Glitch in the God Complex (AmpCore #1)

02 - Bad Day, Worse Luck

The wraith shuddered to a halt and rotated its body into the narrow defile. She'd gained some distance, but the thing wrestled its bulk in after her. Piper gulped in a lungful of air and kept running.

The narrow defile spat her out onto a broader street, this one full of people half-in, half-out of bars and clubs. A wall of cigarette smoke rolled over her and she jinked left, bolting into the thickest crowd of bodies she could find without breaking stride. Her shoulder crashed off of something solid and human; a wave of curses snapped at her heels but she kept running.

Cries of alarm rose behind her and she knew the codewraith had come blundering into the night. A scream cut through the bass music thumping out of windows on either sides, followed by a sputtering chorus of gunshots as residents took matters into their own hands.

Piper didn't stop. Maybe she'd get lucky and her fellow dock-dwellers would kill the wraith, but somehow she doubted it. Instead she went barging straight through the double doors of one seedy looking bar, ducking the swiping hand of the bouncer on the door. Her wild charge didn't stop for anything as she was engulfed in a sea of blazing neon and pounding techno music that shook her ribcage. A tray of luminous drinks went sailing across the bar as she clattered into a waiter, but she just spun with the impact, thinking of nothing but the crazed machine chasing her.

She blundered her way through to one of the grimy bathrooms, knife in hand. The thick smell of marijuana made her cough, and two bleary eyed patrons turned to her in confusion, but she barged them aside. One foot jammed down onto a pipe in the back wall, then she was up, levering herself to the small window that led out onto the back street.

With a wrench of the knife she snapped the flimsy, old-fashioned clasp holding the window shut and tumbled back outside. She hit the concrete below, rolled to her feet and sprinted off into the night.

*

Piper would have described her house as a dump to most people, but right now it was the most beautiful thing in the world.

With the codewraith apparently swallowed up by Hadrian's nightlife, she had raced through the dock slums until she reached the little clump of steel cubes that made up her neighbourhood. Every wall plate of every crappy dwelling bore a black stencilled logo of a hammer striking an anvil – the emblem of Cartwright Multi-Fab Construction Solutions – reminding every resident on a daily basis just who owned them. Just visible further away from the river was the multi-storey bulk of the local academy, an ugly cube of a thing lathered with corporate logos.

On another day it all would have filled her with anger, but right now she had bigger problems. She scrambled through the potholed street until she found her house. It didn't look any different to the other gun-metal blocks that lined the street, but muscle memory helped her find her way.

Piper swiped her wrist-link against the lock. Three seconds passed – long enough to almost make her scream – before the mechanism bleeped and she hurled herself inside.

Almost hyperventilating with fear, Piper slammed the door shut behind her and threw herself against it, eyes wide as she tried to get breath into her lungs. She dug one hand into her hair, a wordless noise of disbelief slipping from her gritted teeth.

Kirk? She didn't even know if he was alive. She hadn't seen any blood, but the thing had struck him hard enough to break bones.

"Piper? Piper is that you?"

A bleary voice cut through the fear. After checking the door was locked tight, she spun around. Tin-plated walls closed in around her to form a narrow hall, lit by an anaemic blue-white bulb in the ceiling.