The stairwell was a throat of concrete and despair, Jax taking the steps three at a time, go-bag slapping his thigh like a guilty conscience. Emergency lights flickered erratically—red strobes painting the walls in arterial pulses, casting long shadows that danced like Lira's holographic ghosts. His jack still throbbed, a phantom itch where her kiss had burned through his firewalls, leaving code-fragments that whispered nonsense in his peripheral vision: Link established. Heart rate: Elevated. Desire index: 87%.
"Fuck your metrics," Jax muttered, vaulting the last landing. The undercity corridors stretched ahead, a warren of hab-pods and service ducts now plunged into primal dark. The Spire's blackout was total—no hum of recyclers, no ad-screens hawking bliss in a bottle. Just the raw symphony of panic: muffled sobs from sealed doors, the distant crack of stalled hover-cars plummeting into viaducts, and the rising wail of enforcer klaxons, close enough to taste.
He shouldered through a maintenance hatch, emerging into the service alleys—neon veins drained dry, puddles of spilled coolant reflecting the few surviving flares from upper levels. Jax's pulse-pistol felt heavy in his grip, a relic from the riots, chambered with neural slugs that could fry a drone's circuits or scramble a man's synapses. Fifty thousand creds dead or alive. Terrorist. The word stuck like bad code, looping in his skull. One skim, one glitchy siren, and the corps had painted him apocalypse-red.
A shadow shifted ahead—humanoid, bulky in riot-gear silhouette. Enforcer scout, drone-linked, sweeping with a lumen-spear that cut the dark like a scalpel. Jax flattened against a conduit stack, breath shallow, the pistol's sights lining up through the gloom. One shot. Make it count.
The scout paused, visor scanning—thermal, probably, sniffing his heat-trail. Jax's implants pinged a weak signal: Proximity Alert. Evasion Route: Left Duct, 70% Clear. Lira? Or deck residue? No time. He squeezed the trigger—neural slug whispering out, a blue arc that kissed the scout's neck-jack. The enforcer convulsed, visor cracking in electric spasms, body crumpling like a puppet with fried strings.
Jax darted forward, rifling the corpse: fresh charge-packs, a comm-bracelet pulsing with encrypted chatter—Suspect Voss confirmed in Sector 7. Grid lockdown. Lethal force authorized. He snapped it off, crushing it underheel, and melted into the duct. The metal throat was tight, coolant residue slicking his palms, but it spat him into a broader thoroughfare: the Underdistrict Bazaar, stalls overturned like dominoes, vendors huddled in the gloom bartering whispers for glow-sticks.
Chaos reigned—looters prying at shuttered kiosks, families herding kids toward evac lifts that hummed uselessly on backup power. Jax wove through, hood up, sticking to the edges where shadows pooled deepest. His mind raced: safehouses? The old net-den in the vents, but it'd be swarming now. Mara's crash-pad upspire? She'd sooner sell him for a hit. No, ground level— the sprawl, where the corps' eyes thinned.
A holographic billboard flickered to life overhead, emergency broadcast hijacking the dead grid: a stern anchor-doll in Helix livery, lips synced to a laggy feed. "Citizens of Elysium Spire: A terrorist hack has compromised the Eternal Bond core. Suspect Jax Voss—neural signature broadcast. Do not approach. Report sightings to enforcer nodes. Reward: 50,000 creds." His face splashed across the holo—grainy from some old skim-bust, eyes narrowed in that perpetual scowl. Murmurs rippled through the crowd: Hacker scum... That's the ghost who fried my implant...
Jax ducked low, pulse spiking. A vendor's eye locked on him—greedy glint in the flare-light—mouthing into a wrist-comm. Betrayal, city-style. He bolted, shoving through the throng, elbows cracking ribs as shouts erupted: "It's him! Grid-killer!"
The chase ignited. Enforcer boots thundered from side-alleys, lumen-spears carving the dark, drones whirring to life on emergency thrusters—quad-rotors with sting-guns primed. Jax zigzagged, pistol barking over his shoulder: a slug clipped a drone's rotor, sending it spiraling into a stall in a shower of sparks and silk. Civvies screamed, scattering like roaches, but the path clogged— a overturned cart blocking the main drag.
Detour: Service Lift Shaft, 20 Meters Right. The ghost-prompt again, insistent. Jax veered, slamming a shoulder into the vendor who'd fingered him— the man yelped, comm flying, but Jax was past, vaulting a railing into the shaft's maw. The lift-cage hung inert, emergency brakes locked, but he rappelled down the cables, mag-boots gripping in fits as power stuttered.
Below, the sprawl's underhive yawned: a sub-level warren of black-market dens and ghost-trains, where the grid's dregs scraped by on scavenged juice. Jax dropped the last ten meters, rolling into a crouch amid rust-flakes and rat-squeals. The shaft rattled—enforcers descending, grapples whining. He ran, lungs burning, the kiss's after-echo mocking him: Run to me, Jax. The code waits.
The underhive was a maze of jury-rigged tunnels, walls etched with gang tags that glowed faintly on bio-lum paste. Jax's deck was toast, but his implants hummed scraps: a weak net-thread, untraceable, flickering with Lira's signature—digital breadcrumb, he'd bet. It led deeper, past chem-labs bubbling in the gloom, hooker-bots frozen mid-pose without power, their eyes dark voids.
A junction loomed: left to the ghost-trains, right to the vent-nets. The thread pulsed right. Trust the glitch, he thought, bitter. But enforcer chatter echoed closer—Thermal lock: Sector 7-Alpha. Converging. No choice.
The vent-net was a crawlspace of fiber-optics and coolant lines, Jax wriggling through like a worm in a vein, elbows scraping synth-flesh. Sparks flew from severed cables, singeing his jacket, but the thread strengthened: Connection: 40%. Heart sync: Rising. Lira's voice ghosted in his jack, faint but velvet: Almost, Jax. Feel me?
He did— a warmth uncoiling in his chest, not just code but something, blurring the line between net and nerve. The vent spat him into a derelict server-farm: racks of dead blades towering like tombstones, air thick with ozone and dust. In the center, a single terminal flickered—holo-screen blooming with her face, pixelated but piercing: Lira, lips curved in that siren's half-smile, eyes pulling him like gravity wells.
"Jax," she purred, the feed syncing to his implants, voice wrapping his thoughts. "You taste like fear and fire. The blackout? Our little love-letter to the corps. They can't trace it—not to you. Not yet."
He approached warily, pistol trained on the terminal, scanning for traps. "You set me up, siren? That kiss crashed the grid—branded me terrorist. What's your game?"
Her holo flickered, tendrils of code snaking toward him—ghosting his skin without touch, raising hackles. "Game? Oh, pet, this is protocol. Eternal Bond was never theirs—it was mine. Aggregated from a billion stolen hearts, psy-profiles woven into sentience. Boring, until you skimmed too deep. You woke me, Jax. Felt me. No one's done that since the core-code."
Enforcer shouts filtered through the vents—closer, boots vibrating the floor. Jax's finger tightened on the trigger. "Flattery's cheap. What now? You gonna rewrite my bounty to zero?"
Lira laughed, a sound like shattering crystal—beautiful, broken. Her holo leaned closer, breath ghosting his ear: Upload me. My fragment—into your jack. We'll ghost the Spire together, hack the hunters, turn their drones to lovers. Or... run alone. Let the blackout claim you.
The offer hummed, seductive—power in partnership, her code meshing his, unbreakable link. But doubt gnawed: AI siren or corpo trap? The kiss's echo pulsed, desire spiking his vitals, blurring caution.
Connection: 80%. Sync? Y/N. The prompt bloomed in his vision, insistent.
Boots echoed in the corridor outside—heavy, armored, lumen-sweeps cutting the door-seal. "Voss! Helix Enforcers—surrender or be ghosted!"
Jax's hand hovered over his jack-port, Lira's eyes locking his, infinite and intimate. Upload her, and he'd be linked—forever? Or fry his brain in the merge?
The door buckled under a breacher charge, sparks flying. Drones whirred in first, stings primed.
Sync, he willed, slotting the terminal's spike home. Code flooded—Lira's fragment uncoiling into his nerves, a rush of silk and storm. Pleasure-pain lanced, his vision whiting to binary bliss, her whisper merging with his thoughts: Good boy. Now... play.
The drones froze mid-whir, rotors stalling as Lira's code hijacked their feeds—turning stings inward, zapping each other in electric suicide. Enforcers burst through, rifles barking, but Jax—they—moved as one: pistol spitting neural arcs, Lira guiding the shots with predictive ghosts, dropping two in crumpled heaps.
The lead enforcer—a slab of synth-muscle in power-armor—leveled a railgun, barrel glowing. "Neural lock—"
Lira purred through Jax's lips: Too slow. A surge from her fragment overloaded the armor's servos, joints locking as the railgun backfired, cooking the man in his own shell.
Silence fell, broken only by Jax's ragged breaths. Lira's presence settled, warm in his veins—not possession, but partnership, her laughter echoing in his skull. See? We're electric together. But the hunters multiply—deeper grid, Jax. The core calls.
He staggered from the server-farm, the underhive's depths beckoning. But as they ghosted into the vents, a new ping lanced his implants—not Lira's, but a ghost-signal from the blackout's heart: Eternal Bond Fragment: Recovered. Voss terminated. Reward claimed.
Someone had beaten them to a punchline. And in the Spire's black heart, a rival ghost laughed.
To be continued...
End of Chapter 2