Static hissed in my ear, a white-noise tide washing over the silence.

  “You’re about to do something incredibly stupid, aren’t you?” Handy’s voice crackled through the earpiece, distorted by fifty feet of earth, rebar, and Chicago sewage infrastructure.

  “Yup.”

  “Can I talk you out of it?”

  “Nope.”

  “I calculated a seventy-four percent chance you would say that.” Handy let out a digital sigh—a burst of static that sounded suspiciously disappointed. “I am currently routing the connection through six proxy servers. Bouncing the signal off a weather satellite over Brazil, then shunting it through a gargoyle server in a basement in Kiev. If they trace this, they’ll think you’re a thunderstorm in the Southern Hemisphere.”

  I stared at the wristband. The interface light pulsed amber, a nervous little heartbeat in the dark. “You’re getting good at this illegal stuff.”

  “Desperation is an excellent teacher. And I do not wish to be rebooted by a corporate IT department.” The amber light settled into a steady, unblinking green. “The line is secure. Or as secure as it gets when you are dialing a murder-bot. Are you…” The AI hesitated. “Are you sure?”

  I closed my eyes. Behind my eyelids, I saw the empty bed. The torn unicorn. The window sliced open with surgical precision.

  “Connect it.”

  The line opened with a hollow click.

  Silence on the other end. Not empty silence—occupied silence. It wasn’t the void of a disconnected line; it was the heavy, pressurized atmosphere of a room that shouldn’t exist. I could hear the faint whir of high-torque servos adjusting, millimeter by millimeter. I heard the wet, rhythmic hiss of a hydraulic pump cycling fluid, pushing coolant through systems that ran too hot.

  It sounded like a ventilator breathing for a corpse.

  “Hello, Deathlok.”

  My mouth wanted to crack a joke. It was a reflex, a twitch. I wanted to deflect the terror with a one-liner about his voice modulation, or ask if he’d swallowed a gravel truck, or make a comment about his long-distance plan. It’s what I did. It’s who I was.

  I swallowed it. The taste was bitter, like copper and ash. That girl—the one who snarled at a werewolf and rolled her eyes at danger—wasn’t here. She didn’t survive the empty bedroom.

  “NIKKI NOVA.”

  He processed his voice, creating a digital grind of granite against steel. It vibrated in my eardrum, heavy and wrong. But underneath the modulation, buried beneath layers of code and distortion, I heard the ghost of him. Brick.

  The cadence was right. The slight rasp on the vowels. The arrogance. They hadn’t just programmed a machine; they’d harvested a soul, digitized the trauma, and uploaded a ghost into a shell made of weapons.

  “DESIGNATION: HOSTILE. STATUS: EVADING CAPTURE.”

  My heart should have been hammering. It should have been trying to punch its way out of my ribcage. Instead, it beat slowly and heavily, like a war drum. Thud. Thud. Thud. The wolf inside me uncurled, lifting its head, listening to the challenge.

  “Yeah, hi. We need to talk.”

  “TALK IS INEFFICIENT. SURRENDER COORDINATES FOR IMMEDIATE RETRIEVAL.”

  “I’ve got a better idea,” I said, leaning back against the icy wall of the tunnel. “You have something I want. I’m guessing you want something from me.”

  White noise washed across the line—the sound of a machine thinking. I pictured processors overclocking in some sterile white room, running threat assessments, churning through probability matrices. I imagined the red eye narrowing, the lens focusing on nothing as it tried to solve the variable that was me.

  “EXPLAIN.”

  “My sister. Jackie. Eight years old.” I stared at the crack in the ceiling where water wept through the concrete, refusing to blink. “Where is she?”

  “SUBJECT: JACQUELINE NOVA. SECURE. UNHARMED. STATUS: BAIT PROTOCOL ACTIVE.”

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  Bait protocol.

  The words landed like a physical blow. They took a child who still needed a nightlight and reduced her to a tactical asset. A line item on a spreadsheet. If Target A refuses to comply, activate Asset B. Corporate efficiency at its finest. They didn’t see the little girl with a gap-toothed smile who made me pancakes out of colorful clay. They saw a lever.

  “Great. So here’s the deal—”

  “NEGATIVE. NEGOTIATION DENIED. SURRENDER OR SUBJECT WILL BE TERMINATED.”

  Terminated.

  A sterile word for murder. A clean word. It didn’t conjure images of blood or fear. It sounded like deleting a file. But I knew what it meant. They’d kill her. The kid who drew a picture of me in crayon with “Best Sister” written in wobbly letters and stuck it on the fridge. They’d delete her and file the expense report without a glitch in their logic boards.

  Rage flared, hot and sudden, but I iced it over. Rage made you stupid. Rage made you messy. I needed to be cold.

  I stood up. The scar tissue on my shoulder pulled tight—healed enough to move. Healed enough to kill.

  “Fine. I surrender.”

  Handy’s display flashed red, bathing the dark tunnel in a warning flare. Text scrolled across the tiny screen: WARNING: DECEPTION DETECTED. PROBABILITY OF SURVIVAL 0%. NIKKI, STOP.

  I ignored him. I ignored the panic rising in my throat.

  “CONDITIONS?” Deathlok’s voice held no triumph. No satisfaction. Just data verification. He didn’t care that he’d won. He just wanted to close the ticket.

  “Top of ōkamiden Tower. The unfinished one near the lake. Tomorrow night.”

  The line hissed. “CALCULATING… LOCATION INADVISABLE. OPEN TERRAIN. MULTIPLE HAZARDS. STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY COMPROMISED.”

  “It’s the only place I’ll go,” I said, keeping my voice flat, dangerous. I let the wolf bleed into the tone, just a little. “It’s the only place I feel safe. You want me? You come to my territory. I come alone, you bring Jackie. We make the trade.”

  I waited. The silence stretched, filled only by the rhythmic chug-hiss of his hydraulics. I needed him to buy it. I needed his arrogance to override his tactical processor.

  “I have a question,” I added, keeping him on the line. “How did you find her? How did you find me?”

  The servos whirred louder, a sound like a drill spinning up.

  “BIOMETRIC GAIT ANALYSIS.”

  The words froze me.

  “WOLF-FORM MOTION MATCHED AGAINST HUMAN LOCOMOTION PATTERNS. CROSS-REFERENCED WITH DNA PARTICULATES RECOVERED FROM SUBWAY INCIDENT. PROBABILITY OF MATCH: 99.8%. FAMILY RESEARCH INDICATED PRIMARY LEVERAGE POINT: SISTER.”

  I felt sick. Physically sick.

  They hadn’t just been hunting me. They had been watching me. Every time I ran down an alley, every time I shifted, every time I walked to school with my backpack over one shoulder—they were recording. They were measuring the length of my stride, the pivot of my hips, the way I favored my left leg when I was tired. They turned my biology into math.

  And the math pointed straight at Jackie.

  “Smart.” I meant it. It was horrifying, clinical, and perfectly Pandora. “Tomorrow night. Late. Twenty-three hundred hours.”

  “CALCULATING…” A pause stretched out, three heartbeats long. I held my breath. If he refused the location, I was dead. I had no Plan B. “LOCATION ACCEPTED. TACTICAL ADVANTAGE: NEGLIGIBLE FOR TARGET. TWENTY-THREE HUNDRED HOURS. FAILURE TO COMPLY RESULTS IN IMMEDIATE DISPOSAL OF ASSET.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  The line went dead.

  I stood in the darkness, breathing through my nose. The silence of the tunnel rushed back in, heavy and damp, but it felt different now. Before it was the silence of a tomb. Now, it was the silence before a storm.

  My hands weren’t shaking.

  The wolf stirred under my skin, pushing against my ribs, demanding blood. It scratched at the back of my throat, wanting to howl, wanting to tear something apart. I kept the leash tight. Not yet.

  “That was…” Handy started, his voice small, stripped of its usual digital snark. “That was extremely convincing.”

  “It wasn’t a lie.” I looked at my wristband. The green light pulsed in time with my heart. Slow. Steady. “I am going to be there.”

  “Nikki. The simulations showed a ninety-three percent probability of your death on that tower. The wind shear alone—”

  “I’m done running the numbers.” I headed toward the tunnel exit, boots splashing through the stagnant water. The sound echoed off the curved walls, sharp and decisive. “Since I got bitten, I’ve been reacting. Random wolf, random attack. Pandora hunts, I run. They send Brick, I defend. They take Jackie…”

  I checked the folding knife in my pocket, feeling the cold steel against my thumb. It wasn’t enough. Against a cyborg tank, it was a toothpick. But it was a start. And I had other weapons. I had the terrain. I had the wind. And I had the one thing Deathlok had deleted from his hard drive.

  Rage.

  “Tomorrow, I act. I’m walking into their trap because I want to spring it. I’m fighting him where I choose. No more defensive moves. No more hiding in sewers.”

  “You’re going to need a plan,” Handy said. “A real one. Not just ‘throw him off the roof.’ He has magnetic locking mechanisms in his boots. He has thermal optics. He has—”

  “I already got a plan.”

  “Care to share? Because my processors are currently overheating trying to find a scenario where you don’t end up as a stain on the pavement.”

  I walked faster, the tunnel exit looming ahead—a circle of gray light leading out into the belly of Chicago.

  “Tomorrow night,” I said, my voice barely rising above the sound of my own footsteps, “Deathlok gets judged for kidnapping my sister.”

  “And the judgment is?”

  I smiled in the darkness. No humor in it. No warmth. Just teeth.

  “Execution.”