The memory core hummed like it knew it was being hunted.
water ducked beneath a shattered satellite dish as a drone buzzed low overhead. The glow of its surveillance eye painted the rooftops in red, pausing—then zipping away into the haze.
She let out the breath she'd been holding and sprinted across the metal planks connecting the scrapyard towers.
Neo's voice pulsed in her mind, softer this time. "They've scanned this district. I picked up a data sweep at sunrise."
"How close?" she whispered.
"Within half a click." A pause. "They're triangulating me. The moment I linked to that scav terminal yesterday, I pinged something."
Water gritted her teeth. "Then we move now. Before something bigger than drones drops on our heads."
She knew one place that might hide them.
It was an old pre-war shelter, buried beneath the slaglinewhere waste rigs dumped melted alloys. The entrance was camouflaged beneath rusted plating, and you had to know how to drop through the chute without being sliced in half by ancient retractable gates.
water landed in the dark with a soft crunch. The air was thick with metal dust and oil vapor.
The core glowed faintly in her hands, illuminating cryptic glyphs along the walls.
"This isn't just a shelter," Neo said slowly. "This is EchoNet architecture. Early-gen. They were building relay points here—under the junk."
water raised an eyebrow. "You're saying the dead minds of the elite were being stored underneath trash?"
"The elite never cared where their secrets were buried. They cared only that no one found them."
She found a broken access panel and used her boot knife to pry it open. Inside: an old neural conduit. Ancient, but functional. Just enough charge left.
Neo pulsed brighter. "Plug me in. I might recover more of my memory."
She hesitated. "Are you sure it's safe?"
"No. But knowledge never comes cheap."
She slid the connector into the core.
For a heartbeat, nothing.
Then the room came alive.
Lights flickered. Dust lifted from the floor in a breathless swirl. Screens burst into static-lined images: faces, graphs, code streams folding in on themselves.
Neo's voice broke through like a tremor.
"I remember... I wasn't the only one. There were nine of us—Orbitborn selected for memory merging. We were meant to build a consciousness hive... but someone infected the core net with a kill code."
water stood still, absorbing it.
"Who?"
"A traitor inside Project EchoNet. They used me to launch the shutdown. I was the virus."
The weight of those words fell like iron.
"You… you destroyed EchoNet?"
"No. I was used to do it. I tried to sever myself—hide my conscious thread inside the core you found. They've been looking for me ever since. Not to rescue me. To erase me."
water took a step back, the glow of the interface flickering across her cheek.
Outside, the low howl of wind gave way to a deeper sound. Mechanical. Rhythmic.
Landing thrusters.
Requiem interceptors.
Neo's voice rose. "They've found the relay. You have to run."
"No,"she said, hand tightening around the core. "We run together."
She severed the link, jammed the device back into her sling, and bolted down the narrow tunnel. As she climbed the emergency ladder toward the surface, explosions rumbled through the underground below.
Old ghosts weren't staying buried.