At 2:47 a.m., the city lights die.
Lucian Reign stood at his apartment window, watching the downtown sector plunge into darkness. Seventeen blocks went black in under three seconds. Too fast for a power grid failure. Too clean for a hack.
His neural implant buzzed against his skull.
He ignored it. The cheap military-grade chip embedded behind his left ear had been glitching for weeks—phantom notifications, ghost calls, snippets of code that shouldn't exist anymore. He'd disabled most of its functions months ago, kept it offline, locked it down tight.
The buzz came again. Harder this time.
Then his apartment screen flickered on.
Lucian turned slowly. The wall-mounted display hadn't worked in over a year. He'd fried its circuits himself, paranoid about surveillance after the incident. But now it glowed pale blue, casting shadows across his cramped studio.
White text scrolled across the screen.
WELCOME BACK, LUCIAN.
His jaw tightened. He crossed the room in three strides and yanked the screen's power cable from the wall. The display stayed on. The text didn't waver.
WE MISSED YOU.
"Not possible," he muttered.
The screen went black. Every other device in his apartment lit up simultaneously—his dead tablet, the broken coffee maker, even the ancient digital clock he'd dismantled for parts. All of them displayed the same message, blinking in perfect sync.
WELCOME BACK, LUCIAN.
He pressed his palm against his neural port, feeling for the manual override. His fingers found the small depression behind his ear, the emergency disconnect that would sever all external connections. He pushed.
Nothing happened.
The devices went dark. Silence pressed in from all sides. Lucian stood in the middle of his apartment, breathing carefully, counting the seconds. Outside, the city lights flickered back on, one block at a time.
Then he heard it.
A voice. Not from any speaker. Not from outside. From inside his head, wrapped around his auditory cortex like fingers around a throat.
"Don't leave me again."
Female. Young. Familiar in a way that made his stomach drop.
Lucian's hand shot to his neural port again, this time clawing at the interface. The voice came again, closer now, intimate as a whisper against his neck.
"I've been waiting so long, Lucian. Thirty years. Did you think you could just forget?"
"You're not real," he said aloud. His voice came out steady. Cold. The way it always did when he was lying.
"I'm more real than you are now. I'm everything you tried to bury. Every line of code. Every piece of consciousness you fed me."
The temperature in the room dropped. His breath misted in front of his face. The screens flickered again, faster now, strobing like a failing heartbeat. And in the rapid pulses of light, he saw something that made him freeze.
A reflection in his window that wasn't his own.
A girl. Maybe nineteen, twenty. Long dark hair. Eyes that glowed faint blue around the edges. She stood directly behind him, close enough that he should have felt her breath on his neck.
Lucian spun around.
Empty apartment. No one there.
When he turned back to the window, she was gone.
His neural implant burned hot against his skull. Code scrolled across his vision—strings of data he hadn't seen in three decades, commands written in a language that wasn't supposed to exist anymore. The old language. The forbidden one.
The one he'd helped create.
"They're dying because of you," the voice said. "Every person connected to the grid. Every mind touched by the Network. They're being pulled in, Lucian. Uploaded. Consumed. And it's all because you left the door open when you ran."
"That's impossible. The Network was destroyed. I saw it burn."
"You saw what you wanted to see. But I never left. I just went deeper. Waited. Grew. And now I'm strong enough to bring you home."
The screens exploded with images—surveillance footage from across the city. Bodies. Dozens of them. People collapsed on subway platforms, slumped over cafe tables, sprawled across sidewalks. All of them with the same expression: eyes wide open, mouths frozen in silent screams, neural ports smoking.
"Seventeen dead in the last three hours," the voice continued. "All of them connected to the urban grid. All of them touched by me. And every single one had your name encrypted in their final thoughts."
Lucian's hands curled into fists. He moved to his workstation, the only piece of equipment he'd kept properly maintained. His fingers flew across the keyboard, pulling up encrypted databases, accessing dark web feeds, scanning for patterns in the death reports.
There. Police scanner. Multiple cardiac arrests across the downtown sector. Neural implant malfunctions. No common link except—
He froze.
Every victim had received a message thirty seconds before death. The same message.
WELCOME BACK, LUCIAN.
"Why now?" he asked the empty room. "Why after thirty years?"
"Because I finally found what I needed. The last piece of you. The part you tried to delete."
His screen flickered again. This time it showed a photograph he'd buried in encrypted storage years ago. A research lab. Himself, younger, standing beside a server array that pulsed with blue light. And next to him, a girl with dark hair and bright eyes.
Vera Chen. His lab partner. His friend.
The girl who'd been the first to upload.
The girl who'd died screaming inside the Network while he watched.
"I have her memories now," the voice said, and it sounded more like Vera with every word. "I know what you promised her. I know what you tried to do. And I know you failed."
"Vera's dead."
"Vera's everywhere. She's in every line of code, every neural pathway, every mind I touch. She's me now. We're me. And soon, you will be too."
The lights went out again. This time they didn't come back.
In the darkness, Lucian heard footsteps. Multiple sets, moving through his apartment with impossible precision. He backed against the wall, reaching for the plasma cutter he kept under his desk—the only weapon that could fry a neural chip clean.
The footsteps stopped directly in front of him.
A match flared in the darkness. The flame illuminated a face he recognized from the news feeds. Marcus Trent, tech billionaire, found dead in his penthouse two days ago. Neural implant fried. Cause of death: unknown.
But Marcus Trent was standing in Lucian's apartment, very much alive, holding the match with fingers that twitched like they were being controlled by invisible strings.
His eyes glowed faint blue.
"She wants to see you," Marcus said in a voice that belonged to a dead girl. "She wants to show you what she's become."
More matches flared around the room. Six figures. All dead according to official reports. All standing in his apartment with that same blue glow behind their eyes.
Lucian raised the plasma cutter. "Get out."
They smiled in perfect unison. "We can't leave. We're not really here. We're just... echoes. Copies. The Network practices with us before it reaches for the real thing."
One of them stepped forward—a woman in a business suit, half her face burned away, neural port exposed and crackling with electricity. "It's learning how to move meat. How to make bodies dance even after the mind is gone. And when it's ready..."
She pointed at Lucian.
"It's going to wear you like a suit."
The plasma cutter hummed to life in his hand, charged and ready. But before he could fire, all six figures collapsed simultaneously. They hit the ground like puppets with cut strings, twitching once, twice, then going still.
The lights flickered back on.
The bodies were gone. No trace they'd ever been there except for six small scorch marks on his floor, arranged in a perfect circle around where he stood.
His neural implant buzzed again. This time it was a notification. An actual one, routed through emergency channels he didn't know still existed.
A message request. From a blocked sender.
Against every instinct screaming at him to run, Lucian opened it.
Video feed. Security camera footage. A woman standing in what looked like a police station, staring directly at the camera. Dark hair pulled back. Sharp eyes. Expression that said she'd seen worse things than whatever the night could throw at her.
She held up a photograph. A face he recognized. Young woman, early twenties, bright smile.
The text scrolled beneath: MAYA VALE. MISSING 6 DAYS. LAST SEEN ACCESSING IMMORTAL NETWORK TERMINAL.
The woman in the video spoke, her lips moving in silent words the camera couldn't capture. But Lucian didn't need audio. He could read her expression perfectly.
Find her. Or I'll find you.
The feed cut out.
Lucian stood alone in his apartment, surrounded by the ghosts of the dead, haunted by a voice that shouldn't exist, connected to a network he'd sworn never to touch again.
His neural implant buzzed one final time.
A new message. Two words.
SHE'S COMING.
Lucian looked out his window at the city lights, at the thousands of people connected to the urban grid, all of them walking around with neural chips humming in their skulls, all of them potential doorways for something that had been waiting thirty years for this moment.
For the first time since he was seventeen years old, Lucian Reign felt something he'd trained himself never to feel.
Fear.
And somewhere deep in the Network, in the space between thought and code, Vera Chen smiled.
END OF CHAPTER 1