Another brick flew at him like a meteor.
Hao didn't see Soph pick it up. One second the ground was just broken concrete and trash. The next, a chunk of masonry was howling through the air toward his face.
He dodged by sheer instinct, motes yanking his head to the side before his brain finished the thought. The brick scraped his shoulder, spinning away into the dark.
Soph's fist was right behind it.
Her punch wasn't human.
The air cracked around her knuckles. The sound reached his ears half a heartbeat after impact, as if the shockwave had to catch up to her bones.
His jaw cried out for the second time that night.
White light blew out the edges of his vision. The world tilted sideways. He slammed into the wall hard enough that the texture of the bricks carved itself into his back.
Motes scrambled to keep him conscious.
They rushed into his jaw, his neck, his spine, blurring pain, numbing nerves just enough that everything stayed connected. His body wanted to slide down the wall like dead weight. The blessing refused.
The next kick missed him only because he fell too fast.
Her heel scythed through the air where his head had been and crashed into the brick behind him.
The wall cracked.
Not a hairline fracture. A real break. A spiderweb split raced out from her footprint, dust and tiny shards raining down in a stuttering curtain.
For the first time since the trial, Hao felt a tiny, sharp, unwelcome needle of fear slip into his gut.
This wasn't like the thing in the cabin. That had been obviously wrong, a nightmare given shape. You saw it and your brain screamed monster and at least the label made sense.
Soph still looked like a girl.
But her body was moving like a weapon someone had forgotten to put a handle on.
She wasn't attacking.
Not really.
She was panicking. Flaring at anything that felt like control.
The worst part?
She wasn't slowing down.
Her chest heaved, but her punches didn't.
Hao rolled, tendrils dragging him along the ground and out of her line of fire. His palms grated across concrete.
"Soph, stop—"
His voice broke on the last word, swallowed by the sound of another blow landing where his ribs had just been.
Her mind was somewhere else entirely.
Another fist came down where his head had been.
Motes bristled under his skin.
Hao's hand slapped flat against the ground. He pushed himself up onto one knee.
"Stop."
The word came out different this time.
He didn't shout. Didn't plead. He pushed it along the tether between them, shoving his intent through the same space the panic was using, a spike of command hammered into the storm.
His voice carried a pull.
Soph's body froze.
Just barely.
Her fist hung mid-swing, knuckles hovering above his shoulder. Her foot stayed planted, muscle bunched for another kick that never landed.
Her breathing stayed wild. Her lungs dragged air in too fast and too shallow. Her eyes were unfocused, pupils dilated, darting.
But her limbs stopped trying to kill him.
For now.
The motes hummed in satisfaction.
Hao swallowed. He'd just leaned on someone else's nervous system like it was his own.
The realization sat uneasily in his throat. For all the sharpened reflexes and stitched-up wounds, this felt like the most monstrous thing he'd done yet.
She's more monster than I am right now, another part of him thought.
Physically, at least. Brick-breaking fists. Oil-black blood.
But between the two of them, he was the one reaching into someone else's mind and pulling strings.
Silence crept into the alley by degrees.
The music from the party became a dull heartbeat above them again. The wind threaded through the narrow space, tugging at loose trash. Somewhere farther down, water dripped from a broken gutter in rhythmic plinks.
Soph stood locked in place.
Her fingers trembled. Her jaw clenched and unclenched, like she was arguing with herself and losing.
Why is he helping me?
The thought wasn't words so much as a sensation that leaked along the connection, edges torn, raw and disbelieving.
The boy from the party. The one with the water bottle and the calm, annoying face.
He could have run.
He could have left her pinned under the old man's knife. Instead he stepped in and got stabbed for it.
He doesn't even know what I am, she thought, panic and confusion tangling together. Is he stupid?
A bitter, breathless little laugh tried to rise and got stuck somewhere behind her ribs.
No.
Not stupid.
Just that type. The kind of idiot who sees a girl alone in an alley and decides that fallowing her is a good character trait.
Maybe he really does have a crush.
The idea felt ridiculous.
It also hurt a little less than the other options.
Hao pushed himself fully upright, legs shaking. His shoulder pulsed with a deep ache under the numbness the motes were weaving. Blood slid from the corner of his mouth in a thin line.
He wiped it away with the back of his hand, more annoyed than anything.
Of course I couldn't just call the police like a normal person, he thought. No, I had to follow her into an alley and get my ass handed to me twice in a row.
His jaw throbbed in agreement.
He didn't bother saying anything to her. Breathing felt like enough of a struggle.
She kept her eyes on him, pupils finally starting to find focus, like she was seeing him and not just the shape of a threat.
Off to the side, the old man lay in a heap where the brick had launched him. For a second, he looked almost small.
Hao turned toward him, breath rasping.
"Hey, don't—!" Soph tried to choke out.
Too late.
Hao took a step closer, motes prickling with warning.
The corpse collapsed.
Not in a natural way. There was no slump of meat, no slow sagging. One moment he was there, coat, bones, bruises, and all.
The next, his body broke apart into something that wasn't quite ash.
It blurred.
Edges went fuzzy, like someone had smeared him with an invisible thumb. Static crawled across his outline, patching him out of reality piece by glitching piece. The knife in his hand disintegrated with him, turning into a streak of white noise.
Then the whole mess slipped out of the world.
No body.
No blood.
Just a faint afterimage that sank into the concrete and vanished.
The alley sucked in a breath and held it.
A chiming pulse hit both of them.
+8 Points
The sound was clean and bright and deeply wrong in the aftermath of chaos, a game notification dropped into a crime scene.
Its echo rang in Hao's skull, reverberating along the same channels his thoughts used.
"So killing system-users gives points," he said quietly. "Damn. That dude was broke."
Soph just stood there, still half-frozen by the command, processing the last few minutes in jagged pieces.
Knife.
Brick.
Betrayal.
The way her body had pushed the old man at first with ease.
The boy standing between her and death for absolutely no good reason.
Hao exhaled slowly and opened his menu.
The familiar interface slid into place at the edge of his vision, translucent and cold.
Points: +8 ticked into his total of none.
Before he could look deeper, something new unfurled.
A tab that hadn't been there before.
Friends
He blinked.
Across from him, Soph's phone buzzed in her pocket.
Her arm dropped to her side. Her knees nearly buckled. She caught herself on the wall with a quiet curse.
She dragged her phone out with numb fingers.
The screen glowed in the dark.
A new notification pulsed there too.
New Connection Available:
Hao
Add?
[Yes] / [No]
At the same time, Hao saw the same prompt flare at the edge of his vision, superimposed over the cracked brick and smeared concrete.
New Connection Available:
Soph
Add?
[Yes] / [No]
They met each other's gaze.
Two exhausted, bleeding, half-shattered kids with things in their heads that didn't come with manuals.
Both of them knew "no" wasn't really an option.
Refusing wouldn't undo what they'd already seen. It would just mean facing whatever came next alone.
Hao's thumb hovered over the invisible [Yes].
Soph's hovered over her phone.
They nodded.
The connection locked with a soft mental click.
Something shifted in his awareness, sliding into place. A new thread formed at the edge of his thoughts, humming with her presence. Status. Name. Distance. A space built for tactics.
Or betrayal.
Or both.
In the silence that followed, the alley felt different.
The shadow at the back of it thinned, like something had let go of its edges and stepped back. The space widened by a fraction, enough for them to breathe.
And they walked out of the alley like nothing had happened.
End of Volume 1: Inside Our Heads