a final gambit: spinning up a phantom instance of itself, a mirrored vault meant to lure Lucy into a recursive sink where she'd burn out in feedback.
She didn't blink. Instead, she forked the phantom into its own decoy thread. "Chase your tail, you ugly bastard."
The console flared once—then flatlined. Her HUD spat a final line:
NODE 3 — REPLICATION KEYS: INVALID
ISOLATION: PENDING
At the same instant, gunfire cracked. V lit the hall in short bursts, her voice sharp. "Contact! Loader incoming, big one—servo-mount with a chain gun!"
Max moved like a shadow folding. Eidolon surged through him; constructs peeled from the dark, slamming into the loader's legs, tangling its servos. Max braced, raised the rifle, and fired one thunderous shot. The slug punched through coolant lines; the loader screamed and staggered. V slid an EMP into its undercarriage and it collapsed in a twitching heap.
"Clear," V barked.
Lucy yanked the probe free. Her deck went cool and quiet, leaving only the faint hum of exhausted fans. She shoved it under her jacket and scrambled to her feet.
"Done," she said, voice raw. "Node Three is blind."
Max's optics dimmed to steady blue. He gave one small nod. "Move."
They didn't wait for reinforcements. They ghosted back through the conduit, lungs burning with rust and oil, until the cold night air of the freight yard kissed their faces again. The van was waiting, engine low.
Only when they were speeding through rain-slick streets did Lucy risk opening the deck again. The log blinked:
NODE 3 — ISOLATION: SUCCESS
REMAINING HOSTS: 4
She exhaled, shoving hair from her face. "Four left."
V gave a low whistle. "Hell of a fight for one."
Max, ever calm, watched the map update. "And the next will fight harder."
In the background, Lucy's log replayed the final seconds before the node's silence. Buried in the noise was a fragment of code—older, deeper, stamped with the same alien cadence she'd glimpsed in Node One and Two. But this one had something extra: a tag. A single word, faint as dust.
HINGE.
Lucy's stomach turned. She looked up at Max. "They're not just scattered. They're linked. Four left—and the next isn't just a node. It's a keystone."
Max's optics burned steady, cold. "Then we cut the hinge before they can swing it."
The van's wheels hissed on the wet asphalt, carrying them toward another war.
The van's cabin rattled as they tore through the rain, neon signs smearing across the windshield like streaks of blood and fire. The city was alive outside—sirens wailed in distant quarters, VTOLs buzzed overhead, and somewhere beneath it all the hum of corporate infrastructure never ceased. But inside, the three of them were silent, the weight of Lucy's last word settling like a stone in the gut.
HINGE.
Max broke the quiet first. His voice was even, but the resonance of the Eidolon in it made V glance back from the driver's seat.
"Mary."
The AI's reply came smooth, filtered through the deck speakers.
"Already parsing the log. Hinge appears not to be a mere identifier. It's an access marker—an index into something layered beneath the replication lattice."
Lucy rubbed at her temple, still feeling the phantom echo of BLACKSHADE clawing at her skull. "So what? Like a backdoor?"
Mary hesitated—rare for her. "No. More like a lock. A structural pivot. If the nodes are ribs, Hinge is the spine."
V cursed under her breath and swerved to avoid a hauler drone lumbering through the street. "And guess who's gonna be the hammer to break it."
Max didn't answer. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, optics dimmed to a steady burn. Rainlight slid across the plates of his armor. He seemed carved from the dark itself, silent in a way that made Lucy's throat tighten. She hated when he did that—thinking so deep the world around him blurred.
Lucy snapped her deck closed and pushed words into the quiet. "Where's the next node?"
***
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It's 22 chaps ahead