A Bug in the Code

Chapter 16 - INTERLUDE

The safehouse was little more than a storage closet above a noodle stand, the walls thin enough to hear the sizzle of oil and the cook's raspy coughs through the floorboards. Miyu sat cross-legged on the stained mattress, the neural drive pulsing gently between her palms as Echo feasted on stolen data. There was nothing to do now but wait.

Kai leaned against the window frame, peeling the foil lid off a cup of instant ramen. The neon from the street below painted his face in alternating streaks of pink and cyan. "We should take shifts sleeping," he said, though neither of them would.

Miyu hummed, noncommittal. Her eyes traced the cracks in the ceiling—fractures in the plaster that looked like lightning, like code, like the veins beneath skin.

Three Years Earlier

Miyu's first hack had been at fourteen, a childish prank on a public transit payment kiosk. She'd rerouted the display to show looping animations of cats instead of departure times. It had lasted seven glorious minutes before the system reset itself.

Her father, a mid-level infrastructure engineer for the city grid, had been the one to find the crude code remnants during his nightly diagnostics. He'd said nothing at dinner. But later, he'd left a datapad on her bed—an obsolete model, easy to modify—with a single note:

"If you're going to break things, at least learn how they're built."

The next morning, the transit kiosk displayed cats again. This time, it lasted three hours.

Kai scraped the last noodles from his cup. "You ever think about leaving?"

The question hung between them, absurd. Leaving wasn't an option. Not really. The Sentinel's borders were airtight, its checkpoints manned by drones that could smell fear like blood in water.

Miyu rolled the drive between her fingers. "Where would we go?"

Outside, the city breathed its toxic lullaby—the hiss of pneumatic doors, the distant wail of a re-education van, the ever-present hum of drones. The noodle stand's sign flickered, casting their shadows jagged against the wall.

Two Years Earlier

Kai had been recruited straight out of the academy, his test scores too high to ignore. The Sentinel preferred its enforcers young, their loyalties uncomplicated by memory.

His first assignment was a routine compliance check—an elderly couple accused of hoarding pre-Sentinel literature. He'd stood by as his partner ransacked the apartment, watching the way the old man's hands shook around his wife's shoulders.

The contraband was a single book: a collection of folktales, its pages brittle with age.

Kai had logged it as "miscellaneous paper waste."

His partner hadn't argued. But the surveillance footage would have caught the discrepancy. The Sentinel always knew.

A sudden burst of static from the neural drive made them both startle. The patterns on its surface swirled faster, coalescing into something almost linguistic before dissolving again.

"How much longer?" Kai asked.

Miyu pressed her thumb against the drive's warm surface. "However long it takes."

Somewhere below, the noodle stand's radio crackled to life, playing a Sentinel-approved news segment—another productivity milestone, another arrest for subversion. The cook switched it off with a grunt.

In the sudden quiet, the city felt smaller. Closer. As if the walls were listening.

Present

Miyu stretched her legs, her knees popping. "We need supplies. A new rig. More burners."

Kai nodded toward the window. "Black market's two blocks east. Opens at dawn."

They lapsed back into silence. The drive pulsed. The city hummed. Somewhere beyond the smog, the first gray hints of morning pressed against the skyline.

Waiting, Miyu decided, was the worst part of rebellion.

But not for much longer.