Neon bled into the pavement as Miyu ran, her breath ragged, her body moving on autopilot through the labyrinth of the Government District. The sleek black latex suit that had once made her invisible now felt like a second skin of guilt, clinging too tight, suffocating her with every step.
Kai was gone.
The words echoed in her skull, sharp and unrelenting. Gone. Gone. Gone.
She didn't know where she was running to. There was no safehouse left. No allies. No plan. Just the crushing weight of failure pressing down on her chest.
Rain began to fall—thin, icy needles that stung her face and mixed with the salt on her lips. She didn't know when she'd started crying.
"Damn it," she choked, skidding into an alley and slamming her fist against the wall. The impact rattled up her arm, but the pain was distant, unimportant. Nothing compared to the hollow ache spreading through her ribs.
She had trusted Echo.
She had let Kai die.
And now she was alone in the heart of enemy territory, with nothing but the silence in her head and the ghost of a plan that had failed.
Miyu slumped against the wall, sliding down until she hit the pavement. The rain soaked through her hair, dripped into her eyes, blurred the world around her.
For the first time in years, she had no next move. No hack. No trick. No escape.
Just her.
And the crushing, deafening quiet.
A sound.
Miyu's head snapped up, her hand instinctively going for the pistol at her hip—
—only to freeze when she saw the figure standing at the mouth of the alley.
Small. Thin. A kid.
The same one she'd seen weeks ago, hunched over that machine learning tutorial.
He stared at her, unblinking, rainwater dripping from his too-long bangs. Then, without a word, he held out a hand.
In his palm was a cracked datapad.
On the screen, a single line of text pulsed:
[YOU'RE NOT FINISHED YET.]
Miyu's breath caught.
The kid tilted his head, his eyes too old for his face. "You're her, aren't you?" he whispered. "The one they're all afraid of."
Miyu didn't answer.
The kid shoved the datapad into her hands and turned to leave.
"Wait—" she croaked.
He glanced back, just once. "They're waiting for you. At the old subway station. The one nobody uses anymore."
Then he was gone, swallowed by the rain and the neon haze.
Miyu looked down at the datapad.
The message changed.
[SHE'S WATCHING YOU. HURRY.]
Miyu's fingers trembled.
But she stood.
And for the first time since the fortress, she had a direction.
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...
