37. BlackOut
BlackOut
Playlist: The Void - Spiritbox
Kael
“Fuck!” I spin around and catch the air where Lyra was standing. My first reaction is to keep her here with me for as long as possible, to keep her safe. But the VoidChanneler has already taken what’s mine.
That’s a line that can’t be uncrossed.
I turn back to the blinking prompt. It stares at me with a harsh warning that my world is about to collapse...for the second time. The blackout isn’t just inconvenient; it’s a total loss.
One second, Lyra’s light is in my hands, trembling against me. The next, she’s gone. Pulled from my arms like a dream slipping through my fingers.
Gone.
Not fading or faintly glitching.
Just gone.
The holo-rig shorts out with a dying whine, sparks spitting across the penthouse.
I slam both hands onto the glass of my desktop, muscles trembling from the force of holding myself together.
My veins pulse hot, instinct telling me to tear the city open until I find her again.
Her saying my name in the throes of pleasure, still echoes in my ears.
A phantom squeeze lingers on my shoulder, where the shape of her hand rested against my skin.
Now, there’s nothing, just the cold emptiness of systems gone black.
I force myself to breathe, put my thoughts in order. But the fury hits me hard. Vikktor’s threats. LINK’s defiance. Eli’s void. A promise made to Lyra. Everything conspires to drag her away from me.
Pressure. I know it well. It’s no stranger, more like an old friend that never announces itself. Every time it returns, it brings something new to lose. This could cost me everything.
But here’s my truth: I don’t break when I lose something. I become the sword that cuts through whatever stands in my way. I will rebuild. I’ll tear this city down brick by brick, system by system, until she’s back in my arms.
The blackout stretches on, but my mind runs faster, already in triage mode. This is the cost of letting my control slip. This is what happens when the chaos I’ve spent my life containing decides it’s coming for me.
My hands clench at my sides. “Fucking Eli.” I spit his name into the stillness. His void surge dropped half the city into darkness, crashed the grid, collapsed DreamNet, demolished GameNet. Who knows what other systems have been destroyed? Mostly though, he dragged Lyra out of my reach.
And for what?
The monitors around me cycle through error scripts, trying to recover feeds. LINK will rebuild it. I can reroute, hardwire, bypass, do all the things to get into the back doors of my system. But not to her. Not tonight. She’s locked out. Who knows where.
My hands close into fists above my keyboard as I run through my training. Visualization of successful outcome, Kael-san. Master Kenji’s words repeat in my thoughts like an error message.
Eli is no longer a brother-in-arms. He’s an open fracture in my design. My enemy.
His power is erratic, untethered, more weapon than man. I should kill him, erase him like every other anomaly that threatens to topple my empire. Every calculation points to that.
But I promised her, an internal vow, when I rarely promise anyone anything.
The betrayal gnaws at me. Her voice flickers like a glitch. “Save Eli. Save me.” The hopeful look on her face still owns me.
I didn’t even think twice when I agreed. So unlike me. Now that vow is a knife lodged in my back.
I drag a hand down my face, breathe...hold. My pulse slows. I don’t have the luxury of empathy. Promises are chains. Promises get people killed. And yet I did it anyway. Anything for her.
If I break my word, I lose her. But not in body; she’s coded too deep for that. In trust. And if I lose her trust, she’ll never let me close again. Not really. Not the way I need.
Another breath...hold. The world narrows to a single, cold point in my vision. Regret tastes like metal in my mouth. I sit with it for a moment.
The dim light of my screen reflects on the glass desk, casting tiny iridescent spots across my face. The promise doesn’t stop my mind from cataloging options, brutal, clean options that end the threat of Eli.
Clarity. I get up and move before any more violent thoughts catch me.
Rage fuels my swiftness as my hand finds the rack where my blades hang, fingers closing around the hilt of Kenji’s katana.
The handle feels cool in my grip, the weight of it reminding me of the wisdom I know to be true: cut and something dies.
I twist in one fluid motion and tear it through the monitor. One strike.
I walk over to the desk patiently. What remains of the monitor is a loop of Eli’s void signature pulsing, laughing at me, as systems come back online. LINK’s preservation flag flashes beside it. She’s busy fighting fires for me.
The lights stutter and return, the feeds on the wall coming slowly back online, like a drowning man choking for air. LINK runs orders from the CIC feeds; they scroll as the agents type:
CIC COMMAND...NEUTRALIZING ANOMALY...CONTAINMENT INCREASED...NO KILL ORDER...COUNTERBALANCE INITIATED
I don’t have to do a damn thing. Vikktor is already issuing orders for a neat end to a messy problem.
I close my eyes and raise my sword again.
Time pauses. The blade catches the light in a thin, sharp line.
My arms tense, veins emerging from my forearms as I bring the katana down on the glass desk.
For a heartbeat, I hold my breath. I hear the sound of my own blood pumping.
The monitor falls as sparks scatter across my bare chest. A thin smell of ozone wafts into the air.
I let the sword hang in my hands and close my fingers around the hilt until they sting, the blade trembling in my hand.
The front door beeps four times then clicks.
Someone entered the keycode. My training kicks in as I slide into the corner, becoming one with the shadows.
The door opens slowly to the emergency lights of the darkened hallway.
I turn, raising the blade in my hands, red in the whites of my eyes, and wait.
Ash fills the threshold, damp leather jacket dripping on my carpet. He stops abruptly when he sees the sword, throwing both hands up in surrender. He squints to look in my eyes. “Shit, Kael!” He ducks as if I’m going to remove his head in one fatal blow.
“Ash,” I reply flatly, my voice not my own, just a sound coming from a vessel. I lower the sword like a broken man going through the motions.
Ash steps forward without flinching. “You planning to re-enact samurai porn, or are you going to put that thing down, put a shirt on, and talk like a functional adult?”
Right back to humor. How nice for him.
Numbness.
I can only stare at him, adrenaline still flooding my system. It freezes me in place. My head doesn’t move, but I squeeze the katana just to feel something.
He grins as he slowly walks toward me, snapping his fingers.
“Hey! You in there?” A wave of his hand.
I feel the air hit my face, but I remain stoic.
“Use your words, Kael.” He plows right in and throws his wet jacket over my leather sofa.
“You always did like a dramatic entrance.” He looks at the sword, then at me. “Looks heavy.”
If I were a program, I would be stuck in a virtual loop. He casually strolls over to my corner office and whistles at the shards of monitor and heaps of broken glass. “Damn, boy. You need to get laid. That’s some serious sexual frustration.”
I’m still paralyzed from the rush of cortisol. My arm twitches, and just because I feel like being a dick, I arc the blade in a clean, dangerous line. Ash, who’s been in alleys with knives in his face, coolly leans and dips, like he trusts me not to touch him.
“Careful, mall ninja.” A half a second later, I realize he’s close enough that the tip of my sword is an inch from his throat. He’s casual but frozen in place. I remain still, calm.
He places both hands on my forearms. “Snap out of it, Kaze.” He quietly steadies the weapon. “Put it away.”
My voice still doesn’t sound like my own. It comes out deep and clipped. “What do you want?”
Ash lets the silence grow until it becomes a thing you can’t ignore. Without his usual swagger, he responds. “I think we both know who did this.” He motions to the windows, half the city still dark. “Eli’s location. When he did this, I found him.”
My body goes taut. “Where exactly?”
His eyes flick to my broken monitor and back to me.
“Top-east corner of the tower. Some sort of lab hidden at the end of a maintenance hallway. I’ll need a schematic of the building.
” He lowers his voice, deliberately. “I kind of knew a general location earlier but couldn’t really be exact.
” He shrugs. “But I’m not stupid. Vikktor’s ears are everywhere in that lab.
I sure wasn’t going to do a big reveal there. Duh.”
He flops down on my sofa, soggy boots resting on my coffee table. Heathen.
I finally feel like I can move. I place the sword neatly back on the rack and grab a crumpled T-shirt from the floor of my makeshift dojo. “You knew. Why didn’t you tell me?” I slide into the sleeves, the scent of fresh ocean and amber sun wafting. Lyra.
Ash shrugs again, the motion casual and unbothered.
“Because I wanted to be sure. I had to be sure it was definite before I put you into another war you couldn’t come back from.
Because you’re reckless when you’re challenged, dangerous even.
” He motions to the wall of weapons. “Stabby.” He shivers dramatically.
The word hits like a stone. “I promised her.” I sit next to him, arms resting on my knees.
“And you meant it.” His voice softens in a way that makes my skin crawl.
“Which is why I’m here. Not to lecture, not to hassle you, but to help.
” He leans forward, a move that’s both familiar and intimate.
He taps my temple gently. “This up here? It’s powerful.
You promised a girl something, Ryudon. You can’t keep that vow with violence.
You keep it with a plan from that supercomputer brain of yours. ”
I pull back, smoldering. “You think we can get to him? Rescue him?” I really don’t want to. I was taught to do the right thing, but if I stay true to myself, my gut reaction is to erase the anomaly with a swift call to the CIC.
Ash’s grin returns amid the seriousness.
“I locked in on Eli’s resonance right before he surged.
He’s weak but near hardware; maybe some type of magic containment.
He’s bleeding into system partitions, exactly where you don’t want him going or Vikktor looking.
I can get us to him, but it’s going to be messy.
” He leans back, helping himself to last night’s glass of whiskey from the coffee table.
He winces at the burn. “I have no idea what we’ll find, but I do know we can’t just cruise out the door with him like we’re going to lunch. ”
He walks over to my bar and pours two more vintage whiskeys into crystal glasses.
He hands me the glass and continues, “When you get everything back online, we’ll need LINK to do a threat assessment and come up with a jailbreak for whatever Vikktor is doing to hold Eli.
” We both toss back the glass. “But there’s a cost.”
I swallow. The familiar burn travels down my throat, finally bringing my own body systems online. “There’s always a cost.” My laugh is humorless.
“Yeah.” Ash’s face is serious for a change.
“Bro, I get it, he’s trashing your hard work, your reputation.
You probably want to kill him right now.
I won’t stop you. But if you want to bring him back alive, or alive-ish, to Lyra and fulfill that promise, then you need me.
And you need Ember. You need to let me do what I do.
” He cocks his head. “And you need to admit you can’t do this alone. ”
I get up and pour another, the brown liquid flowing into the glass like the last of a dying sunset. How apropos.
“We need some serious fucking Scooby Gang energy!” He smacks the tops of his thighs excitedly.
Not the vintage cartoons again. Ash seriously needs to do something besides watch one-hundred-twenty-year-old shows for kids in his spare time. I roll my eyes.
My voice is whiskey rough. “Why? Other than Lyra, why should we help him?”
His gaze goes distant for a second, synapses flickering under his eyes.
“Because we were there, Kaze. Because he’s a kid with a giant hole of magic where his heart should be.
Because you didn’t learn how to keep people close, and neither did I, and I don’t want you to lose her because of it.
” He steps back the last few feet, freeing the air between us.
“Pick your poison: Let them kill him and sleep tight alone in your elite penthouse, or save him, get the girl, sleep with her in your elite penthouse”—he raises his glass, gesturing for me to refill it—“but wake to a war. It’s your call, Brother. ”
I stare back at the man who used to be the boy I dragged out of alleys. My mind flashes back, reticent. Ash and I at sixteen...
The fight had gone bad. We’d taken on men we shouldn’t have: older, armed, ruthless. He was on the ground, blood at the corner of his mouth, eye swollen shut, laughing like a fool even as his ribs rattled with pain.
“Stop moving,” I told him, pressing my hand down to feel if anything was broken.
“I don’t, ahh...think that’s how medicine works, Kael.”
Our buddy Jett came up behind me, touched my shoulder, but said nothing. I felt a scorching heat under my palm as the bruising faded. The purpled flesh lightened, bones knitting faster than they should have. Ash went still, eyes widening.
“What the hell was that?” he whispered.
I didn’t answer. I didn’t know. I just pulled him to his feet and told him to keep walking. We never spoke of it again. But he never forgot, and neither did I.
I come back to reality, just in time to tip back the whiskey. This must be how Lyra feels toward Eli.
I choose to fight. Not for him. For her.
“I’ve got to get this system back online. I’ll tell Ember to meet us in an hour at the lab.” My throat tightens at the thought of what lies ahead of us.
“Lyra’s gone again. I have to get to her first; that’s our priority. Then Eli.” My voice drops, frustration reshaping it. “And don’t keep shit from me again, Ash. Don’t make me regret trusting you.”
He laughs softly, a sound that’s half-relief, half-promise. “You never have, Kael. Even when you said you did.”