Void trudged along the riverbank, boots dragging through damp gravel. She glanced at the water, moonlight pulling silver smiles out of the dark surface. "A month," she muttered. "Over thirty days I sweep this place, wearing her coat like it's some consolation prize for surviving." She tightened the oversized sleeves, fingers fumbling with edges that hang past her hands. "It doesn't fit. It never will. And neither do I."...

2:19 AM.

Void stared at the ceiling like it had personally betrayed her. Again.

Sleep, the elusive little bastard, had slipped through her fingers hours ago, probably off to cuddle some emotionally stable straight girl who didn't flinch when someone said the word "future."

She shifted under the sheets, blanket twisted around her leg like a snake trying to strangle the last shred of her dignity. "God, even my bedding's clingier than anyone I've dated," she muttered, then laughed. Dry. Bitter. Like oversteeped tea.

It was always like this. These nights where everything in her life felt like a punchline to a joke she didn't remember telling. Void: pretty face, sharp mind, a touch of 'don't touch me,' and allegedly - if enough exes could be trusted - "a captivating personality." Captivating like a cursed mirror, probably.

"I'm like a collectible card that looks cool but no one actually wants in their deck," she muttered to the ceiling. "Rare, beautiful, wildly impractical, and prone to catching fire."...

Void dropped through the vent like a whisper. Air was filled with rust, dust and fear. She landed on her forearms, rolled forward, and dropped the cover behind her - silent enough that if anyone wasn't practically nose-to-nose, they still wouldn't notice.

Her boots clicked softly along the metal grating as she made her way beneath the flooded node room. Drips echoed in the gloom. Red emergency lights pulsed overhead - low, ominous beats like a dark heart.

She calibrated her HUD: infrared maps, audio dampening on. Every sensor in her kit spiked - biosig ahead. Dee. She could practically taste her fading pulse...

Void had been up since late o'clock.

The lab - as usual - smelled like solder flux and... Burnt toast. She never remembered making toast. One of the servos must've triggered the microgrill again - probably that janky task queue she still hadn't fixed.

Her hoodie sleeves were pushed up, exposing ink-stained forearms and fingers twitching with muscle memory as she wired up a freshly milled PCB. A prototype signal conditioner, meant to stabilize Dee's ever-fucking-temperamental audio stream for that neural feedback rig they'd talked about. Even if the girl barely understood how it all worked, she cared to listen, and Void kind of liked that.

Liked it more than she wanted to admit...

There was a comfort in repetition. The soft whirr of the extractor fan overhead, the faint burnt-plastic scent of solder, the tap-tap of a booted heel nudging a drawer closed. Void's workbench wasn't clean - hell no - but it was controlled chaos, and right now that's all she could stomach.

Her bench was lit by the glow of an LED matrix, barely hanging on to its current animation cycle. Two columns had glitched out, frozen mid-scroll like they'd just given up on life. "Relatable," she thought. She rolled her wrist, cracked her knuckles, and hunched back over the board with her tweezers and cursed breath.

The code was a mess. Not because Void was some kind of a script-kiddie - she knew exactly what she was doing. It just refused to cooperate, and printf("fuck\n"); sprinkled every two lines was obviously the best way to debug. The matrix was supposed to pulse out little pixel hearts in magenta and white, a dumb aesthetic flourish for a synthpunk audio reactive badge she was prototyping. The one Aura always wanted to make. Instead, it spat out gibberish, mocking, taunting her "sucks to suck, bitch."...