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.
The passage pinched down to a steel service door with a cheap keypad. Void popped the cover, jumped a couple of contacts, and ran a "borrowed" bypass daemon; the lock gave up after a few seconds and slid open with a slow hiss. Beyond was a stub of corridor half‑ankle‑deep in standing water, lit only by a sickly blue maintenance strip. Condensation veiled the concrete, thin frost spreading where the HVAC had failed, and the temperature dropped with every step she took inside.
At the far end, a low door led into a larger chamber. Void peeked. The room was a morgue turned mad-lab. Inside, Dee sat slumped in an industrial bathtub filled with ice. Her slender limbs were pale. Thin liquefied wires ran from her own neural port along the bath lip to a glowing sub-grid panel - she'd connected herself directly. Her head lolled forward, hair soaked, black water dripping, and faint spastic holographic glyphs flickered in front of her unseeing eyes.
Void's heart clenched so hard she thought it might stop. She crouched at the doorway and whispered, "Goddamn it, Dee. Hang tight."
She crossed on tiptoe. The ice bath hissed around Dee's body, steam lifting, carrying the smell of burnt rubber. Temperature was locked below zero - probably to slow down whatever digital pathogen was looping in Dee's system.
Void dropped to her knees next to Dee, eyes scanning the setup. One cable ran into the old sub-grid, the other jacked straight into the port beneath Dee's neck tattoo. The connection was active - too active. Feedback loops were building, dragging Dee's mind further towards her demise. Her eyes twitched under closed lids, caught in some trauma-induced dreamstate. If Void didn't break the cycle soon, the system would cook her brain clean.
"Ah fuck. This is gonna sting, pretty girl," Void hissed, eyes scanning the chaos for anything sharp. Her gaze locked onto an empty Broseph bottle - she snatched it, smashed it against the floor with a brutal crack, and sifted through the jagged mess until her fingers closed around a sliver just fine enough to cut. Flame flared as she flicked her lighter, heating the glass until it glowed faintly, the scent of burning alcohol and plastic already curling in the air. No time for hesitation.
"Alright, girlie, let's do this."
Void took a shaky breath, then made a small cut near Dee's carotid, praying she wasn't fucking it up. Somewhere under the surface - yeah, there it was - the auxiliary synaptic connector. She clipped her personal link into it, hands trembling as her ICE spun up, buying precious seconds before Dee's system could freak out and crash her brain. Void's heart pounded. This wasn't just wires and pretty lights anymore. It wasn't theory. It was her. Cold, vulnerable, barely hanging on. And Void? She was flying blind - but she'd be damned if she didn't try something.
Void hit the trigger on a low-grade EMP, just enough to knock out the noise flooding Dee's core. The stream of corrupted data flickered and died, like someone finally putting a sock in a screaming banshee's mouth. Dee's chest jerked with a sharp inhale, the tension bleeding off as the overload subsided. Void let out a breath she didn't realize she was holding, yanked her gloves off, and pressed two fingers to Dee's neck. Weak pulse. But steady. Still alive.
Next: liberation hacking. No manuals, no safety nets - just Void, cyberware going haywire, and a girl hanging by a thread. She launched the decoupling sequencer, fingers flying over her deck. If her inputs weren't timed just right, the cascade could flatline Dee in under a second. But doing nothing? That was a guaranteed coffin. Void didn't have valid timeouts, didn't even know if this kind of protocol had any. She'd have to feel it - ride the chaos by instinct and hope her gut was sharper than the entities trying to fry them both.
"Here goes..."
TX [IX XR EA E9]
TX [49 20 74 68 69 6E 6B]
SYS_SLEEP 500
TX [XR XR 5A FF]
TX [49 27 6D 20 64 65 76 65 6C 6F 70 69 6E 67]
SYS_SLEEP 235
TX [XR IX 5A E0 FF CA]
TX [46 65 65 6C 69 6E 67 73]
SYS_SLEEP 730
TX [E0 FF 55 EF EF]
TX [46 6F 72 20 79 6F 75]
SYS_SLEEP 120
TX [E9 E9 CA E0 55 55]
TX [69 27 6D 20 73 75 63 68 20 61 20 66 6F 6F 6C]
TERM
Dee's body spasmed a few times, terrifying Void in the process.
The sequence worked. It reached the sub-grid, splitting the tether. Diagnostics on her HUD started blinking:
DANGER: DISCONNECT TARGET NOW.
Void pulled both plugs at the same time.
Dee blinked.
Void fought back tears. She wiped the steam-slicked hair off Dee's face and whispered, "You're okay. I got you."
Dee's eyes fluttered open, confusion and relief mixing. "Void?" She slurred, a fragile murmur slipped past her lips, "The symbols... I felt them... tapping at my brain sponge."
"Shh. Not now," Void said low, wrapping an arm around Dee's shoulders as she hauled her out of the ice bath. Her fingers brushed the circuits around Dee's port - still hot. Damn. She needed to patch the software backdoors rogue subroutines carved out while being eviscerated.
Void gently laid Dee down on a cot, every movement deliberate, careful. She pressed nano-cloth patches over the incision she'd carved earlier - each one sealing tight with a faint hiss, guarding against infection like a whispered apology. Then she slid the cable into Dee's now-stable neural port, her fingers lingering just a moment longer than needed. The connection hummed to life. She updated the security protocols, uploaded custom BIOMON_PROT and SEC_LOCK daemons, hastily written but wrapped in precision. Makeshift firewalls, born not just of code, but of quiet desperation. A promise: "no one's breaking in again. Not on my watch."
Dee gasped slightly as sensations flickered back. "Fuck... felt like something ripped me open." Her fingers slid across the fresh seal on her neck, shaky, then found Void's arm and latched on. "You did this. You-" Her voice cracked, caught between confusion and something close to fear.
Void squeezed her hand. "Yeah. I did. Guess that's not how you imagined our first date."
Dee turned toward her. Trembling. "You risked getting flatlined. For me. Because... why? We barely know each other."
Void stared. Blue neon pulse lighting her face. "Because, for reasons unknown to me, I trust you. And I couldn't let some old Net entity break you. Even if you're dumb as a brick."
She leaned in, close enough that Dee could smell burnt tinned wire and coffee-stubble sweat of Void's coat. "What you did, by the way? Took some balls. And you've got skills. Just need to grow some brain cells now."
Dee stared at Void in silence, unsure whether she was still grateful for the rescue, or now pissed for being insulted.
Void stood and wiped her palms. She looked at the door. "We need to get you out of here." She rifled her coat, pulled out an airhypo "This will stabilize you. Just a tick."
She injected Dee's chest. Dee shivered, her eyes glowed softly. "Better?"
"Better."
Void glanced at her cyberdeck. "But I need to destroy these feeds. Permanently."
She ran NETHOLE_ERASE and DATA_PULSE_DRY_ADAPT daemons. The lights breathed as spikes pulsed through debris cables and the device coughed out a final log:
SYNC: COMPLETE. SUBNET NODE STATUS: COLLAPSED
Dee watched her. "You're good at this. At... tech."
Void popped a grin, dark in the bay's gloom. "A gift Aura left me..." She paused. "Because while it's about circuits. It's also about caring. And that's everything Aura was. Care."
Dee leaned into her, shoulder drifting along Void's arm. "Whoever she was she did a good job. Consider me... cared for. Fuck... You saved me."
Void shrugged, gaze fierce. "Didn't feel like rescuing. Felt like seeing an opportunity to help someone I kinda, sorta maybe-"
Dee laced her fingers with Void's. "Told you, we've not had time for maybes." Her voice shook. "You already did."
Void blinked, mouth dry. She cleared it. "Yeah." She pulled Dee into a firm hug - their shadows fizzing on the frost-covered wall. Their breaths hung in the mist.
Sirens howled overhead, sharp and shrill - a harbinger for the pack of chrome hounds closing in. The old building's alarm system screamed red, echoing off the walls in jittery bursts. Void's head snapped up, pupils narrowing. "Let's book it. Not much time before NetWatch comes swarming the place."
She slipped Dee's arm over her shoulders, guiding her stumbling frame toward the nano-extractor door, boots sloshing through half-frozen runoff and the stench of burned wiring thick in the air.
Dee paused before stepping over the wires extending from her shirt. "Just... Promise we can rebuild it. When this shit's done? Not this..." She tapped the frozen bath. "Thing."
Void nodded, voice hoarse. "Promise. Time to go home."
Dee nodded, voice small. "Please."
"Not that either of us really knows what the fuck 'home' even is," Void muttered - more to herself than to Dee, the words slipping out like an old bruise surfacing.
Void jolted upright, lungs dragging in the sharp air of her lab. The hum of cooling fans whirred softly overhead. Her half-soldered LED matrix blinked dumbly on the desk beside her, cycling error codes. An alarm chimed from the corner - low, insistent, merciless. No ice bath, no Dee, no danger. Just her blanket, a half-drunk can of fizz, and a mix of relief and disappointment flowing through her mind.
"What in the flying fuck was that."
She picked up her phone, 1 notification:
Dee :: 9:06AM
Good morning, hope you slept well!
Void let out a sigh of relief.
Void :: 10:13AM
mornin', queen. you have no idea what kinda fuckery i just woke up from.