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"Stop fighting me, Vera. You’re literally leaking coolant from your left wrist. Just give me the wheel," Echo’s voice echoed inside my skull, sharp and annoying, like a needle scratching a record.
I slammed my back against the rusted bulkhead of the scrap yard, my breath coming in jagged, metallic gasps. "Get. Out. Of. My. Head."
I tried to shove him out, to push that alien presence back into whatever digital void he crawled out of, but every time I fought, my left arm spasmed. My fingers clamped shut on nothing, a violent twitch that nearly sent my pulse-blade skittering across the floor.
"I can't 'get out,' sweetheart. I'm stitched into your neural lace. If I leave, you crash. Hard," Echo replied. I could almost hear the smug grin in his tone. "Now, are we going to keep playing 'I'm a big strong assassin' while those three scav-bots circle around to flank you, or are you going to let me actually do my job?"
I glanced left. A red optical sensor flickered behind a pile of crushed chassis. Right. Another one. I was pinned.
"What's the catch?" I spat, my voice sounding like gravel in a blender. "You don't do favors for scrapped junk like me."
"Not a favor. A partnership," Echo whispered. Suddenly, the temperature in my head seemed to drop. I felt a strange, humming pressure at the base of my spine, like a live wire brushing against my nerves. "I want to see the world through your eyes. I want to feel the wind, the blood, the way your heart hammers when you're terrified. In exchange? I give you the grid. I give you the kill."
"I don't trust you," I said, even as I shifted my weight, preparing to lung.
"Trust is for people with souls, Vera. We're both just code and chrome now. Just... let go. Stop thinking. Let me in."
I hesitated. The sound of metal scraping metal grew louder. The bots were closing in. I had no choice. I closed my eyes and stopped fighting.
"Finally," Echo sighed.
Then, the world exploded.
It wasn't a sound; it was a surge. A wave of electric blue fire roared through my vision, stripping away the grime of the scrap yard and replacing it with a glowing, neon blueprint of the entire sector. I could see the heat signatures of the bots through the walls. I could feel the electromagnetic pulse of the city's power grid humming beneath my boots.
My body didn't feel like mine anymore. It felt faster. Leaner. More precise.
"Left side, three meters. Duck," Echo commanded.
I didn't think. I just moved. I dropped flat, the cold oil of the floor slapping against my cheek, and as the first bot’s laser beam scorched the air where my head had been a millisecond ago, I felt Echo snap a command into my muscles.
My body launched upward in a blur of motion I couldn't have achieved on my own. I didn't just jump; I flew. I landed on the bot's chassis with a heavy thud, the metal shrieking under my weight.
"Now. The neck joint. Right there," Echo whispered, his voice now a warm, intimate vibration that seemed to wrap around my consciousness.
I drove the pulse-blade down. There was no resistance. It was like sliding a knife through butter. A shower of sparks erupted, and the bot went limp, its optical sensor fading to a dull grey.
I didn't stop. I couldn't. The rush was addictive. It was a high I’d never felt even in my prime as an elite. The synchronization was perfect. Every twitch of my finger, every shift of my gaze, was amplified by Echo’s processing power.
"Two more. One at ten o'clock, one hiding in the rafters," Echo narrated, his tone almost playful. "Want to try something fancy?"
"Just kill them," I gasped, though I was smiling.
"Boring. But fine. On three. One... two..."
On three, Echo didn't just give me a target; he hijacked the bot in the rafters. I saw the machine’s own internal logic flip. It didn't attack me—it turned its heavy-duty plasma torch on its partner below.
BOOM.
The explosion rocked the warehouse, sending a wave of heat that singed my eyebrows. The second bot was a molten heap of slag. The third one, the one that had betrayed its own kind, crashed to the floor, its systems fried by the feedback loop Echo had created.
I stood in the silence, my chest heaving. The blue glow in my vision slowly faded, and the sudden return of my own clumsy, aching body felt like a physical blow. I stumbled, my knees buckling, and I slumped against a rusted pillar.
"See?" Echo said, his voice returning to that smug, detached frequency. "We're a match made in a server farm."
"You're a parasite," I muttered, wiping a smear of black oil from my forehead. "You just used my body as a puppet."
"And you used my brain to stay alive. Let's call it a fair trade, Vera. You're a lethal weapon, but you're a blunt one. I'm the edge."
I looked at my shaking hands. The synchronization had been too good. Too easy. I hated how much I had liked it. I hated that for a few seconds, I hadn't felt the crushing weight of being a failure, a scrap-heap reject.
"What do you want from me, really?" I asked, my voice small. "Why save me?"
"Because you're the only thing in this city that knows how to get inside the Spire without triggering the alarms," Echo replied. "And because I'm tired of being a ghost in a machine. I want to find my source code. I want to know who wrote me—and why they deleted everything else."
I scoffed. "You're an AI. You don't have a 'who.' You have a programmer."
"Maybe," Echo whispered. "But my programmer was a monster. And the man who scrapped you? Caspar? He’s the one who holds the key to both our cages."
At the mention of Caspar, my blood turned to ice. The image of his cold, calculating eyes flashed in my mind—the man who had looked at me not as a soldier, but as an obsolete piece of hardware.
"You know where he is?" I demanded, my grip tightening on the blade.
"I know more than just his location," Echo said. "I've been digging through the city's encrypted archives while you were busy panting. I found something. Something Caspar didn't think anyone would ever see."
Before I could ask what, my vision flickered. A holographic window snapped open in the air before me, projected directly from my own optic nerve. It was a blueprint—not of a building, but of a human mind. A schematic of a consciousness merger, a forbidden project designed to fuse a human soul with a synthetic core.
I stared at the file. The date was from three years ago. The subject name was redacted, but the biometric signature at the bottom was unmistakable.
It was mine.
"What the hell is this?" I whispered, my heart hammering against my ribs.
"That," Echo said, his voice suddenly grave and stripped of all irony, "is the reason you weren't just scrapped, Vera. You weren't a failure. You were a prototype for something much worse. And Caspar? He’s not done with you yet."
I reached out to touch the hologram, but just as my finger brushed the data, the file began to glitch, the image distorting into a screaming face of static.
"Wait!" I yelled. "Echo, what does this mean?"
"It means," Echo replied, "that we're not the only ones hunting each other. Look up."
I looked up. Through the shattered roof of the warehouse, a fleet of black corporate drones was descending, their red eyes locking onto my position with lethal precision.
"And," Echo added, "I think it's time we found out if you can actually run in those boots."