The needle hissed.
"Stay under, kid," Jax whispered.
Leo thrashed. The restraints creaked against the bolted chair. His pupils were blown wide, black voids reflecting the strobe of neon from the alley outside.
Jax didn't look at the monitors, he felt the boy's panic through his haptic gloves. It felt like static electricity crawling over his skin.
"The memory is deep," Jax said into his throat-mic. "Basal ganglia. He's hoarding it like a reflex."
"Clean it and get out," a voice crackled in his earpiece. Senator Vane. Cold. "The Audit is three blocks out.
If they find him with that trauma signature, my career ends today."
Jax closed his eyes. He dived.
The Synapse Grid roared. In the darkness of Leo's subconscious, the world was a melting city of liquid mercury.
Jax navigated the neural pathways, stepping over jagged shards of guilt. He found the thread, a silver, pulsing vein. The hit-and-run.
Jax grabbed the thread. Immediately, the smell of burning rubber and the sound of a snapping spine flooded his nervous system.
He gritted his teeth. His fingers danced across the air in the physical world, re-coding the trauma. He rewrote the blood as rain.
He rewrote the screaming girl as a screeching cat. He patched a memory of a missed flight over the carnage.
"Wait."
Behind the accident sat a black box. A dead-end file. It shouldn't have been there. It wasn't Leo's. It was a parasite.
Jax touched it.
The world turned white. A girl's face appeared, not the one from the accident. She was older. Her eyes leaked raw binary code.
She screamed a string of coordinates that burned into Jax's cortex like hot needles.
40.7128°N, 74.0060°W
"What is that?" Jax gasped. His physical body arched off the chair.
"Jax, status!" the Senator barked.
"There's something else here. A ghost file. God-tier encryption."
"Delete it. All of it."
"I can't. It's hard-coded into his motor functions. If I scrub this, he forgets how to breathe."
A siren wailed outside. Red light strobed through the grimy windows of the safehouse, slicing through the smoke.
"The Auditor is here," the Senator said. The line went dead with a cold, digital click.
The remote kill-signal hit the safehouse door. The locks fused shut.
Jax ripped the leads from his temples. Blood leaked from his nose. He looked at Leo. The boy was staring at the ceiling, drooling.
His identity was a half-finished puzzle, his eyes vacant.
"Sorry, kid. You're on your own."
Jax grabbed his gear. He smashed the window with the butt of his pulse-pistol. The glass shattered like digital artifacts, falling into the rain.
He jumped.
The cold rain lashed his face. He hit the fire escape, boots clanging against rusted iron. Below, black interceptors drifted into the alley. They were silent, sleek predators.
"Target sighted," a woman's voice echoed through the street.
Vera.
Jax didn't look back. He tapped his neck, activating the Adrenaline Surge patch. His heart hammered a frantic rhythm. His vision sharpened, highlighting escape routes in glowing amber. He vaulted a railing, his silhouette a blur of motion against the neon signs of 'The Static.'
"Freeze, Architect!"
The voice was closer. Too close.
Jax skidded to a halt at the edge of a rooftop. Vera stood at the end of the alleyway below, blocking his descent. She held a pulse-pistol with two hands. Her eyes glowed with the icy blue light of an active Audit scan.
"You're late, Vera," Jax shouted over the thunder. "The Senator already scrubbed the crime. You've got nothing."
"I'm not here for the Senator's son," Vera said. Her aim didn't waver. "I'm here for what you stole from his head. The Ghost File."
Jax froze. "How do you know about that?"
"Give me the coordinates, Jax. Now."
"I didn't steal it. It jumped into my cortex. It's military grade. If I try to transfer it here, we both fry."
"You're lying."
"Check my signal!" Jax stepped toward the ledge. "Look at the interference. They're tracking the signal, not me. If you don't lower that gun, the Erasers will drop on us in thirty seconds."
Vera's expression fractured. For a split second, the Auditor's mask slipped. Her hand trembled.
"You know about the Zero Signal, don't you?" Jax pressed.
"I know it's inside me," she whispered. "I have gaps, Jax. Gaps that look exactly like your handwriting."
High above, the clouds parted. Three drones descended, their searchlights cutting the dark. The hum of their rotors sounded like a swarm of angry hornets.
"They're going to kill us both," Jax said. "The Audit won't save you from the corporations once they see you've compromised the data."
Vera lowered the weapon. She looked at the drones, then back at Jax. "Show me."
Jax jumped from the roof, catching a power line and sliding down into the mud of the alley. He landed in front of her. He reached out, his haptic gloves humming.
"This is going to hurt," Jax warned.
"Do it."
He slammed the link into her neck port.
The world dissolved into the Signal.
The alleyway vanished. They were standing in a field of white noise. Digital ghosts drifted past them, screaming, silent, half-formed things.
In the center of the void, the coordinates Jax had seen in Leo's head began to glow, forming a map of the city that bled into the deep sea.
"Look," Jax pointed. "It's not a glitch. It's a harvest."
"My childhood," Vera gasped, reaching for a fragment of the map. "I remember that house. But it's not a house. It's a server."
"Someone didn't just edit you, Vera. They built you around a secret."
"You did it!"
"I didn't even know you!" Jax said, but the words rang hollow, as if they'd been written by someone else.
The white noise suddenly turned red.
SYSTEM ALERT: EXTERNAL BREACH.
"They're in," Jax grabbed her arm. "Wake up!"
Jax yanked the cord. They slammed back into the physical world. The alley was crawling with black-clad figures.
The Erasers. They didn't breathe. They didn't speak. They moved with the synchronized precision of a single algorithm.
"Cover me!" Jax yelled.
Vera raised her pistol and fired. A bolt of blue energy took the head off the lead Eraser. No blood. Just sparks and hydraulic fluid.
Jax slammed a "Combat Reflex" patch into his thigh. His muscles coiled. He didn't think, he just moved.
He spun, kicking an Eraser back into a stack of crates, then fired his own pulse-pistol into the chest of another.
"We need to go! Now!"
They ran.
The rain turned into a deluge, blurring the lines between the physical city and the digital overlay. Holographic advertisements for 'New-Life Personas' flickered and died as they passed.
"Where are we going?" Vera panted.
"To the coordinates," Jax said, his eyes scanning the horizon where the massive spires of the corporate district met the black ocean.
"We're going to find out who you were before they turned you into a hunter."
Behind them, the city of Omonoia screamed with the sound of sirens, but Jax only heard the Signal, the low, constant hum of a thousand trapped souls, waiting to be set free.