Static Between the Wires

Altaran bled neon through the clouds as the hovercraft sliced toward the eastern fringe. The fifth shard pulsed beneath my coat, cold against my ribs, its resonance threading into the fracture lines already webbing my neural map.

The raid on Sector Seventeen's vault had rattled the Consortium. Sirens still echoed softly behind us—security grids scrambling to isolate how we slipped through. But we weren't out. Not yet.

Vesper sat across from me, head low, her breathing shallow. Her embedded shard flickered dimly blue at the base of her throat, syncing gently with the five locked against mine.

"How much do you remember?" I asked, voice low over the hum of the craft.

Her eyes met mine—grey, sharp despite exhaustion. "Enough to know they didn't just erase us. They rewrote whole sections—names, faces, entire years stripped out like corrupted files."

I adjusted course, steering toward Ghost's safehouse nested beneath Greyspire's skeletal infrastructure.

"The syncing's accelerating," I muttered, watching city grids scroll across my retinal overlay. "Every shard we recover, the gaps close faster."

"And the cracks deepen," Vesper added, fingers brushing her temple. "You feel them, don't you? Fragments of things that shouldn't fit—memories from angles that don't line up."

I didn't deny it. Buried combat routines bleeding into muscle memory. Faces half-familiar surfacing behind my eyes. The subtle echo of… rage?

Whoever I was before—the person stitched into these fractures—wasn't quiet.

The safehouse loomed ahead, tucked beneath a corroded transit relay—antennae sprouting from fractured rooftops, surveillance blind spots mapped in the static haze.

We docked. The access hatch hissed open.

Ghost met us inside, his lenses pulsing soft teal, code flickering behind his eyes.

"You stirred the hive," he rasped, already pulling surveillance feeds onto his displays. "They've locked sectors down, blacklisted transport grids, flagged every known alias you've ever burned."

"Then it's working," I retorted, handing him the fifth shard. "They're panicking."

He examined the fragment—its surface etched with delicate crystalline runes, resonance still humming softly in the stagnant air.

"Two more like this and the entire neural map begins rewriting," Ghost warned, connecting the shard to a stabilizer array. "Your identity won't be patchwork anymore. It'll overwrite everything—the Consortium's protocols, Solis family locks, maybe even your own safeguards."

Vesper leaned against the console, pulse flickering weakly across her embedded shard.

"We need that overwrite," she said. "We don't win this half-forged."

Ghost's expression darkened. "You're assuming what comes back is still you."

The words lodged sharp beneath my ribs.

"We've got bigger problems," I deflected, scanning the displays. "They flagged something else."

A new feed flickered on—grainy, corrupted, deep within Altaran's undercity. A figure—half-shadowed, moving with deliberate precision. Face hidden beneath a neural mask.

"Who's that?" Vesper asked.

Ghost's fingers danced across the controls, isolating biometric traces.

"Unknown," he muttered. "But their neural signature matches Solis security tech. High-level encryption. They're hunting the fragments too."

"Not Blackwell's?" I pressed.

"Independent," Ghost confirmed. "And off-consortium entirely."

Another player.

I memorized the grainy silhouette, pulse ticking sharp.

"Then we find the sixth shard before they do," I said, voice steady.

The hunt for answers was accelerating, the fractures of their engineered pasts expanding into raw, undeniable truths.

Altaran itself seemed to be cracking, its hidden sins refusing to stay buried.

I flexed my fingers, the fifth shard pulsing gently beneath my coat.

We were running out of time.

And whoever that masked operative was—they were running faster.