The rain hadn't let up. Neo-Vanta City bled color into its gutters—neon pinks, cold teals, arterial reds—carried by runoff from the endless glow of signs no one really read anymore.
Gabriella crouched beneath the broken overpass in Sector Twelve, fingers numb, hair soaked. Her neural link was still glitching from the pulse-dampener blast. The silence in her head was deafening—no system alerts, no data overlays, no ARC surveillance pings.
Just her thoughts.
And the Drive.
She pulled it from her coat: a sleek, obsidian device no bigger than a credit chip, but warm to the touch, like it was alive. The core inside wasn't just quantum code—it was memory, emotion, something deeper. It was them. Hers and Austin's work, twisted now into a tool both sides wanted to control.
A low chime vibrated in her skull. The link was reestablishing. Carefully, she let it reconnect—only locally. No uplink, no external pings. She tunneled into the Drive's last auto-cache and decrypted the corrupted file she'd glimpsed before:
> SIGMA-FRAGMENT // 97% REDACTED
SUBJECT: VALE, AUSTIN
STATUS: COMPROMISED
INITIATED: LEVEL 5 NEURAL MAP REDIRECTION
ORDERED BY: UNKNOWN [Clearance Override Detected]
LOCATION TRACE: NULL
Her breath hitched.
He'd been overwritten. Or was being overwritten. A neural redirection wasn't just conditioning—it was erasure. They were turning Austin into something else. Someone else.
That explained the silence. That explained the transmission.
A sound broke her trance—a faint metallic click behind her.
She turned too late.
The muzzle of a low-suppression plasma pistol kissed the back of her neck.
"Step away from the Drive, Gabby."
Her blood froze.
She knew that voice.
Austin.
But when she turned to face him, the eyes weren't his.
His voice had weight, but no warmth.
"I don't want to hurt you," he said.
She stared, heart fracturing. "They got to you."
He didn't answer. Just raised the gun higher.
Then something flickered—barely a twitch in his jaw, a shimmer behind his pupils. A glitch.
She took a step forward, slow and deliberate. "You're still in there. I know you are. Remember the rooftop garden? The pact we made?"
His grip wavered.
Then the gun fired.
Everything went white.
---
AUSTIN'S POV — FRACTURED MIND
They don't see it. None of them do.
Gabby thinks she's saving me—but she doesn't understand what I've become.
What I had to become.
The Echo Drive pulses at the base of my skull, like a second heartbeat. It whispers clarity through the static. It shows me the city for what it really is: a rotting machine, held together by fear and illusion. Neo-Vanta needs to burn so something better can rise. And I'm the spark.
But she's still in the way. Always trying to reach the old me. She's blind to what's coming. Or maybe she's just too good to believe I'm gone.
I want to tell her she's right. That the real Austin is still somewhere, clawing beneath the surface of this corrupted code in my brain. But that version of me—he's weaker. Hesitant. And he would never do what needs to be done.
And still… her voice cuts through. Even now, when everything inside me is a hurricane of logic and fire, her voice makes me hesitate.
I hate that.
I hate that I still care.
Because caring is a liability, and she... she's my last weakness.
But this city doesn't need Austin Vale anymore.
It needs me.
And if Gabby won't stand aside—
She'll fall with the rest of them.
---
Scene: The Echo Nexus – Level 7, Core Convergence Chamber
Neo-Vanta City | 2097 | 03:46 AM
The hum of the Echo Drive pulsed through the chamber like a heartbeat—steady, calculated, artificial. Blue light cascaded over Gabriella Rho's face as she stood at the command console, her gloved fingers hesitating over the neural interface.
She was alone. Or so she thought.
"You're not supposed to be here," a voice echoed from behind.
She turned slowly. Austin Vale stepped out of the shadows, face half-lit by the glow of the central conduit. His expression was unreadable—calm, but strained.
"You activated the convergence protocol," he said. "Without approval."
Gabby's jaw tightened. "Because the Board was never going to approve it. You know that. They're afraid of what the Drive can really do."
"I trusted you," Austin whispered.
"And I trusted you'd stand by me when it mattered." Her voice cracked. "This is the only way to unbind the signal. To stop the bleed."
Austin approached slowly. "Or rewrite everything. You want to play god."
"No, I want to fix what we broke."
A hiss of steam escaped from the core's cooling vents. The Echo Drive surged. Warnings blinked crimson on the display. Gabriella turned back to the console, typing rapidly.
Behind her, Austin moved.
"Don't make me stop you," he said.
"You won't."
But he did.
She never saw the neural tether dart forward. It latched onto the back of her spine like a striking serpent. Her scream cut through the chamber as a cascade of white-hot memories flooded into the Echo stream. Not just hers—theirs.
The Drive wailed. Systems overloaded.
Gabby's knees buckled. She reached out—but there was no one there to catch her.
And in that moment, she understood.
The signal wasn't fractured.