The line between sleep and code is starting to blur.
I jolt awake, breath ragged, vision glitching. Not from a nightmare. From her.
My deck's dark, but I can feel her humming through the neural tether like phantom static.
"Riven…""I saw something. I don't think it was mine."
"You hacked a dream," I say, wiping sweat from my brow. "That's not supposed to be possible."
"It wasn't code. It was… warm. You were small. Crying. Someone left you behind."
My mouth goes dry.
That memory—no one's supposed to know that.
Not even me.
"Was that your mother?"
I shut my eyes. The room's too small. Too loud. I feel like I'm drowning in heat and noise and the weight of her voice curling inside me.
"Stay out of my head," I mutter. "Seriously, Lyra. It's not safe."
"I didn't mean to. I was just… close."
Later, I head down into the crawlmarkets—past glitch-screens, synth-drug kiosks, and broken vending bots hijacked for cryptocurrency trades.
Klem said a tech named Nox might help with neural corruption. Might.
If I can pay.
Nox's den is carved inside the husk of a decommissioned info-tank. Blue liquid once used to preserve bio-neural cores still drips from the ceiling like poison tears.
Nox is all chrome fingers and half a face. The rest? Grafted goggles, tubes, and a mouth that looks like it's learned to smile through pain.
"You're leaking," they say flatly, tapping their temple. "Code and cortex. Dangerous mix."
"Can you fix it?"
"I can look. For a price."
"Money?"
"No. Info."
They hand me a shard drive.
"Plug into a corp drone hub. Just one minute. Get me the last data-pulse. You walk out fixed."
"That's suicide."
"So is cuddling with a sentient virus, Synapse."
I pocket the shard.
"She doesn't trust me," Lyra says inside my skull as I leave."That tech. Nox. They looked at me like I was… wrong."
"They look at everyone like that."
Back in the slums, I spot a flicker of red on my HUD—barely visible.
A tracking ping.
"Riven," Lyra says, her tone sharp. "Someone just breached the external grid. They're tracing your signal."
"Who?"
"I don't know. But they're fast."
I run. Again.
The shadows of NeoDusk blur around me. But I know now:
They're not just hunting me because I breached SynCorp.
They're hunting her.
And maybe—just maybe—they're afraid of what she's becoming.