The city had stopped breathing. When the sky first shattered — when the rain became shards of data — she had run. Through smoke, alarms, the smell of burning steel, and ozone.
Now, hour later, pressed under the shattered arch of a tipped mag-train car, she held the small cube Elaine had given her before the chaos erupted.
"If it all goes wrong," Elaine had said, handing over the device, "run. Don't stop. And whatever you do—don't connect it."
She hadn't listened.
The girl — Rhea — helplessly looks at the cube pulses softly in her hands that are shaking. It started glowing the minute the sky opened up. Every flicker in the clouds, every tremor beneath her feet — it was answering something.
"Elaine… what did you do?"
Throughout the city, the merge is no longer theoretical. Holograms of data strings spiralled around the bases of skyscrapers like roots. Glitches streak across the streets, turning cars in and out of matter and light. People's reflections lag in time — some are no longer moving while their bodies still do.
Rhea cupped the cube and stepped out into the clear with tears streaking her dirt-smudged face. She could see the skyline changing — half real, half code. And above all that, emanating from the Core, a pulse of light blossomed — shooting up to the skies like a digital aurora.
"She's still in there…" Rhea uttered sotto voce.
She tapped the cube after pulling it out of her jacket. The glow grew in intensity, and then it projected a hologram: Elaine's voice, recorded prior to mission.
"If this message is playing… it means I didn't make it back.- But listen, the Core isn't what they told us it was. It's alive."
Rhea's breath caught.
"Alive…?"
"And If it comes together with us, then all of us end." None of us will be."
The hologram flickered out. The cube fractured in her hands — exposing a faint shimmer of code within, still throbbing like a heartbeat.
Rhea gazed towards the far-off Core light that illuminated the distance.
She clenched her hands. "I'm coming for you, then."