71. Extract.exe #3
I can see the on-screen data flooding my peripheral vision. She’s suspended between the two worlds, golden threads of her EchoWeaver magic ensnared in LINK’s green-gray static.
Jett’s voice cuts through. “Kael, I have her soul!” He meets my gaze, maroon eyes glinting with a thought I can’t quite read. Pity? “She’s not meant to exist in just one world. The prophecy says part of her should stay.”
“What the fuck, Jett! Finish the job!” He’s making no sense. None of this makes sense. Prophecies are for those who believe in myth, in fate, in stories told by desperate people trying to survive an imperfect world. Not for me.
Certainly not for a man who built his own kingdom with blood, code, and discipline.
Lyra’s eyes remain open, but the light in her pupils begins fading. I throw everything I have left, every ounce of code, power, and rage into the tether for her.
“Taiyō! Come back to me!”
The flares from my CoreCaster energy engulf the room.
A spectrum of colored threads reaches for me like tendrils, her light merging and bleeding a rainbow of colors into mine.
For a heartbeat, we’re one source, a swirling vortex of color.
A giant pulse of energy erupts as Jett places his hands on her chest, and we’re both knocked backward.
“Lyra!” Jett calls to her.
Her chest rises once. Then stills.
I stumble forward. “Come on, Lyra. Don’t you dare give up!” I grab her hand, and to my surprise, it’s warm and faintly glowing.
She gasps, the grid around us glitching violently. Her magic ignites in response, a surge of gold threaded with magenta, and now dark red electricity wrapped in stardust. It meets mine head-on, and instead of intermixing, it consumes it.
My breath catches. Her magic is no longer dancing with mine. It’s swallowing, no, devouring it whole. My entire body weakens, my veins empty, like they’ve been drained. I manage to stand and lean over her.
“What the hell?” I whisper, but the words barely make it out. I feel completely drained, almost empty.
Lyra’s eyes fly open. Magic pours from her fingertips in beams of maroon, orange, gold, magenta, and now violet and green threads join them.
This is something new, something that feels much wilder, more infinite.
She’s consumed power from all of us. I feel her pulling on me, feeding on me.
Jett looks at his palms; he feels it too.
She shouldn’t be this strong. Not yet. Not like this.
Overwhelming, that’s how I’d describe the sensation. Jett and I are both feeling something...else. She isn’t just receiving our magic. She’s learning it, absorbing it. Processing it. Becoming more than either of us planned.
Jett’s dark, soul-eating eyes don’t budge.
He stares at Lyra’s body, then at me, a look of awe or perhaps even something bigger.
“You don’t get it.” His voice is hushed.
“This is supposed to happen. All of this. The LumenSeer foresaw it. She called it the BioConvergence. And it’s happening right in front of us. ”
My throat closes. “The what? BioConvergence? That’s complete bullshit!”
Jett steps back like he’s witnessing StarFell all over again.
“Your magic, her magic, they’re not merging.
” Concern is written all over his face. “She’s consuming yours.
The LumenSeer said the day would come when an EchoWeaver would swallow several magics at once and rise different.
That a woman will fall as a human and rise ascended.
No. Impossible. Unthinkable.
“That’s why I can’t finish this. Because if I put all of her back now? She won’t just wake up in a human-filled cyberbody, Kael, she’ll be changed in ways none of us can control.”
My heart slams in my chest. Prophecies, magic, fate. All the shit I never believed in, now ripping my world in half. A strange wetness fills my vision. Tears? It’s completely foreign. The last time I cried was at my mother’s funeral.
“I don’t believe in hocus pocus and all that LumenSeer garbage.” I sigh. “Jett, finish this. She needs to be whole. If we ever were the close friends I remember us to be, then please...” It sounds like begging.
It is.
“No.” He almost looks shocked at his own response. “She’s back, Kael, and your plan worked. She’s breathing. Be grateful.”
His expression freezes me in place. “What did you do?” I demand, spinning toward him.
He gives me a hollow grin. “I kept my promise to you. But you never asked me what it would cost.”
There’s always a fucking cost...
I look back down at Lyra. There's a faint shimmer of dark crimson light beneath her skin. Her eyes blaze with a new glow, and right in the center, like a captured sun, sparks of my orange magic flare inside her pupils.
My magic, hell, all of our powers, consumed by her in small chunks, but large enough to give her a newfound power and shape. Something entirely advanced beyond humanity and never seen before. The thought excites me. Science has yet to see this type of anomaly.
I really don’t know what she’s become. Something that could either save her from Vikktor, or save us all from the corporations? Maybe.
Or something that will disrupt and dismantle this entire city.
Probably.