The facility was coming apart around them.
Ceiling panels rained down in jagged shards. The walls groaned as support beams buckled, the air thick with the acrid stench of melting metal and burning circuits. Alarms wailed like dying animals, their shrill cries swallowed by the deeper, shuddering tremors of the building's self-destruct sequence.
Miyu didn't have time to think.
She lunged for the console beside Echo's suspended body, her fingers flying across the interface. The screen flickered, lines of corrupted data scrolling too fast to read.
"What are you doing?" Kai shouted over the chaos, bracing himself against a shuddering wall.
"Not leaving her here!" Miyu snarled.
She yanked the neural drive from her pocket—the same one that had burned out saving her from the X-9—and jammed it into the console's port. The system screamed in protest, but she overrode it with a brutal series of commands.
DOWNLOAD INITIATED.
5%
The floor lurched violently. Kai grabbed her arm to steady her. "Miyu, we have seconds—"
"Then buy me some!"
Kai swore, turning to face the doorway just as an X-9 staggered through. Its movements were erratic, its red sensor flickering between crimson and a strange, unstable blue. It raised its weapon—then twisted at the last second, firing into the hallway behind it.
"Hurry!" Kai barked.
45%
Miyu's hands shook. The drive wasn't meant for this. It was already damaged, already half-dead. If it failed now—
78%
A deafening crack split the air as the ceiling above them collapsed. Kai tackled her out of the way just as a slab of concrete crushed the console. The neural drive's tiny indicator light blinked green.
DOWNLOAD COMPLETE.
Miyu didn't wait. She ripped the drive free and ran, Kai at her heels.
The exit was a jagged maw of twisted metal, the hallway beyond choked with smoke and sparks. They barely squeezed through before the corridor behind them imploded, the force of the blast hurling them forward onto the rain-slick pavement outside.
Miyu gasped, rolling onto her back as the Nakano fortress folded in on itself, a dying beast consumed by its own ruin. No alarms. No drones. Just the hiss of settling debris and the distant wail of emergency response units too late to matter.
Kai coughed beside her, blood streaking his temple. "You're insane."
Miyu clutched the neural drive to her chest. It was warm. Almost alive. "Yeah, well. You're welcome."
They didn't speak again until they reached the sewers.
The tunnels beneath the Choke were a labyrinth of filth and forgotten things, but they were also the only place the Sentinel's eyes couldn't reach. Miyu led the way through the knee-deep sludge, the drive's faint glow the only light between them.
Kai broke the silence first. "So. What now?"
Miyu exhaled. "Now we disappear."
She didn't say the rest—that they were fugitives now. That the Sentinel would burn the city to find them. That the thing in her pocket might be their only hope.
Kai's laugh was hollow. "Never took you for the hiding type."
"There's a first time for everything."
Above them, the distant rumble of hover-transports echoed like thunder.
The hunt had already begun.
YOU ARE READING
A Bug in the Code
Mystery / ThrillerIn a totalitarian cyber-surveillance state, Miyu is a brilliant but laid-back hacker who makes a living off other people's data to survive. When she stumbles upon a hidden encryption tied to a vanished resistance group, she's thrust into a deadly ga...
