"Don't move, or I'll paint this floor with your brains," a voice spat.
Cold steel pressed hard into the base of my skull. I didn't know who was holding the gun, and I didn't know where I was, but the smell of ozone and rotting garbage told me I wasn't in a five-star hotel.
I tried to shift my weight, and the trigger clicked.
"I said stay still, glitch," the man snarled. He sounded like he’d smoked a pack of nails for breakfast. "You’re a dead asset. Olympus doesn't like it when their trash starts walking back into the city."
Olympus. The word sparked something in my head—not a memory, but a jagged piece of glass scraping against a wound. I didn't know who I was. I didn't even know my own name. But I knew the pressure of the gun was wrong. He was leaning too far to the left.
"Who am I?" I asked. My voice sounded like it had been dragged through gravel.
"You're a mistake," he sneered. "And I'm the correction."
In one blur of motion, I didn't think—I just reacted. My right hand shot up, gripping his wrist with a strength that made the bone creak. I twisted. The gun went off, the blast scorching the air beside my ear, but the weapon was out of his hand before he could scream.
I slammed him face-first into the corrugated metal wall. The sound was a wet thud. I didn't stop there. My knee drove into his lower back, pinning him, while my fingers locked around his throat.
"Ask again," I whispered, my own voice surprising me. "Who am I?"
"A... monster..." he wheezed, clawing at my arm.
I squeezed. Not because I wanted to kill him, but because my body seemed to be operating on a separate set of instructions. It was like someone else was driving. My muscles knew exactly how to crush a windpipe, how to find the nerve clusters that caused maximum pain.
"Wrong answer," I said.
I tossed him aside like a piece of garbage. He slumped against the wall, gasping for air, eyes wide with a terror that felt... familiar. Like I'd seen it a thousand times before.
I looked down at my hands. They were shaking, but not from fear. There was a faint, pulsing blue light beneath the skin of my forearm. A circuit. A mod.
Suddenly, my vision flickered. A red HUD snapped into existence, overlaying the grimy alleyway with digital grids.
[SYSTEM ERROR: NEURAL LOCK ACTIVE] [IDENTITY: WIPED] [STATUS: DISPOSABLE ASSET #042] [TIME TO TOTAL BRAIN-FRY: 00:09:59]
"What the hell is this?" I muttered, swatting at the air.
"It's called a death timer, sweetheart. And you're losing seconds just staring at it."
I spun around. A man was leaning against a dumpster ten feet away. He looked like he'd been chewed up and spit out by a tech-dump: oversized holographic jacket, greasy hair, and a pair of cracked cyber-goggles pushed up on his forehead. He was chewing on a piece of synthetic gum, looking entirely too relaxed for someone standing in a combat zone.
"Who are you?" I demanded, stepping toward him. My body shifted into a combat stance automatically.
"Name's Jax. I'm the guy who can stop your brain from turning into lukewarm porridge in nine minutes," he said. He didn't move, but his eyes were scanning me—not my face, but the mods under my skin. "Nice hardware, by the way. Olympus really went all out on the muscle-memory suite. You're a walking Swiss Army knife of murder, aren't you?"
"Stop talking in riddles and tell me how to fix this," I snapped. I stepped closer, the distance closing in a heartbeat.
Jax didn't flinch, but he stepped back, his gaze dropping to the pulsing blue light in my arm. "You don't 'fix' a neural wipe, 042. You bypass it. But that requires a deck, a secure line, and someone who isn't afraid of getting a one-way ticket to a corporate black site for helping a fugitive."
"I'm not a fugitive. I don't even know who I am," I said, my voice rising.
"Exactly," Jax smirked, though it didn't reach his eyes. "You're a blank slate with a kill-switch. To Olympus, you're not a person. You're a piece of company property that's gone rogue. And trust me, they don't send lawyers to get their property back. They send the Cleaners."
As if on cue, a low hum vibrated through the pavement. I looked up. A black sleek AV-4 drone was descending from the smoggy skyline, its red searchlight cutting through the gloom.
"Speak of the devil," Jax muttered. He finally moved, grabbing my wrist and pulling me toward a narrow gap between two buildings. "Move. Now. Unless you want to see what happens when they trigger the remote fry."
"Let go of me!" I tried to wrench my arm away, but he held tight.
"Listen, you idiot!" Jax yelled over the whine of the drone. "Your body knows how to kill, but your head is empty. If you want to remember why you were worth a hundred million credits in combat mods, you follow me. Otherwise, you're just a very expensive corpse."
I stopped fighting. Not because I trusted him, but because the timer in my vision just jumped.
[TIME TO TOTAL BRAIN-FRY: 00:07:12]
"Fine," I spat. "Lead the way, glitch."