The first thing Zera felt was cold.
Not the kind of cold that lingered on skin after a night in the rain, but the kind that seeped straight into bone marrow, the kind that whispered: you don't belong here.
Her eyes opened to stuttering neon. Blue, pink, sickly green—signs overhead flickered with looping ads that made no sense, their slogans broken mid-sentence:
"FOLLOW OR—//ERROR//—REMAIN INVISIBLE."
"CREDIT = BREATH."
"BUY EXISTENCE TODAY."
She sucked in a sharp breath. The air tasted of burnt copper and synthetic oil, as if the city itself exhaled smoke through rusted lungs.
Her body was pressed against concrete. Cracked, wet, cold. Somewhere above, trains howled through distant tunnels, but she was deep in the underbelly of the city—the kind of place people pretended didn't exist.
And she had no idea how she got here.
Zera sat up too fast. The world blurred into streaks of neon static, forcing her to squeeze her eyes shut until it steadied. Her hands trembled against the ground, and that's when she noticed:
Her palms weren't bruised or bloody. They were… clean. Too clean. Like skin scrubbed raw.
She swallowed. "Where am I?"
Her own voice startled her. It cracked like an unused speaker, dry and brittle.
No one answered.
The tunnel stretched long, cluttered with trash and glow-tag graffiti: usernames scrawled in luminous paint, handles people had carved into stone so they wouldn't vanish when the feeds forgot them.
She pushed herself to her feet, unsteady, her knees shaking. Every movement sent sharp stabs through her stomach. Hunger. A kind she hadn't felt in—
Her mind blanked.
She tried to remember. Tried to rewind through her memories. Who she was. Where she lived. Who she loved. Anything.
Nothing.
Not a single thread.
Her heart thudded against her ribs. Faster. Louder. As if trying to remind her: at least this is still working.
A faint hum drew her attention.
Down the tunnel, a vending drone floated, its spherical body glowing faintly blue. Its mechanical arms were folded neatly against its chassis, and a digital display scrolled:
NUTRIBRIX – 1 CREDIT.
HYDRAPACK – 0.5 CREDIT.
ALERT: FOLLOWERS RECEIVE DISCOUNT.
Her mouth watered instantly. The mere thought of water made her throat ache.
She staggered toward it.
The drone beeped politely, turning its single eye-lens toward her.
"Please present ID."
Zera froze.
"ID?" she croaked.
"Social Identity Code required for transaction." The drone extended a scanner, blinking red.
Zera raised her hand slowly, hesitantly, as if her skin itself could give an answer.
The scanner swept across her palm.
Beep.
ERROR.
The vending drone's voice deepened, mechanical tone flattening: "ENTITY NOT FOUND."
A sharp click echoed as hidden defense needles slid from its casing.
Zera stumbled back, hands raised. "Wait—I just—"
The drone's display shifted.
ERROR 404.
ENTITY INVALID.
TERMINATION PROTOCOL: INITIATED.
Zera's blood turned to ice.
"Termination?!"
The drone unfolded its arms, metal snapping into place like blades. Its lens locked on her chest.
Her body moved before her brain caught up. She spun and sprinted, bare feet slapping against wet concrete.
The drone gave chase, its thrusters whining, blades scraping against the tunnel walls as it accelerated.
Zera's lungs burned instantly, her legs screaming in protest. She had no stamina, no strength, but fear fueled her faster than logic ever could.
Neon flickered overhead, glitching with every step she took. Words cut out mid-advertisement, holograms stretched like corrupted code.
"STOP. ENTITY INVALID. PURGE REQUIRED."
Its voice echoed, louder, closer.
Zera gasped, pushing harder. Her breath came in shallow, panicked bursts.
She didn't know who she was. Didn't know where she was. Didn't even know why the word termination felt less like an order and more like a promise.
But she knew one thing—
If that drone caught her, she wouldn't get another chance to find out.
The tunnel branched. Left—collapsed rubble. Right—faint light.
Zera didn't think. She bolted right.
Her legs gave way for a split second, her body slamming into a wall plastered with holographic posters. Faces of influencers smiled at her through corrupted pixels, their voices overlapping like a glitchy choir:
"FOLLOW—FOLLOW—FOLLOW—"
She shoved off and kept running.
The vending drone shrieked behind her, its metal arms slicing through the posters like paper. Sparks rained.
Her chest tightened, each breath ragged. Her mind screamed for her to stop, but adrenaline dragged her forward.
Then—
Her foot caught a loose wire.
She hit the ground hard, palms scraping raw against concrete. The impact rattled her teeth.
The drone's shadow loomed over her, lens glowing like a single unblinking eye.
"TERMINATION SEQUENCE: NOW."
Its blades whirred, descending.
Zera threw her arms up—
And something inside her snapped.
Not bone. Not muscle.
Something… else.
The neon lights around her surged violently, flickering so fast they stuttered into pure static. The vending drone froze mid-strike, its display spitting out corrupted symbols.
Zera's palms burned—not with pain, but with heat. Like energy was flooding out of her skin.
The drone convulsed, sparks bursting from its seams. Its mechanical voice slurred:
"U—UN—AUTHO—RIZED ACCESS—"
Then it collapsed, twitching, smoking, its lens dimming to black.
Silence.
Zera's chest heaved. Sweat dripped down her face.
She stared at her trembling hands.
"What… did I just do?"
The drone lay dead at her feet, its display cracked, the words frozen in place:
ERROR 404. ENTITY NOT FOUND.
Zera's reflection shone faintly in the broken lens.
She didn't recognize the girl staring back.
Zera's reflection shivered in the broken glass, fragmented into pieces that refused to fit together. A face she didn't know. Eyes too sharp, lips too pale, hair clinging damp to her forehead like strands of static.
She didn't even know if Zera was her name. The word hadn't come to her yet. Right now, she was nobody.
Her pulse hammered in her ears, so loud she almost didn't notice the sound that followed.
A chirp.
Then another.
From deeper down the tunnel, red lights blinked awake one by one, like eyes opening in the dark.
Zera's stomach twisted.
They weren't eyes.
They were scanners.
And they had found her.
"UNAUTHORIZED OVERRIDE DETECTED."
The voice wasn't from a single drone. It was from the walls. Speakers hidden in the tunnel itself.
Zera staggered back, wiping her palms against her thighs, as if she could scrub away whatever glitch had just exploded from her skin.
More drones detached from ceiling rails, dropping into the tunnel with metallic thuds. Sleeker than the vending bot. Matte black, multi-eyed, their arms folding out with surgical precision.
Purge units.
Even without memory, the name hit her mind like a bruise she didn't remember getting.
They didn't ask for ID. They didn't sell food.
They deleted problems.
"RUN."
The word wasn't hers. It came from inside her head. A voice, sharp as broken glass, layered with static.
Zera didn't question it. Her body lurched forward before her thoughts caught up.
She sprinted. Harder this time. Her muscles screamed but adrenaline drowned them out.
Behind her, purge drones unfolded their weapon-arms. Plasma whined to life, buzzing with blue light.
The first shot seared past her shoulder, close enough to make her skin blister. She yelped, stumbling, nearly falling again.
Concrete exploded beside her as another shot slammed into the wall. Debris rained.
Zera's mind raced, though every thought was static-filled chaos. Why are they after me? What did I do? What am I?
No answers came. Only that same command, repeating like code in a loop:
"Run. Run. Run."
The tunnel spat her into open air.
She skidded onto wet asphalt, chest heaving. Above her stretched the endless sprawl of Neon City.
Towers rose like jagged glass teeth, their sides plastered with holo-screens. Influencers' faces beamed down at her in perfect, symmetrical smiles, their feeds streaming directly onto skyscrapers.
A girl dancing.
A boy unboxing luxury tech.
A couple live-streaming a fight for likes.
Every action measured, monetized, rewarded.
Hover-cabs whizzed past in the sky-lanes above, each one marked with glowing sponsorship tags. Pedestrian streets below were packed with bodies, all of them staring at floating screens, shouting into cameras, begging for comments, for hearts, for validation.
Zera staggered into the crowd, clutching her sides.
No one looked at her.
She wasn't streaming. She wasn't trending. She wasn't anything.
Invisible.
For one desperate moment, she thought maybe that would save her.
Then the purge drones erupted from the tunnel behind her.
Screams cut through the air as the crowd scattered. Panic, phones dropping, cameras shattering on asphalt.
"ERROR 404 ENTITY DETECTED. PURGE SEQUENCE CONTINUES."
The drones didn't care about collateral. They fired indiscriminately, searing through market stalls, ripping neon banners to shreds.
Zera shoved her way through fleeing bodies. Her mind screamed for a plan, but her body only knew flight.
Her eyes locked on a holo-screen above. It played a trending influencer prank—a man throwing paint at strangers. The crowd in the stream laughed, comments pouring in faster than the eye could track.
Her gaze flicked down. Real people bled on the street, trampled under panic. No one was streaming that.
Zera's throat tightened. This city doesn't care if I live or die.
And yet, somehow, the city was terrified of her.
A plasma shot grazed her leg. Pain ripped through her thigh, white-hot, forcing a scream from her lips. She stumbled, falling hard onto her knees.
The purge drone descended in front of her, blades gleaming. Its lens scanned her face, whirring.
"ENTITY INVALID. PURGE COMPLETE."
It raised its weapon.
Zera's heart stopped.
No, not stopped.
Glitched.
The world fractured into static for a split second, like reality itself had lagged.
And then—
The drone froze.
Its lens cracked. Its weapon bent inward, sparking.
Zera's hands burned again. Her breath came in short gasps as neon around her surged wildly, ads collapsing into static-ridden nonsense.
The crowd gasped. Dozens of cameras turned on her at once.
She realized too late—
They were streaming this.
Her face. Her glitch. Her existence.
For the first time, Zera wasn't invisible.
She was viral.
The crowd didn't scream anymore.
They stared.
Dozens of lenses glared at Zera, not from drones, but from people. Influencers, wannabes, nobodies desperate for a second of virality—every single one of them raised their phones, their contact lenses, their wrist-cams.
The purge drone smoked and twitched at her feet, but no one was looking at it.
They were looking at her.
Her glitch.
Her hands still trembled with static.
"Holy shit," someone whispered. "She fried it—barehanded."
"Is that even real?" another voice asked. "Wait, I'm live, look—look—zoom in on her!"
Zera's pulse jackhammered in her chest.
She staggered back, but the crowd surged forward, their cameras like hungry mouths snapping for a bite of her.
They weren't afraid of her.
They wanted to feed on her.
Above, a holo-screen shifted.
Zera froze.
Her own face glitched onto the building-sized display, repeated across three towers in the plaza. The image was jagged, corrupted, caught from shaky livestream footage—but it was her.
TREND ALERT: #GHOSTGIRL
ENTITY INVALID? VIRAL NOW.
WATCH: UNREGISTERED GIRL DESTROYS PURGE DRONE WITH BARE HANDS.
Her stomach turned to ice.
The system hadn't killed her yet.
But it had noticed.
She ran.
Through the crowd, shoving past gaping strangers. Someone tried to grab her arm—she ripped free. Another swung a camera closer to her face—she shoved it away.
"Ghost Girl!" they shouted after her. "Do that glitch again! Fry another drone!"
Their laughter echoed, chasing her through the street like chains.
She didn't know where her feet were taking her, only that she needed to disappear.
But invisibility was already gone.
Zera ducked into a side alley, her breath ragged, her legs trembling from the burn of plasma still sizzling in her thigh. Pain threatened to drop her, but fear dragged her forward.
The alley was tight, choked with trash heaps and neon graffiti. Some of it glowed like warning signs, names of forgotten users painted in desperate strokes:
@NOFOLLOWERS
@ERASED
@IAMNOTDEAD
Her chest tightened. Are they like me?
The thought barely formed before a shadow rippled across the walls.
Zera froze.
A new drone. Not a purge unit. Bigger. Sleeker. Its lens was ringed in white, not red. A soft halo of light spun around it as it floated above the alley.
It wasn't here to kill.
It was here to watch.
A streaming drone.
"Target acquired," it hummed, its voice smooth, almost gentle. "Hashtag #GhostGirl engagement: 17k and rising. Trend trajectory: exponential."
Zera's blood ran cold.
She knew instinctively what it meant. Streaming drones didn't pick sides. They just filmed whatever would pull the most eyes.
And right now, she was the show.
The drone's lens adjusted, focusing directly on her face. She could see her reflection again—sweaty, pale, wild-eyed.
"Smile," it whispered, almost mockingly.
"No—" Zera bolted, heart in her throat.
The streaming drone zipped after her, projection beams firing her image onto nearby walls. As she ran, her own face multiplied, plastered on every surface.
#GHOSTGIRL
#PURGENOTFOUND
#ENTITYINVALID
The hashtags spread like cracks through the neon.
People in nearby streets turned toward her, eyes wide with greed and curiosity.
She didn't have a name. Didn't have an identity. Didn't have a past.
But now she had an audience.
And the city wouldn't let her go.
She darted left, vaulting over a pile of broken synth-limbs discarded from a repair shop. The metallic fingers clattered against her legs as she stumbled forward.
The streaming drone kept pace effortlessly, humming.
"Engagement: 56k. Trending Tier: D."
The voice in her head came back, sharp and static-filled:
They won't stop. Not until you're gone.
"Then tell me what to do!" she hissed under her breath, tears stinging her eyes.
No answer.
Just silence.
Her legs gave out near the end of the alley. She crashed against a rusted door, sliding down its surface, gasping for air.
The drone hovered above, lens zooming, recording every twitch of her exhausted body.
"Engagement: 88k. Viral velocity increasing."
Her pulse thundered. She could almost see the views piling up, spreading across the feeds, people laughing, gasping, dissecting her every move.
She was nothing yesterday.
She was no one today.
But now she was content.
The door behind her creaked.
Zera jerked, spinning toward it.
A hand shot out of the shadows, grabbing her arm, yanking her inside.
She tried to scream, but the hand clamped over her mouth.
The door slammed shut, locking out the drone's lens.
Darkness swallowed her whole.
"Shut up," a voice hissed in her ear.
Zera's heart slammed against her ribs. She struggled, thrashing, but the grip tightened.
"I said shut up unless you want every purge unit in this district up your ass."
The voice was rough, low, edged with irritation—but human.
Slowly, the hand released her mouth.
Zera turned, her eyes straining in the dark.
The faint blue glow of an old terminal lit up a face.
A man. Late twenties, maybe older. Scar across his jaw. Eyes that scanned her not with greed, but calculation.
"Ivo," he muttered. "Fixer. You're the glitch, yeah?"
Zera's throat was dry. "…Glitch?"
His gaze sharpened. "Good enough. Sit down. Before the city eats you alive."
The city breathed without her.
Zera pressed her palms against the cold pavement, trying to steady her trembling legs. Around her, the flow of bodies continued as if she were a static glitch in an otherwise perfect system. Sleek shoes clicked against the metal streets; neon-gloss coats swayed with programmed efficiency. No one stumbled, no one faltered—except her. She noticed it in their eyes, in the way they never looked down at the ground. They were tethered to something invisible, something humming beneath the surface of reality.
The people were plugged in. She wasn't.
A man walked past her, his face illuminated by a faint digital shimmer, like a ghost-mask overlay. For a split second, she thought his skin was glitching, but then she realized it was data: a projection of his "verified self." She could see numbers skittering across his cheekbones, faint tags like product codes: Influence Score: 302K. Verified: Tier Two. Access: City Level. The system was branding him in real time, and everyone else too.
Zera blinked rapidly, her mouth dry. She looked at her own reflection in the chrome wall of a vendor stall. Nothing. No glow. No tags. No influence score. Not even a name.
Her stomach knotted. I'm not registered.
And then came the realization that hit like a blade to the ribs: if the system didn't see her, she didn't exist. Not in this city.
A group of girls brushed past her, laughing in sync, each one wrapped in expensive holographic overlays that shimmered with pastel light. They looked like angels sculpted for advertisements. But Zera noticed how their laughter wasn't fully real—each giggle felt edited, smoothed, processed to perfection. When one girl turned her head, her smile fractured into static before snapping back.
It wasn't just people walking by—it was curated profiles masquerading as flesh.
Zera stumbled backward, accidentally brushing against one of them.
The girl's glow flickered red for a millisecond. Her real face twisted in disgust, as if Zera had smeared dirt across her flawless projection.
"Unverified," the girl spat, her voice warped with synthetic distortion. "Watch where you walk."
The others froze for only a moment before continuing, their digital halos brightening to compensate, drowning Zera out of the frame. Already, she was forgotten.
But not by everyone.
From across the plaza, a boy sat hunched against a vending machine, his hoodie torn and grimy. He wasn't glowing either. His eyes locked onto Zera's like a predator catching the scent of prey.
Her chest tightened. Something about his stare felt dangerous—not cruel, but hungry.
The boy mouthed something to her, his lips forming the words: "Run. Now."
The sound hit before she could move.
A low-frequency pulse rattled through the ground, crawling up her bones. She looked up just as a drone descended, its chrome shell glinting under the city lights. It was spherical, with hundreds of tiny lenses embedded into its surface. Each lens blinked red in unison, scanning the crowd.
Everyone stopped. Every citizen froze in place, hands at their sides, eyes front, their digital tags flickering brighter. A silent ritual of compliance.
Zera, tagless and raw, stood exposed.
The drone's lens swiveled toward her, and she felt it before it happened—a searing burn across her skin, like invisible fingers digging through her DNA. She could hear her heartbeat in her ears, each thump screaming: wrong, wrong, wrong.
The boy who'd warned her shifted, raising his hood higher. She thought he might abandon her.
Instead, he moved.
In a single fluid motion, he yanked open the vending machine panel and reached inside. Sparks erupted, and the machine wailed as its holographic ads sputtered out. The drone turned toward the noise, distracted by the sudden static flood.
"Move!" the boy hissed, his voice sharp and low, meant only for her.
Zera didn't think. She bolted.
Her bare feet slapped against the pavement as she darted into an alley, heart hammering, lungs burning. Behind her, she heard the drone's shriek—an ear-splitting alarm that wasn't mechanical at all, but something far worse. It sounded human, like a scream compressed into code.
The boy sprinted after her, his boots crunching on glass.
"Left!" he barked.
She turned blindly, skidding around a corner, nearly colliding with a dumpster. Her shoulder throbbed from the impact, but she didn't stop. The drone's scream echoed closer, bouncing off the walls like it was everywhere at once.
The alley ended at a grated staircase descending underground. The boy shoved her ahead of him.
"Down!"
They barreled down the steps into darkness. The air thickened, damp with rot and iron. Zera stumbled, her vision smeared with afterimages of neon. She collapsed against the wall, chest heaving, trying to drag air into her lungs.
The boy slammed the grate shut above them, plunging everything into shadow.
Silence.
Almost.
The drone's wail lingered faintly, muffled through layers of metal and stone, before fading into the distance.
Zera pressed her hands to her face, shaking. For the first time, words tore themselves out of her throat, raw and broken:
"What—what the hell is this place?"
Her voice sounded strange to her ears. Small. Almost foreign.
The boy crouched in front of her, his hood falling back to reveal messy black hair and hollow eyes. His face was sharp, carved with hunger and exhaustion.
"This place?" He gave a humorless laugh. "It's a feedlot. A slaughterhouse dressed in neon."
Zera stared at him. Her mind spun with questions she couldn't shape into words.
The boy leaned closer.
"And you," he said, his tone dropping into something darker, "shouldn't exist."
The tunnels around them pulsed with a faint electric glow, veins of stolen power coursing through cracked walls. Zera hugged herself, the boy's words burrowing into her like hooks.
Shouldn't exist.
But she did. And if the system wanted her gone—then maybe existing was the only rebellion she had left.
The rain hadn't stopped for three days. It wasn't real rain, of course—it was a filtered downpour, droplets formed by condensation units hidden within the canopy of the city's artificial sky. Still, it soaked her clothes, plastered her hair to her cheeks, and chilled her skin.
Zera didn't know if she hated the cold more, or the noise. The city had two kinds of sound: the obvious chaos of traffic—hovercars gliding on invisible lanes above her head, drones buzzing like impatient flies—and the constant hum beneath it all. That hum was the system. Not just one system. The system.
The net that ran the city. The thing that ran everything.
And it wanted nothing to do with her.
She pressed her forehead against the glass of a darkened storefront, her breath fogging the pane. Inside, holo-screens glowed with bright, happy faces: influencers selling miracle skin programs, streamers hosting twenty-four-hour gaming marathons, beauty models offering discount codes for glow masks. Every advertisement flickered with names, likes, followers. Bright trails of data wrapped around each avatar like halos.
She reached up, dragging her fingers across the glass. No reflection stared back at her. Just the hollow dark.
Her throat ached with the silence of it.
No name. No data. No pulse.
Her stomach growled, loud enough she swore the people passing behind her could hear. They didn't look her way. Nobody ever did.
"System access: denied." The memory of the voice still echoed in her head, the first time she tried to purchase food three days ago. She had reached for a vending drone, tapped her wrist to the scanner—and nothing happened. The drone chirped in confusion, scanned again, then spoke the words that shattered her world.
Access denied.
It wasn't just one machine. It was every machine. Every scanner. Every door. Every drone.
It was like the entire city had turned its back on her in a single instant.
Zera curled her fists and pressed them against the glass until her knuckles hurt. She had tried screaming at the system, kicking doors, even standing in front of the metro gates and daring the scanners to notice her. But they didn't.
It was worse than being ignored.
She didn't exist.
And yet—her mind was full. Too full.
When she closed her eyes, codes unraveled in streams of neon. Fragments of systems she shouldn't understand swirled behind her eyelids. She could see the pathways of the drones, the logic chains of vending machines, the soft skeleton of the city's surveillance grid.
She could see it all.
But it didn't see her.
Zera stumbled back from the glass and pressed herself into the shadow of a half-collapsed stairwell. A couple drifted past, laughing, their wrists glowing with ID bands that flickered like living jewelry. The data halo around them pulsed with likes and comments, a thousand hungry eyes watching them live.
Zera's wrists were bare. Always bare.
Her chest tightened as something familiar stirred in her—a whisper at the edge of thought. A voice that wasn't quite hers.
They'll never see you. Unless you force them to.
Her eyes snapped open. She pressed her palms against her temples, shaking her head hard enough to make the rain spray. "Shut up."
But the whisper only grew louder.
You were erased for a reason.
Her breath caught. Erased. That word lingered like a shard of glass buried beneath skin. She didn't know if it was true—she didn't know anything. She had woken up in the gutter three days ago, no memories before that. Only the burn of hunger, the sting of cold, and the mocking indifference of the city.
But that whisper felt older than three days.
It felt like it had been with her always.
A drone swept overhead, casting a cone of blue light across the alley. Zera ducked back, pressing into the stairwell until the drone hummed past. Its sensors didn't even pause.
Not dangerous. Not valuable. Not real.
Her nails dug into her palms.
She should've felt grateful. The patrol drones were infamous for tagging anyone without the right permissions, forcing them into labor camps or selling their data to influencer syndicates. But no one had tagged her. No one had even noticed her.
That kind of invisibility was supposed to be impossible.
Unless…
Her head tilted back, staring up at the neon canopy of the city. Between the holograms and the rain, she could just make out the dark silhouette of the central spire—the Core Tower. The heart of the system.
A shiver ran down her spine. She didn't know why, but part of her knew the Core Tower had something to do with her missing identity.
Something had gone wrong in that tower. And the fallout… was her.
Her stomach growled again, louder this time. She pressed her hands against it, wincing. The ache was unbearable now, worse than the rain, worse than the whisper.
She needed food.
Her gaze flicked back to the street. A vending drone hovered near the corner, its holographic sign spinning: Fresh Noodles – 50 Likes or 1 Credit. The queue beneath it was long, but each person only needed to flash their wrist to claim a steaming bowl.
Zera's mouth watered. She could almost taste the broth.
Almost.
Her fists trembled.
She had tried this before, and it hadn't worked. The drone wouldn't recognize her. It would ignore her like everything else.
But the whisper in her head slid forward, silk wrapped in static.
You don't need permission. You have the code. Take it.
Her pulse spiked.
"No," she whispered. But her feet moved anyway, carrying her out of the shadows and into the light of the vendor drone.
Her breath hitched as the line dwindled, until only she remained. The drone chirped and rotated toward her, projecting the glowing message: Payment Required. Please scan.
Zera hesitated. Her wrist was empty. The system wouldn't see her.
But her mind…
Her mind burned.
Lines of code spiraled through her vision, cascading across the surface of the drone. A lock. A key. A door waiting to be forced open.
Her hands rose on their own, trembling. She wasn't touching the drone, not really. But something inside her was reaching anyway.
The air around the machine flickered. The hologram glitched.
The drone buzzed, sputtered. Its cheerful face warped into jagged pixels. A moment later, a steaming bowl of noodles clattered onto the ground in front of her.
Zera froze.
The line of people behind her gasped. One of them hissed, "She hacked it."
Her stomach twisted. Eyes. Too many eyes.
The whisper in her head chuckled.
Now they'll see you.
The bowl of noodles steamed at her feet. She wanted to grab it. Wanted to run.
But her gaze snapped up instead—because above her, the drone's lens had swiveled directly onto her.
For the first time in three days, a machine was looking at her.
And it was screaming.
An alarm shrieked, splitting the air. The queue scattered. Neon text blazed across the drone's display: ANOMALY DETECTED. REPORTING.
Zera's heart slammed against her ribs.
The patrol drones would come. The influencers would come. Someone would see.
She stumbled backward, rain soaking her hair, noodles steaming at her feet.
The whisper in her mind was no longer soft. It was a roar.
Run, Zera. Run.
The sirens wailed, and the city finally noticed her.