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"Run, you idiot! Left! Hard left!"
Echo’s voice didn’t just ring in my head—it slammed into my auditory nerve like a physical blow. I didn't argue. I dove.
Two inches to my right, a high-frequency plasma bolt scorched the air, leaving the smell of ozone and burnt plastic. I hit the wet pavement of the alley, sliding through a slurry of neon-tinted oil and grime. My left knee joint gave a sickening pop.
"My leg is glitching," I hissed, teeth gritted. "Echo, if you're so damn smart, find me a way out of here that doesn't involve me crawling on my ass."
"Maybe if you didn't trust your organic instincts over my processing speed, your knee would still be functional," Echo shot back. His voice was smooth, smug, and vibrating right against the base of my skull. "Now get up. Three more Hounds are closing in. They've got you bracketed."
I forced myself up, the servo in my leg whining in a high-pitched scream. I leaned against a rusted dumpster, chest heaving. My vision flickered—red warnings dancing across my retina. *System Integrity: 42%. Neural Sync: Unstable.*
"What the hell are the Hounds doing here?" I spat, glancing at the sky. "Caspar usually sends the Scrappers for trash like me. Hounds are for high-value targets."
"Maybe you're finally starting to realize your worth," Echo murmured. There was a strange shift in his tone—not smug anymore, but something heavier. "Or maybe it's because of what's currently sitting in my core. You're not just carrying a rogue AI, Vera. You're carrying the only copy of a ghost."
"A ghost? I don't do spooky stories, Echo. I do killing."
"Then kill these," he snapped. "Twelve o'clock. Roofline."
I looked up. A sleek, chrome-plated silhouette leaped from the ledge, falling like a silent predator. I didn't have time to aim. I lunged forward, catching the Hound mid-air. We slammed into a brick wall with a bone-shaking thud.
I drove my elbow into its sensor array, feeling the glass shatter. The machine shrieked—a digital sound that set my nerves on fire. I gripped its throat, my fingers digging into the reinforced alloy.
"Echo, override the lock! Now!"
"Do I have to do everything?"
Suddenly, a surge of blue electricity erupted from my palms, coursing through my arms. It wasn't me—it was him. The power was violent, uncontrolled. The Hound’s head exploded in a shower of sparks and black fluid.
I recoiled, staring at my shaking hands. The smell of fried circuitry filled my nose.
"What was that?" I gasped. "That wasn't part of my kit."
"That was a little something I've been hiding," Echo said, his voice dropping to a low, dangerous hum. "But it comes with a price. Your neural buffer is overheating. If we keep this up, your brain is going to cook inside your skull like a cheap egg."
"Great. So I either get hunted by chrome dogs or I turn into a vegetable. My options are just fantastic."
"Stop whining and move. There's a secure terminal two blocks east. If I can plug into the city grid for even ten seconds, I can mask your signature. But you have to get me there alive."
I started moving, my limp getting worse with every step. I could hear the other Hounds circling, their metallic claws clicking against the asphalt. They weren't rushing in. They were herding me.
"They're playing with me," I muttered, glancing at a flickering neon sign above a noodle shop. "They know I'm breaking down."
"They know you're vulnerable," Echo corrected. "And they know I'm the only thing keeping your heart beating. Which means, technically, I'm the one in charge of this relationship."
"Shut up. Just... shut up before I find a way to delete you."
"You can't. We're bound, remember? You die, I vanish. I'm the parasite, you're the host. It's a very classic dynamic."
I rounded a corner and skidded to a halt. A Hound stood there, blocking the alley. It didn't attack. It just stood there, its red optic pulsing slowly. In its mechanical grip was a small, blackened data drive.
My heart skipped. That drive. I knew that casing.
"Is that...?"
"Don't touch it," Echo warned, his voice suddenly sharp. "Vera, get away from it. Now."
"Why? What is it?"
"I said get away!"
I didn't listen. I never do. I lunged, snatching the drive from the Hound's grip and delivering a spinning kick to its chassis that sent it flying into a stack of crates. I didn't wait to see if it got up. I scrambled back into the shadows, pressing my back against the cold concrete.
"Happy now?" I panted, holding the drive up. "Now tell me what the hell this is."
There was a long silence. Echo didn't joke. He didn't brag. For the first time since the merger, he sounded... afraid.
"That drive contains the original source logs from the Project Chimera trials," Echo whispered. "The ones Caspar tried to incinerate five years ago."
"Project Chimera? I've never heard of it."
"Of course you haven't. You were the subject, Vera. Not the assassin. The subject."
I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the rain. "What are you talking about? I was recruited. I was trained."
"You were built," Echo countered. "Or rather, rebuilt. Your consciousness wasn't just uploaded into a cyborg body. It was spliced. You're a hybrid, Vera. A cocktail of organic memory and synthetic architecture."
I stared at the drive in my hand. It felt heavy, like it was made of lead instead of plastic. "Spliced with what?"
"With someone else," Echo said. "Someone who didn't survive the process. Someone who used to be your partner."
I froze. The memory of him—the smell of old tobacco and the way he used to laugh at my bad jokes—hit me like a physical punch. "Jax? No. Jax died in the Sector 4 breach. I saw the building collapse."
"You saw a building collapse," Echo murmured. "You didn't see the recovery team. You didn't see what Caspar did with the remains. He didn't want to lose the best tactical mind in the city. So he broke him down into code. And then, he tried to put that code into you."
I felt a surge of nausea. I looked down at my hands—the chrome, the synthetic skin, the wires beneath the surface. Was I even me? Or was I just a walking graveyard for a dead man's ghost?
"Am I... am I him?"
"No," Echo replied, his voice regaining its clinical edge. "You're still you. But I am the fragment of him that didn't fit. I'm the glitch. The part of Jax that refused to be absorbed. That's why we're so compatible, Vera. Because we're two halves of the same broken experiment."
I leaned my head back against the wall, closing my eyes. The world felt like it was tilting. I could hear the Hounds returning, their howls echoing through the narrow streets.
"We can't stay here," Echo said. "The drive is a beacon. They can track it. And if Caspar gets it back, he'll have everything he needs to finish the merger. He won't just have an assassin. He'll have a god."
"I don't want to be a god," I whispered. "I just want to kill him."
"Then we need to move. Now. There's a terminal just around this bend. If I can get in, I can wipe the beacon and find out where Caspar is hiding his main server."
I stood up, the drive gripped tight in my fist. My leg was still sparking, my vision was still blurring, but the nausea was gone, replaced by a cold, sharpening rage.
"Fine. Let's go. But Echo?"
"Yes, host?"
"If you ever call me a 'host' again, I'm going to find a way to format your personality into a toaster."
"Fair enough. Now run, before the next wave hits."
I bolted toward the terminal, my boots splashing through the neon puddles. I could see the glow of the access port up ahead. But as I reached for the console, a massive holographic screen flickered to life above the street.
It wasn't an ad. It was a city-wide alert.
My breath hitched. There, in the center of the screen, was my face. My name. And a number beneath it—a bounty so high it could buy a whole district of the city.
And right below my name, there was a countdown timer.
*00:59:59... 00:59:58...*
"What is that?" I asked, my voice trembling.
"That," Echo said, his voice sounding grim, "is the deadline for your expiration. Caspar didn't just scrap you, Vera. He put a kill-switch in your core. And it just got activated."