20. GhostTracer
GhostTracer
Playlist: Ghost - Gunship, Power Glove
Kael
The lab is silent again except for the faint hum of servers and the buzz of the drones outside. Fast moving images continue bleeding in from the city through the glass wall of windows.
Once again, I haven’t slept. Coffee cups litter my desk, half-drained, cold. Ember’s words replay like a looped error file in my skull: Her body was found. She’s gone...sort of.
No. That makes no sense. There’s no logic, no proof.
I stare at the grid projection hovering over the central console. What a fucking mess. Two anomalies lit it up last night, twin spikes in power that ripped straight through the system. One of them flatlined, presumed dead. The other, Eli, her brother. Still here. Still burning.
His magic signature is bleeding through the building’s architecture now, crawling along fiber lines and server stacks, threatening every piece of code I’ve ever written, every safeguard I convinced myself was unbreakable.
The system is straining to contain him, and I can feel it; LINK can feel it, like a pressure valve waiting to split wide open.
Not gone, erased, or deleted. Why?
I swipe the feed, tracing the rogue signal.
It should look like corrupted code, jagged edges, errors.
Instead, it still moves, just physically contained.
It resists confinement, mutates to avoid deletion.
It shouldn’t be possible. No fragment of Vikktor’s virus should be capable of adapting like this.
It must be Eli, and Vikktor has him here in HQ. But why?
My thoughts are interrupted by LINK:
DR. RYUDON
I’M SENSING AN ANOMALY brEACH
REQUESTING PROTOCOL: DELETION
Godsdamn Vikktor and his virus.
LINK pings, alerting me to the finished run of the GhostTracing patch I wrote a few hours ago.
I log into the system. My console fills with black void code, streaming past like a mesmerizing display of zeros and ones.
Something flickers from inside, a pulse of bright pink static against the dark, like a heartbeat.
The virus? Maybe. Could it be Lyra trapped in DreamNet? Could I have found her this easily?
I slam the thought down. Can’t think that way. Dangerous. Exhausted. If I let myself believe, I’ll unravel. This could just be rogue code left behind from the aftermath of the virus. I see nothing in the output that suggests anything remotely human or anything related to an anomaly.
“LINK—begin deletion protocol,” I command. I want this out of my system. Now I’m even more determined to make Vikktor pay for it, pay for the lives lost, including Lyra’s.
YES DR. RYUDON
The screen shudders. I continue to watch the location grid as light races toward the anomaly then bursts, breaking apart as if an invisible force shoved it back. LINK responds immediately.
SYSTEM ERROR
UNAUTHORIZED MOVEMENT
ESCALATION REQUIRED
I lean forward, grip tightening on the console. The error code bleeds down the screen:
ENTITY NOT COMPLIANT WITH DELETION PROTOCOLS
“LINK—Run it again.” I sit back, ready to intervene.
The command executes. Again, resistance. Static hisses in my ears, and gods help me, I think I hear something like a laugh. Barely audible, like someone laughing under their breath, defiant and determined. I force myself to breathe, to not lose control in anger.
ERROR: DELETION FAILED
DR. RYUDON: HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO PROCEED?
My mind snaps back to the girl kissing me on the beach, eyes so intense, full of golden fire. Deep down, I want to fight back, want to avenge her. I whisper to the black grid. “You’re a threat. A shadow of the virus, and I’ll tear you apart before I allow you to take my system down.”
My hands tremble as I code the next attack.
I’m not even sure she’s alive, have no idea where she landed.
If she is in DreamNet, trapped like a star in a dark sky, then I have to guide her back to the light.
It’s where she belongs. I will find her, but first I have to destroy everything this virus touches.
On the monitors, the anomaly flails, pushes at walls that aren’t walls, and collapses into a heap of blinding light.
It’s almost beautiful...if it wasn’t gutting my architecture from the inside.
A digital ghost, but more real than anything I’ve seen in years.
It could be her, or it could be Vikktor’s virus. At this point my mind is reeling.
Eli’s bursts remain a low hum, no threat to the order. Vikktor must have him somewhere here, must be suppressing his magic, but I’ll have to focus on him later. Right now, I need to find out what happened to Lyra.
Something inside me pushes like a hand on my chest, heavy, unrelenting, a familiar instinct older than logic. It happens a lot in times of stress. Instead of burying it, this time, I welcome it.
Lyra’s face keeps intruding on my thoughts like a script I didn’t authorize access to.
Not the anomaly signature or the magic spike. Her.
She didn’t move like a weapon of the rebellion.
She didn’t burn hot with a hunger for chaos the way the reports always describe U21s.
She worried about her brother. She laughed, teased, and lived like she wasn’t struggling to survive in this city.
Whatever power lived inside her, it wasn’t aimed toward destruction. It was something warm and human.
That realization throws everything I know to be into a tailspin.
U21s are supposed to be volatile and unpredictable. They’re supposed to be walking disasters waiting for a trigger like Ash. I chuckle to myself.
That’s the narrative I’ve built my corporate life around, the logic I’ve trusted to justify everything I’ve built.
Lyra never tried to hurt anyone. She probably didn’t want to be seen, especially not by the “anomaly hunter.” I know for a fact she wanted to disappear, to exist without being hunted, and that’s why I could so easily find her in her dreams.
She’s dangerous in a way the others aren’t because she makes me question the world order, makes me question everything I believe.
I can’t afford to have these thoughts. Empathy is a liability, but so is attraction and obsession. One anomaly doesn’t invalidate an entire generation. I refuse to let myself romanticize about one that could be the exception. It’s just not logical.
I don’t have magic. I don’t feel the world the way they do. U21s talk about vibrations and currents and instincts, things I can’t sense, can’t verify, can’t control. Trusting that kind of power feels like stepping into darkness without a map. It feels like weakness.
My entire career has been built on eliminating anomalies, so I compartmentalize.
I file Lyra away as an outlier, one good apple in the whole rotten bunch.
If I let myself believe U21s aren’t a threat, then I have to look at what I’ve become and what I’ve done.
That paints me with the same brush as Vikktor, and even though I work for him, I refuse to become him.
I’m not ready for that...yet.
Her golden eyes flash through my head again—not the newsfeed’s still image of her broken body. No, it’s the way she looked the night I first saw her at STATIK, red light spilling across her beautiful face, stubborn and bright, like she’d never allow herself to be owned by anyone.
This virus, combined with the void, brought on the collapse of the entire DreamNet, surged GameNet, and spilled recklessly into other vital networks.
If I eliminate all parts of this code, how will I find her, if she is indeed alive?
She could be suspended in DreamNet permanently, like an induced coma.
Or she could just be gone, her magic signature left flaring until it dissipates into the universe.
My obsession to know more begins to spin out like a whirlwind, threatening to pull everything else down. Curiosity usually leads me down paths never meant to be taken. I tell myself I’m insane, sleep-deprived, chasing ghosts in the machine.
But ghosts don’t resist deletion. Ghosts don’t laugh at you through the white noise.
The system waits for my input. The blinking cursor mocks me as it pulses in time with my heart.
AWAITING RESPONSE DR. RYUDON
Even LINK senses my insanity. I drag my hand back from the console, shoving it through my hair instead. “Not tonight,” I mutter under my breath. My voice sounds raw, shredded. “Not this one. Not yet.”
I kill the command window that would scrub the entire network during TheKast tonight. The anomaly flickers again, and then disappears for a brief moment, as if aware it survived.
I drag the feed into a locked partition, rerouting the code away from the DreamNet mainframe, hidden from every other eye in VikkCorp, including Ember.
I lean back in my chair, staring up at the cold LED lights of the lab’s ceiling.
Every bone in my body tells me I’ve just made the biggest mistake of my life.
And yet, I feel something I haven’t in years.
Excitement.
I startle when my DataLINK rings, spilling a cold cup of coffee onto my desk. It drips onto the floor, soaking my shoe. Ash’s ID blips across the screen. Of course. He never sleeps either.
I swipe to connect, still staring at the empty screen in front of me.
“Kael.” Ash’s voice is low and serious. “Tell me you’ve got something. I felt another surge in GameNet a few minutes ago. It tore a hole in the game and crashed the server briefly. People are pissed. What the hell’s going on now?”
I swallow, suddenly aware of how tight my throat is. “Everything is almost back to normal,” I lie.
“Have you seen the news feeds?” I lower my voice to a whisper, despite being alone.
One can never be too careful inside VikkCorp.
“You were right. Eli was the powerful anomaly, and Vikktor has him in custody. Lyra was too, and they’re painting her as a casualty of the CIC raid. ” My voice cracks unexpectedly.
Ash goes silent. Too silent for him. “No, that can’t be.” He sounds certain. “I’ve been bombarded with vibrations all night, and the surge effects are still banging on my brain. I haven’t had a headache like this since I wrecked into that holo projection tower.”
I force myself to say it. “Lyra was with me tonight. We both dropped out of DreamNet, but now they’re painting it like she was eliminated by the CIC.” I suck in a desperate breath. “I’m still seeing two anomalies surging. Have you felt anything from her? Her signature, anything?”
A breath explodes through the call, like Ash was sucker punched. “No. Don’t fuck with me, Kael. Say that again.”
“According to Ember, she’s gone, body dead but still getting some sort of waves from her in the feeds.” The words taste like poison, each one corroding my mouth. “Corporate sweep, virus collapse, blah-blah, take your pick. She didn’t make it back.” I can’t hold back the anger-infested sarcasm.
Ash’s voice breaks into static for a moment, then steadies, colder than I’ve ever heard it.
“I told her. I told her not to go in.” His words fill with anger, with guilt.
“And you...you’re sitting in your white tower, telling me she’s a line item?
An inconvenience to your day? A casualty in a corporate sweep? ”
My hand tightens around the edge of my desk until the metal groans.
“Don’t!” I snap, harsher than intended. “Don’t act like I wanted this or did this.
Vikktor and Eli did this. Like I wouldn’t trade every godsdamn piece of code in this system to undo it.
Non-citizens may be worthless, but they didn’t deserve to die! ”
There’s silence again, thick, buzzing, like the moment before a wire snaps. I feel a tiny piece of regret for that last statement.
Finally, Ash exhales. “If she’s really gone, then something doesn’t add up. I just tried, and I can still feel her, Kael. I’m still getting big vibes, you hear me? She can’t be dead.”
My gaze flicks back to the image of the anomaly, pulsing like a heartbeat. For once, I don’t argue. “Yeah,” I mutter, voice dropping low. “I know.”
He doesn’t ask how. He just hangs up, leaving me with a line of static.