It’s Waiting For a Cue,

The rain didn't fall like a storm. It wept.

Thin sheets drifting down like the city itself was mourning something it hadn't even lost yet. Ash and I had burned a hole through half of Lower Reach, and now here I was, riding shotgun with a man in black who hadn't said more than ten words since pulling me out of that Hive trap.

Ghost.

I doubted that was his real name, but it fit him too well to question. He wore it like a second skin, the kind you never take off, not even to sleep. Always behind that visor, always watching. Quiet, calculated, like he never really landed anywhere, just kept moving before the floor had a chance to betray him. I understood that.

After what happened with Ash, I couldn't blame him. I didn't trust much anymore either.

God… I'd been so stupid. So eager to believe someone actually had my back. I let my guard down, worse, I let him in. And he sold me out like it was just another deal, just another credit transfer.

I didn't say any of that to Ghost. I didn't have to.

He wasn't the kind of man who asked. And I wasn't in the mood to bleed in front of someone else again.

I should've known the minute he smiled.

That same lopsided grin I'd fallen for, the one he used when sweet-talking me into "one last run," one more job, one more miracle. And like a fool, I bit. Carried Hive's prize right into their lap like a damn delivery girl.

And Nyra… she was supposed to be right behind me. She always had my back. But that night, she never showed up again. No comm pings. No signal. No body.

Just a void that tasted like ash and sounded like guilt.

Ghost's hideout was buried under a collapsed car park, the bones of Old Ironbound curling around it like a forgotten organ. Node Zero, he called it, all concrete walls and flickering monitors, copper wires running like veins through rusted conduits. If the rest of the city was dying, this place was its cold, indifferent heart.

I dropped onto the cot the first night and barely moved for hours. Didn't sleep. Didn't speak. Just listened to the pulse of the generators and the soft whir of Gizmo's damaged servos.

He laid at the foot of the bed, silent, one leg twitching every few minutes as if his systems were stuck in a loop. Every time I reached to open his chassis, my hand stalled. I didn't want to know what had burned out. Didn't want to see the log files.

I was afraid I'd find Nyra's voice trapped somewhere inside. Afraid I wouldn't.

The days bled into each other like oil into water. We moved through them like ghosts, fitting, considering.

Ghost tracked Hive movements across the grid, watching their heat signatures shift sector by sector like pieces on a chessboard. He never said it, but I saw what he was really doing: looking for the moment it would all snap. The moment the trap shut.

And me? I tried to keep busy.

Patched Gizmo's limb with a spare servo scavenged from a toy I found in the trash two blocks from the bunker. Rewired a wall terminal that hadn't lit up in years. Built, unbuilt, rebuilt. Anything to keep from thinking.

Anything to keep from seeing Ash's smirk in the back of my mind, playing on loop.

It wasn't until the fifth night that Ghost finally said something real.

I was sitting cross-legged on the floor, reconfiguring Gizmo's vocal synth, trying to stop him from defaulting to static-crackle hisses every time he purred. The green glow of his core had stabilized, but his behavior was… off. Like he knew something I didn't.

"Something's off," he murmured, more to himself than to me. "They're not just tightening security. They're rewriting protocols, overwriting them."

I looked up from Gizmo's half-open chassis, brow furrowing. "Is this because of that run with Ash? Did we trip something?"

He shook his head slowly, still scanning the data scroll. "No. This started before that. I've been watching it build for days. Hive's network is behaving… wrong."

I set my tools down, the weight in his voice pulling my attention like a magnet. "Define 'wrong.'"

Ghost didn't answer right away. Just leaned in closer to the screen, tapping a line of code that flickered and bled into itself like a glitch caught mid-loop.

"I think they're getting ready to push something live," he said. "Big. And if I'm reading this right… it's not just system updates."

"What then?" I asked, already feeling the chill in my spine.

He finally turned toward me. The visor hid his expression, but his tone said enough.

"Behavioral overrides. At scale."

He turned the monitor toward me, and the screen filled with lines of code that spilled across it like blood down a drain, stuttering, glitching, and looping in relentless repetition. In the tangled mess lay layers of subroutines buried deep within Hive's latest firmware update.

This wasn't your run-of-the-mill patch.

It was a carrier signal a command line hidden in the data feed like a needle threaded into a spine. I leaned in, my eyes tracing the fragments of its meaning: augment triggers, neural call-response patterns, and sleep-state activators. This wasn't merely about controlling hardware; it was tapping into the living, organic part of cybernetic integration. The kind of technology you'd expect to see only in military labs or hear about in whispered dark net legends.

Ghost tapped a section of the code with deliberate precision. "It's waiting for a cue," he said quietly.

I felt a chill run down my spine. "What kind of cue?"

He didn't answer immediately. Instead, he looked up at me, his visor catching the glow of the screen like a dying sun. Finally, he said, "A blackout. Citywide."

Those words settled into my chest like heavy lead, and I knew we were standing on the brink of something far beyond our control.

I'd lived through outages before. Rolling brownouts, generator fires, short-loop shutdowns when the grid needed a reboot. But what Ghost described wasn't a glitch.

It was a purge.

Kill the lights. Shut down every signal, block every outbound comm. Then, in that sudden hush, when the world's too stunned to scream—unleash a neural pulse across the city. Not a bomb. Not a brute-force hack. Just a single, surgical wave designed to trip the buried code sleeping inside every registered augment, every Hive-issued implant, every blinking piece of chrome bolted into someone's spine.

One broadcast. One push of a button. And a hundred thousand minds flip like dominoes.

I felt the breath catch in my throat. "They've already tested it, haven't they?"

Ghost didn't say yes. He didn't need to. The way his shoulders stiffened was enough.

"Nyra…" Her name cracked out of me before I could stop it.

He turned slightly. "You said she had Hive implants, right? Older models. Factory-recalls. That kind of hardware's ideal for testing short-range signal responses."

A prototype signal, I realized. A smaller version of what they were building now. She hadn't disappeared because of a firefight, or panic, or even betrayal.

They'd activated something in her. Flipped a switch. Took her away from herself.

I looked down at Gizmo, his metal frame dim under the glow of the console. He blinked up at me, eyes flickering, a soft whine humming low in his core like he knew what I was thinking.

I clenched my hand into a fist.

"They didn't just test it on her. They used her. And who knows how many others."

Ghost watched me for a moment, like he wanted to say something but didn't know how to form the words.

Then he asked, softer than I expected, "But why go through all this?"

I didn't sleep that night either.

Watched the city lights flicker through a crack in the bunker's ceiling. Tapped into the public grid map. Traced power fluctuations across the sectors like cracks forming in glass.

They were getting ready.

I could feel it in the static crawling under my skin, in the hum of machines like a chorus holding its breath.