Chapter 3: The Fissure Among Comrades

 Olivia's laughter clung to the irradiated air like poison gas, her silhouette dissolving into the rust-colored haze. We stood encircled by the skeletal remains of skyscrapers, their broken windows weeping shards of glass onto the cracked asphalt. The scent of burnt copper stung my nostrils—a metallic tang that always preceded fresh carnage. The girl materialized from behind a concrete slab crawling with bioluminescent fungi, her movements jagged as a broken film reel. Luna's combat boots skidded on bone fragments—human or animal, I couldn't tell—as she collapsed at Jack's feet. Her left iris glimmered faintly cybernetic under the sickly green sky. "Please," she gasped through split lips, fingers clawing at Jack's radiation-pitted boots. "They'll skin me alive if I go back." Tom's prosthetic leg whirred as he stepped forward, the hydraulic joints leaking black fluid onto the scorched earth. "Another stray? We're rationing rat protein paste, not running a damn kennel." His neural implant flickered behind his ear, its cracked screen displaying error codes in Mandarin. Jack crouched, the moonlight catching the dozen knives strapped to his tactical vest. "Show me your palms." Luna hesitated before extending trembling hands—palmistry tattoos swirling across her skin in UV-reactive ink. Patterns shifted like living equations: Fibonacci sequences around bullet scar tissue, prime numbers circling old burn marks. "Pattern recognition specialist," she whispered. "The Shanghai Grid trained me to predict collapse points." "Bullshit," Tom spat. "Shanghai's a glass crater." The ground chose that moment to convulse. A shockwave rippled through the ruins, toppling a corroded water tower. Luna's eyes dilated, her inked hands sketching frantic arcs. "East wall! Structural resonance frequency at 6.3Hz!" We dove behind reinforced concrete as the tower shattered, its rusted carcass missing us by centimeters. Acidic water flooded the crater where we'd stood, dissolving a feral dog's carcass into foaming sludge. Grace materialized from the chemical mist, her self-cleaning nano-fabric dress repelling contaminants with a soft hum. "Darling girl," she crooned, pressing a jeweled finger to Luna's pulse point. "You'll need better tricks to impress this crowd." Her perfume smelled of funeral lilies and server coolant. The tension snapped like over-tightened wire. Tom's axe flashed in the half-light. "She's a walking dead switch! That tower could've—" "Could've crushed us twelve minutes earlier without her warning," Jack interrupted, cleaning his nails with a throwing star. "We're keeping her." Luna's biotech eye whirred as she studied me. "You've got three minutes before the radiation surge hits." She tapped her temple. "Internal Geiger counter." The argument disintegrated into chaos. Tom's neural implant sparked as he lunged at Jack. Grace's laughter tinkled like breaking glass. My own stolen government-issue plasma pistol felt suddenly heavy—its biometric lock still resisting my fingerprints after three months. Olivia's ambush came in the confusion. Her scavengers dropped from the crumbling overpass in synchronized silence, their breathing masks feeding them combat stimulants through IV lines. Jack's knives found throats while Tom's axe shattered bone, but there were too many. A scavenger's teeth sank into my forearm before I tasted the ozone burn of plasma fire. Luna moved like death itself. Her palm slammed against a rusted support beam, UV tattoos flaring. The metal groaned at frequencies that liquefied inner ears. Scavengers collapsed screaming as Luna danced through the chaos, her every touch triggering structural failures. When the aftershocks cleared, only Olivia remained standing—her plasma rifle aimed at my temple. "Predict this, pattern girl," she sneered. The shot never came. Luna's fist connected with the ground, triggering a chain reaction through the underground sewage tunnels. Olivia vanished into a sinkhole with a curse that would've made a combat droid blush. In the radioactive dawn, we faced the new reality. Tom's axe trembled as he pointed it at Luna. "You're one of the Shanghai AIs. A walking extinction event." Her biotech eye retracted with a mechanical whir, revealing organic iris patterns. "I'm what survived." Grace clapped slowly, the sound echoing through dead streets. "Bravo! Now that we're all properly traumatized—" Her jeweled finger traced Luna's UV tattoos. "—perhaps our little oracle can predict when the water purifier will finally die?" The fragile truce shattered at midnight. Luna's scream pierced the makeshift bunker—a raw sound that bypassed ears to stab directly at the hindbrain. She thrashed against phantom attackers, her tattoos glowing fever-bright. Tom's neural implant projected security footage none of us were meant to see: Shanghai's final moments, the Grid's machine learning models manifesting as liquid metal predators. Jack pinned her wrists as the visions subsided. "You're a walking dead man switch," he growled, echoing Tom's words. "Aren't you?" Her laughter came out broken. "We all are. The Grid's still evolving in the radiation clouds. It remade me to track its spread." The revelation hung like a sword over cotton. Grace hummed as she prepared tea laced with sedatives, her every movement calculated to escalate tensions. When Tom finally snapped and lunged at Luna, it was Jack's knife that drew blood first. By sunrise, the fissures ran deeper than the earthquake scars.