The leader of the Obelisk squad raised his hand. The black visor of his helmet dipped slightly, locking onto me like a weapon system acquiring a target.
"Secure him," he ordered.
I froze. My brain was screaming run, but my legs felt bolted to the pavement. The agents raised their Stasis Rods, the tips glowing with a sickening violet light that hummed in the quiet street.
Then, the girl's Echo moved.
It didn't drift forward like a normal person's future projection. It snapped. Her white shadow flickered, appearing instantly at my side, its hand clamping down on my wrist.
A split second later, the real girl was there.
She didn't ask. She grabbed me with a grip like iron.
"If you wait another second," she whispered, her voice rough, "they'll fry your nervous system. Jump."
The Stasis Rods whined, hitting peak charge.
I didn't wait.
I threw myself toward the open sewer grate. We hit the darkness together just as the air above us crackled. A violet beam slashed through the space where my head had been a moment before, scorching the brickwork.
We landed hard in muck and shallow water. My knees slammed against concrete, but the girl was already moving.
"Up," she hissed, pulling me to my feet. "The drones work on thermal. The water hides us for maybe forty seconds. Move."
We ran.
The tunnels were a maze of dripping pipes and rotting cables, but she navigated them with terrifying speed. She didn't look at the path. She looked at her Echo.
The white shadow was constantly glitching ahead of her—ducking under pipes before she did, turning corners before she reached them. It wasn't just showing the future; it was scouting it.
"Who are you?" I gasped, struggling to keep up, my lungs burning.
"Later," she snapped. "Right now, you're just cargo."
We scrambled up a rusted maintenance ladder, bursting out of a hatch and onto a narrow metal catwalk suspended between two derelict skyscrapers. The wind hit us instantly, cold and biting. We were twenty stories up, on one of the old industrial sky-bridges that the city had forgotten.
But the Obelisk hadn't forgotten.
A high-pitched whine cut through the wind.
"Down!" the girl shouted.
She dropped. I was a second too slow.
A suppression drone—smaller and faster than the S9—whipped over the railing. It fired a tranquilizer dart.
I saw it happen in slow motion. The dart was aimed straight for my neck.
But the girl's Echo was already there. The white shadow slapped the air, intercepting the projectile's path. A micro-second later, the girl's real hand moved, a blur of motion. She didn't block it; she caught the dart out of the air and slammed it into the drone's sensor eye in one fluid motion.
The drone sparked and spiraled into the abyss below.
I stared at her, my chest heaving.
"That wasn't... normal," I stammered. "You didn't just see that coming. You reacted to it before it happened."
She didn't answer. She ran to a junction box on the wall, ripped the cover off, and jammed a small, makeshift device into the wiring. A low electromagnetic hum filled the air, creating a distortion field around us.
"That will blind their sensors for five minutes," she said, finally sliding down the wall to sit on the metal grating. She wiped grease from her forehead. "Sit down, Null. You look like you're going to pass out."
I leaned against the railing, trying to stop my hands from shaking. "My name is Kairo."
"I know what your name is," she said. "I'm Lyra."
She looked at me, really looked at me, for the first time. Her eyes were a pale, striking grey, and the white Echo around her finally settled, merging back into her silhouette.
"You have an Echo," I said, accusingly. "You're not like me."
"What I have isn't an Echo," Lyra said, pulling a compressed ration bar from her pocket. "And what you lack isn't a defect."
"Everyone calls it a defect. A glitch. A threat."
"Everyone is an idiot," she said flatly. She took a bite of the ration bar. "The Echo system... it isn't natural, Kairo. You know that, right? Evolution didn't give humans the ability to see ten seconds into the future. We built it."
I frowned. "We learned it in history. The Great Synchronization."
"Propaganda," she spat. "It's a network. A global server farm buried deep underground that calculates probability and projects it onto our retinas. It's a leash. It keeps people predictable. Safe. Controlled."
She pointed the half-eaten bar at me.
"But the system has a blind spot. It can calculate wind speed, stock markets, and human choices. But it can't calculate you."
"Why?" I asked. "Why am I invisible to it?"
"Because you're Zero-Node aligned," she said, as if that explained everything. "You don't generate data. You just... exist. And because the system can't predict you, it's terrified of you."
I looked out at the city skyline. The red countdown clocks were visible on every building in the distance.
57:42:10
"Is that why the world is ending?" I asked quietly. "Because of me?"
Lyra's expression softened, just a fraction.
"The vision wasn't an apocalypse, Kairo. It was a distress signal. The System Core is failing. It sent that image of the burning world to warn us that the simulation is crashing. And the Obelisk Division... they think deleting you will stabilize the code."
A chill went through me. "Deleting me?"
"You're a variable they can't solve," she said grimly. "When you can't solve an equation, you erase it."
I opened my mouth to ask more, but Lyra suddenly went rigid.
Her white Echo, which had been dormant, didn't just flicker. It screamed.
It wasn't a sound I could hear with my ears—it was a psychic pressure that made my nose bleed instantly. Her Echo ripped away from her body, not moving forward or backward, but vibrating violently as if it were being electrocuted.
Lyra grabbed her head, gasping.
"No," she whispered. "Get out of my head."
"What is it?" I shouted, grabbing her shoulder. "Are the drones back?"
"I don't see drones," she murmured, her eyes rolling back, showing only whites. "The network... something is overwriting the network."
She wasn't looking at the city. She was looking into the data stream itself.
"There's someone standing in the Core chamber," she choked out. "I can feel him... he's pushing a signal through the grid."
My heart skipped a beat. "Another anomaly? Someone like me?"
Lyra looked at me, blood trickling from her nose. For the first time since she saved me, she looked truly terrified.
"No," she said. "You're a blank spot. He... he is a black hole."
Her white shadow violently recoiled, as if physically struck by an invisible hand.
"He's not a glitch, Kairo," she whispered. "He's the Admin."
The sky-bridge beneath our feet shuddered. A massive spotlight swept across the metal grating, blinding us. The electromagnetic shield had failed—or it had been remotely shut down.
"They found us," Lyra yelled, grabbing my hand. "Run!"