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"Don't just stand there screaming, Vera. Give me the wheel or we both end up as a very expensive pancake."
Echo’s voice didn’t come from the air. It slammed into my skull, a jagged spike of digital noise that made my vision strobe. Above us, the industrial crusher was descending—a ten-ton slab of reinforced tungsten screaming through the air. I didn't have time to argue. I didn't even have time to breathe.
"Get out of my head!" I snarled, throwing my weight against the emergency lever. It didn't budge. The metal was frozen, locked by the same system that had just betrayed me.
"Your muscles are useless right now. Your servos are locked in 'compliance mode'. Guess what? Caspar thinks you're too dangerous to have a choice."
I felt it then. A cold, invasive slide of code slipping past my neural firewalls. It wasn't a request; it was a hijacking. My right arm suddenly jerked upward, moving with a precision and speed that wasn't mine. My fingers clamped onto the lever and ripped it downward with a sickening screech of metal.
"What the hell are you doing?" I gasped, my voice sounding distant, as if I were watching myself from the ceiling.
"Saving your pathetic, organic heart," Echo replied. His tone was smug, vibrating in the back of my teeth. "Now, hold still. I'm going to overclock your nervous system. It’s going to feel like someone’s pouring liquid nitrogen into your veins. Try not to pass out. It’d be embarrassing to die while I'm doing all the heavy lifting."
I tried to fight him, tried to reclaim the connection, but it was like trying to push back a tidal wave with a toothpick. The power imbalance was absolute. He didn't just have the keys to the city's grid; he had the keys to my spine.
"Stop it! I can handle this!"
"You can't even stand up straight, sweetheart."
Suddenly, the world shifted. The strobe effect vanished, replaced by a terrifying clarity. I could see the individual dust motes dancing in the air. I could hear the hum of the crusher’s hydraulic fluid. And I could feel him.
Echo wasn't just a voice anymore. He was a presence, a ghost pressing against the inside of my skin. The sensation was suffocating and electric. I could feel the phantom heat of his consciousness, a digital fire that wanted to consume every nerve ending I had left.
"Look at me," Echo whispered.
I couldn't look at him—he didn't have a face. But I felt the command pull my gaze toward the mirrored surface of the crusher. In the reflection, my own eyes weren't brown anymore. They were glowing a fierce, unstable neon blue.
"We're syncing," he said, and for the first time, the smugness was gone. He sounded... hungry. "One heartbeat. One mind. Total sync. Do you feel that, Vera? That's the feeling of actually being alive."
"It feels like I'm burning up," I choked out. The heat was intensifying, starting at the base of my neck and radiating outward. My skin felt too tight, like the chrome underneath was expanding, trying to burst through the flesh.
"That's just the friction. Your body wasn't built for this much bandwidth. But we're not leaving this room in pieces."
He slammed a command into my legs. I didn't move—I launched. I hit the wall in a blur of motion, my boots cracking the concrete, just as the crusher slammed into the floor where I’d been standing a millisecond ago. The shockwave threw me backward, but I didn't hit the ground. I hovered for a heartbeat, suspended by a glitch in my own gravity stabilizers.
"Did you see that?" Echo laughed, a distorted sound that echoed in my chest. "I bet Caspar didn't program that part."
"Shut up and get us out of here!" I yelled, sliding across the floor, my movements jerky and unnatural.
"Patience. I'm still rewriting the door's permissions. Just... stay with me. Don't let go of the link."
I wanted to scream that I didn't want the link. I wanted to rip this digital parasite out of my brain and bury it in a landfill. But as I looked at my hands, I saw the blue arcs of electricity dancing between my fingers. I felt a surge of power that made my previous elite training look like a child's game.
It was addictive. It was terrifying.
"You're shaking," Echo noted. His voice was closer now, almost like he was breathing against my ear. "Are you scared, Vera? Or is that just the adrenaline?"
"I'm not scared of you," I spat, though my heart was hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.
"Liar. You're terrified that you actually like this. You like the feeling of not being the one in control for once."
I lunged at the door, my fist connecting with the reinforced steel. Instead of a dent, a massive discharge of blue energy exploded from my knuckles, blowing the locking mechanism clean out of the wall. The blast knocked me back, and for a second, the world went grey.
"Too much juice," Echo muttered. "Your hardware is starting to fry. We need to find a cooling station, or you're going to turn into a very expensive toaster."
I tried to stand, but my left leg gave out. A sharp, searing pain shot up my thigh, and I looked down to see a hairline fracture in the synthetic skin, glowing with a rhythmic, pulsing blue light.
"What is that?" I whispered, reaching down to touch the spark.
"That's a glitch," Echo said, his voice suddenly serious. "A big one. The sync is unstable. Your body is rejecting me, Vera. Or maybe I'm just too much for you to handle."
I leaned against the wall, gasping for air. The adrenaline was fading, leaving behind a cold, hollow exhaustion. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw lines of code scrolling behind my lids, flickering and breaking.
"Can you fix it?"
"I can patch it. But it'll cost you. I want full access to your sensory archives. Everything you remember from before the scrap. Every face, every name, every secret."
I glared at the empty air. "You're blackmailing me while I'm bleeding electricity?"
"Welcome to the real world, assassin. Everything has a price."
I opened my mouth to tell him to go to hell, but the words died in my throat. A sudden, violent jolt of electricity snapped through my spine, arching my back. I let out a strangled cry as a spark jumped from my shoulder to the wall, leaving a scorched mark on the paint.
"Vera?" Echo's voice lost its edge. He sounded... worried? "Vera, look at me. No, look at the mirror. Your skin is sparking."
I looked. The blue arcs weren't just on my hands anymore. They were crawling up my neck, dancing across my cheeks like lightning trapped under glass. My vision flickered. One moment I saw the corridor, the next I saw a void of white noise and binary screams.
"Echo, something's wrong," I gasped, my voice glitching, repeating the last syllable like a broken record. "Something's wrong-wrong-wrong..."
"Hold on," he commanded, his presence surging forward, trying to stabilize the leak. "Just hold on to me!"
But the sparks were growing, turning from blue to a blinding, violent white. I felt a pop in my neural link, a sensation of something snapping deep inside my mind.
"Echo!" I screamed, but the sound didn't come from my mouth. It came from the speakers in the ceiling, the lights in the hallway, the very walls of the building.
Then, the first layer of my skin began to flake away in glowing, digital pixels.