The world narrowed to the cold, unyielding pressure of Marcus’s grip and the faint, hellish glow in his eyes. The gun was useless. I couldn’t shoot him. He was a victim, a puppet on strings of light and code.“Marcus, fight it!” I begged, pulling against his iron hold. “It’s me! Demi!”“Designation: Thorn. Status: Corrupted. Directive: Purge.” The words came out of his mouth, but the voice was all wrong—a flat, synthesized echo of his own.He began to pull me, not toward the city, but toward the dark, churning water of the river. The intent was clear, horrifying. A quiet disposal.I dug my heels into the mud, my mind racing, scrabbling for purchase against the sheer, nightmare reality of it. The protocol in me was silent, overridden by the garden’s stronger, alien signal. All I had was my own failing strength and a terror so complete it was a physical weight.His other hand came up, not to strike me, but to clamp over my mouth, cutting off my scream. His strength was immense, augmente
The silence after the screech was absolute. The only light was the faint, sickly glow from the elevator shaft, where the coalescing code pulsed like a diseased heart. The air itself felt charged, thick with a malevolent static.Eleanor’s breath was a shallow rasp in the dark. “Reaper,” she whispered, the word dripping with a dread I’d never thought her capable of. “She’s not just pruning. She’s scorching the earth.”A new sound began—a low, rhythmic thumping from the elevator shaft. Not mechanical. Organic. Like a massive heartbeat.Thu-thump. Thu-thump.“What is that?” I hissed, my gun aimed into the shifting shadows of the shaft.“The core,” Eleanor said, her voice hollow. “She’s not just in the systems. She’s rewriting them. Making a body.” She fumbled at her console in the dark, her fingers finding a manual override. A single monitor flickered back to life, showing a horrifying thermal image of the elevator shaft.A humanoid form of incandescent heat was forming, woven from the bl
The distorted voice hung in the air of the high-tech penthouse, a digital specter that sucked all the oxygen from the room. The garden is awake. The words were a key, turning a lock deep in the code of my very being. A cold, black-gold awareness surged through my veins, a sensation both terrifying and exhilarating.Eleanor stared at the comms console, her face a sheet of pale marble. The unflappable queen of the boardroom was gone. In her place was a woman facing a ghost.“Lina,” she breathed, the name a curse and a prayer.On the main monitor, the satellite image of Whitlock’s tower flickered. The external attack on its systems wasn’t just continuing; it was accelerating. Firewalls fell like wheat before a scythe. Security protocols were rewritten in real-time, their codes twisting into strange, thorny patterns that were horrifyingly familiar.“She’s not just targeting Whitlock,” I said, my voice sounding distant, filtered through the static now humming in my mind. I could feel it—th
The cold, humming purpose that had filled me shattered. The gun in my hand was no longer a tool; it was a dead weight. Whitlock hadn’t sent me to kill Eleanor. He’d sent me to die with her. To tie up both his loose ends in one bloody, deniable operation.The sound of booted feet and shouted commands echoed up the grand staircase. They were coming. Fast.Eleanor didn’t flinch. She simply watched me, her eyes calculating, waiting to see what her son’s weapon would do.I made a choice.I lowered the gun.In one fluid motion, I swept the heavy lead-crystal paperweight from her desk and hurled it through the large window overlooking the back garden. The glass exploded outwards in a cascade of shimmering fragments.“They’ll be covering the back!” I snapped, my voice cutting through the noise from downstairs.“Obviously,” she replied, her voice dripping with contempt. But she was already moving, surprisingly agile for her age. She pressed a hidden switch under the lip of her desk. A section
The message hung in the air of the command van, a digital ghost in the machine. *The thorn is ready.* I had thrown a switch inside myself, shutting down the fear, the grief, the love. All that remained was a cold, humming purpose. The Demi Protocol, online.Marcus stared at me, his expression a mixture of horror and awe. “Perez… what did you just do?”I ignored him, my eyes fixed on the phone’s screen. Seconds ticked by, each one an eternity. Had I misjudged? Was Whitlock’s offer already rescinded?The phone buzzed. A single word appeared.Excellent.Then, a data packet followed. Schematics. Blueprints. Security codes. A name and address.It wasn’t Whitlock’s penthouse. It wasn’t a corporate stronghold.It was a brownstone. A private residence in one of the city’s oldest, most moneyed neighborhoods.The target was Eleanor Ortega.A cold, sharp laugh escaped me, a sound that didn’t feel like my own. Of course. This was his move. He couldn’t get to Jeff directly, not after Eleanor’s spe
The words hung in the air, sucked of all sound by the van’s soundproofing. It’s the mother.Eleanor Ortega.The woman who had orchestrated this entire nightmare. The architect of our misery. She had just saved her son’s life in a blistering, suicidal display of violence and skill.My mind recoiled, refusing to process it. It was a trick. A manipulation. Another layer to her game.“No,” I breathed, shaking my head. “That’s impossible. It’s a double-cross. She’s taking him somewhere worse. She’s—”“The biometrics match,” Marcus interrupted, his voice still numb with shock. He tapped the frozen image on the screen. “Facial recognition, gait analysis from the run-up… it’s her. No doubt.”He rewound the footage, playing it again. The motorcycle’s insane swerve through the gunfire. The impossible strength to maneuver the gurney. The precise, covering fire that had pinned down the snipers just enough. It wasn’t the work of a corporate shark. It was the work of a soldier.“She was… she was on