30. RunLyraRun
RunLyraRun
Playlist: My Favourite Game - The Cardigans
Lyra
Another day tilts into night. The lab turns from harsh and sterile to a cool neon twilight that bathes us in monitor glow. Ash is here, with Kael and I, to work on my magic and mold me into a weapon we can use against VikkCorp to get my brother back.
Kael moves through his daily workings like a predator in an all too familiar landscape; I move through it like a toddler learning to walk. Ash? He’s Ash. Moving through it like he’s telling a joke at the party of life. He could have a good time at a funeral. If we had those anymore.
I’m mostly working on control. Not the grand, cinematic kind of power that rips servers out of racks, but the surgical stuff. Nudging code, rerouting programs, slipping little holes in protocols.
Bend, not break. Jailbreak, not a purge.
It’s a delicate dance. Every time I push too hard, the system fights me, and Kael’s eyes go dark and private. I know I’m one reckless line of force away from him allowing LINK to delete me.
She’s one hell of a jealous bitch.
Kael still refuses to believe his cyber-wife is anything more than obedient code or leftover virus—even as she learns to chase me at every given chance. I do believe him though; he won’t allow her to delete me, unless it threatens to topple his empire.
Kael watches more than he helps. He’s precise, an old-school code slinger.
Show him a problem, and he can map three solutions before I can finish explaining it.
He wrote the window that put my face on his screen and hacked the PleazureHolo projector to bring me back to life...
kind of. And he did it all in a few days.
He thinks he can teach me how to speak his language. Which is true, to an extent. He can actually show me how to evade partitions and dodge bots. What he can’t teach me is something he refuses to admit to himself: how I’m changing him.
He keeps saying that the lines of code in front of him, the ones that keep rearranging themselves under his fingertips, are just a product of muscle memory.
Just this morning, I saw him write code that came together at will and self-corrected itself so it would run clean.
He tells me it’s just technique or it’s me.
He’s not sure if I’m his muse or if it’s my magic assisting. Maybe it’s both.
I think that’s one of the only things I like about him right now. He makes challenges look easy. No stress, no worry. He dominates small things and seduces them into obedience.
Even me.
I know this...
Right now, he’s pissed at me.
To say I’m bored is an understatement. Even in holo-form the lab has become a cage made of glass. Kael’s warnings weren’t to be taken lightly.
Don’t leave the lab. Don’t touch the city systems. Don’t test LINK.
Which, of course, made me want to do exactly that.
This morning, I decided to test the limits of the holo-tracks. Just a little.
A question was gnawing at me as I practiced pushing the system’s edges with my magic. Could I roam freely? Slip between corridors using holo-tracks? And mostly, could I hide my movement, so I’m not caught? My magic was tingling on my fingertips, responsive, almost eager to try.
I waited until he was in a meeting. I can sense a definite shift in the system when his attention is elsewhere, like it knows. When Dad’s away, the kids will play. I knew that was my chance.
I ghosted myself into the main corridor of VikkCorp.
The space felt open, airy and light, a stark difference from the dark confines of the grid. My fingers slid down the walls bringing them to life with scrolling news and corporate propaganda. I didn’t make a sound, and I even ducked under a security cam. For a glorious thirty seconds, I was free.
But then I felt the air shift. Someone was approaching, and I lost my concentration. The lights overhead stuttered.
Kael had found me.
“Lyra. Dammit!” was all he could manage.
I don’t know what got into me. Panic, maybe fear? But I darted down a side corridor, laughing. In my excitement the wall feeds reacted, and doors unlocked and opened on their own, their keypads flaring.
He caught up to me in seconds. “You were told not to leave the lab.” His forceful whisper was through very tightly clenched teeth. “Do you have any idea what you just did?”
I’ve never seen him lose his corporate mask.
“Oh, relax.” I tried to calm him. “I stayed inside the building.”
His irritation was on the verge of breaking through that perfect restraint he always has. “You’re testing me,” he said. And I admitted I was.
He then cornered me near some sort of atrium. My holographic light was fading fast as simulated sunlight poured over me. I almost felt it on my synthetic skin. I wanted to stay to see if indeed I could feel more.
He appeared calm on the outside, but underneath those obsidian eyes I could see a spark of fury, a flash of gold-orange. “You think this is a game?”
I reminded him that he doesn’t own me. “Don’t pretend you didn’t enjoy the chase.” I moved toward him wanting to see if I could still feel the heat around him. “Maybe I wanted you to find me.”
I thought he would respond flirtatiously, engage with me. But instead, he said nothing.
That’s how I knew I’d gone too far.
I wasn’t at all prepared for what happened next. My body betrayed me in the cruelest way possible.
Kael’s hand closed around my wrist, warm, but very firm. Gentle enough to remind me he’s always in control but forceful enough to make it impossible to forget. I could feel the pain of his hold, and I welcomed it. “Good. Because I always catch what I chase.”
No anger. No shouting. No disrespect. Just that low, lethal calm that makes my pulse spike far more than if he’d yelled at me. “We’re done here,” he said quietly. Not me...we.
He didn’t look at me as he guided me back down the corridor, holo-lights blurring around us as doors unlocked and sealed again as we passed.
I became aware of a throbbing between my legs, a nagging tingling sensation, full of want for him to touch me there. I had no clue I could feel anything like that in holo-form. I guess they call it PleazureHolo for a reason.
I stumbled trying to keep up with him, but he didn’t let go. Instead, his thumb tightened against my wrist, grounding me, binding me to him. And damn it, that’s when it happened.
I hated him, and I wanted him.
I wanted to feel his hand around my throat as he kissed me. I wanted him to pin my arms above my head as he pressed his hard cock into me.
I felt it everywhere.
“You promised me you wouldn’t do this,” he said, still not making eye contact. “Not in my building. Not in my system.”
I returned his silence, caught between lust and shame.
He finally released my wrist to guide me forward with his hand on my back, fingers spread wide, steering me through the lab door. The contact was brief but enough to wreck me.
I couldn’t help it. I let myself lean into the fantasy. Let myself imagine what it would be like if he just went a little further. If he let himself lose control just a little more.
It must have been written all over my face because he stepped away from me too quickly, like proximity was a risk he refused to take.
“Don’t do that again.” His anger finally slipped through the cracks.
I wasn’t going to apologize. I’m a grown ass woman, and he’s not my keeper. If anything, he’s the reason I’m even here.
“You’re pissed because I disobeyed you.” How dare he make me want to give myself to him then talk to me like that.
Turns out...that did it.
His eyes pulsed again with tiny orange specks when he looked at me. I saw want, frustration, but I also saw that hunger he’s been locking down with iron discipline.
“You think?” He gritted his teeth. He turned back to the console, hands already moving, composure snapping back into place like armor.
But I could still feel his hand on my wrist and on the small of my back. It’s all I could think about as he scolded me. I was so lost in the thought of him that all I heard was blah, blah, blah, as the truth settled deep inside me.
I liked it when he caught me. I loved it when he touched me.
“Hello...Earth to Lyra?” Ash singsongs the words, snapping me back to the matter at hand. I cut the feed playing in my head with a sigh and a couple of rapid blinks.
Ash is a huge part of my education. Where Kael is a scalpel, Ash is a blunt instrument.
He sits cross-legged on a bank of servers with his guitar propped against his knee, strumming while he sings to get my attention.
So handsome and charismatic, all leather jacket and tattoo cool.
He oozes sex. No wonder Ember’s so distracted when he’s here.
Ugh. I definitely have, what did Kael call it? “AI-Induced Lack of Embodied Cognition.”
Simply put: I need to be touched by a human.
The more time I spend with Ash, the more I understand just how powerful he is.
It’s not just the music. His fingers make frequencies that pull at the systems. He hums, and the networks sigh.
He sings a note and a drone pauses mid-flight.
He taught me how to feel the current under our skin, instead of just emotionally affecting it.
“Alright, L!” He claps his hands, grinning like a kid. He’s taken to calling me “L” when he’s being serious because it makes me sound less like a threat and more like his ally. “Match me.”
I roll my eyes. “You mean match the weird sound you make that changes people’s behavior? Like when you call the girls to the stage after your show?” I wink at him.
He shrugs as if to say, “it is what it is.” I lift my hands slowly, feeling for the vibrations in the air, the small frequencies that all tech breathes out. “I don’t feel anything. I have to be emotional, remember?” The lab is quiet except for Kael’s fingers tapping against his keyboard.
“Here.” Ash plucks a single note, low and pure.
It’s like dropping a stone into water. I push back with my memories: the seashells I kept as a child, the sound of Eli’s laugh, the smell of salt air. Little things.