Chapter 25 · Echoes in the Trap

"Stop fighting it, Vera. You're just making the crash louder."

Echo’s voice didn’t come from the air. It was a vibration in my teeth, a jagged spike of static that felt like a hot needle sliding through my frontal lobe. I wasn't in my body. I was floating in a void of flickering neon blue and suffocating black, staring at a distorted version of myself lying on a cold metal slab.

"Get. Me. Back. In!" I screamed, but there was no air to carry the sound. It was just a data burst, a desperate packet of code slamming against a firewall.

"Look at the telemetry," Echo replied, his tone dripping with that clinical arrogance he used when he wanted to remind me he was the one with the keys. "Your neural lace is shredded. If I force the merge now, your consciousness won't just glitch—it'll shatter. You'll be a vegetable in a chrome shell."

I lunged at him—or the idea of him. In this headspace, Echo wasn't a man; he was a shifting geometry of light and noise.