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.
"Alright, baby," she muttered to the board, voice low and gravel-worn from too many nights without sleep. "Let's see if your heartbeat's steady."
The scope blinked to life, waveform jittering, then smoothing into a near-perfect pulse. Void smirked and leaned back, cracking her neck.
Her phone flared up.
Incoming call.
She rolled her eyes until she saw the name.
DEE
Void's heart did a weird little flutter.
She tapped to accept. The smartphone's screen shimmered a bit before resolving into Dee's glitchy cam feed. Hair in a messy bun, loose off-shoulder shirt with what looked like paint or blood on the collar - Void couldn't tell. The girl's eyes were bright, a little too bright, pupils dilated in a way that made Void's stomach knot.
"Hey, hotshot," Dee said, her voice half-drowned in digital fuzz. "Hope I'm not interrupting a date with your oscilloscope."
"Busted." Void leaned back in her chair, one leg over the other. "But you're always welcome to third-wheel my circuits. You alright? You look like you slept inside an ice tub."
Dee gave a crooked smile, but it didn't reach her eyes. "Kiiinda did."
Void's smirk faded. "You dove again."
"Yeah. Last night. Old Net sector, one of the Charter Hill access points. Someone posted a breadcrumb trail - supposedly some archived sensory data from pre-Blackwall art installations. I thought maybe I could pull some raw dream feeds for my next 3D sketch dump."
Void blinked. "That's... aggressively stupid."
"I know. It was fun." Dee's voice trembled with a half-laugh, half-glitch.
Then, her face flickered - just for a second - like the feed desynced from reality. A twitch in the jawline, eyes going red, black and back, like the Blackwall reached through her.
Void sat up, heart suddenly pounding. "Dee. Tell me exactly what you siphoned out of there. Do you want to know what NetWatch does to people pulling stunts like this? You're lucky their security systems didn't fry you upon the breach."
"I didn't even download much - just pinged an old relay and got a burst of data back. Looked like some gibber-"
Another flicker. This time, Dee's image bled scarlet around the edges. The background of her cam, some cozy disaster of art supplies and empty ramen packets, warped into incomprehensible static for a blink.
"Void," Dee said softly, "my HUD won't stop rendering these weird... symbols. I thought it was visual garbage but-"
"Wait, are they repeating?"
Dee nodded. "Yeah. Same glyphs. Over and over. They're not in any encoding I've ever seen."
Void's skin prickled.
"I'm linking into your biomon, accept the request."
Void fired up her log analyzer and they both waited for a bit. The silence on the line wasn't like their usual chilling-with-games-time silence. This time it felt heavy.
The algorithm has finished doing its magic.
"You err... Got a rogue daemon in your system, girl. That's old-as-fuck code, possibly recursive viral architecture. You could be hallucinating right now or - worse - your neural processor is currently unpacking some old construct that shouldn't exist anymore."
Dee grinned weakly. "You say that like it's sexy."
Void's breath hitched. "It would be, if you weren't halfway to a psychotic cascade. You need a tune-up, pronto, and I don't mean cosmetics."
"Was hoping you'd say that. Could use someone smart poking around in my... firmware."
Void opened her mouth to respond - probably something equally awful-flirty - but Dee's face froze. Not paused - locked. Jaw wide, a single eye twitching in a feedback loop, her voice distorting like a corrupted stream:
"H-e-l-H-e-l-l-e-e-l-p"
Then came the audio spike.
Like the shriek of a dying modem.
Void slapped her ears, too late. Her implants flared with a feedback echo she hadn't heard since Militech's ICE damn near bricked Aura's cortex during a raid two years ago.
Then came the text message.
"HELP. CHARTER HILL. SUBNET NODE 1-0-6-DELTA. DOWNLINK TUNNEL 12."
Then black.
Not just call-drop black. Total signal collapse.
Void stared at the empty feed, hands clenched on the arms of her chair so hard her knuckles popped.
She knew that node. It was supposedly off the new Net, located on the district's outskirts. An old corpo maintenance substation - back when people still pretended Net security was about physical layers. The kind of place you'd stash legacy AI fragments or forgotten blacksite experiments. Not exactly where you'd go to look for artistic inspiration unless you had a death wish... or were Dee.
Void stood up fast. Grabbed her coat. Checked her gear - modified signal scanner, her cyberdeck, wrist-mounted diagnostic system, and a few... toys.
She didn't have time to think about why this girl, this random fucking girl she got to know just a week ago was suddenly her problem.
"What am I doing with my life... Chick dives head-first behind the Blackwall and expects to get out of it unscathed. Fucking lunatic. Hope there's anything left of your synapses by the time I get there..."
Maybe it was Void finally growing up, or the ghost of Aura forcing her to give a shit - regardless - she wasn't about to let that happen. Not to Dee. Not again.
She pulled her hood up, lit the last stick of incense in the lab - habit more than magic - and whispered, "Watch me, Chloe."
Then she was gone.
Out the door, into the night.