Aren doesn’t even get to finish his sentence.

  The nearest Sentinel raises his incapacitation pistol, visor flashing as it syncs to his fake bracelet. My bag hangs from his shoulder, Sael’s black cube a hard weight inside it, and Lix tenses at my wrist like he can feel the lock-on.

  A split second later, Aren’s bracelet erupts in a shrill BEEP

  The shot goes off.

  Aren throws herself sideways. The flux bolt detonates a shop window behind her in a white flash that bleaches the world of color. The glass doesn’t shatter; it powders, falling as a fine, slicing snow.

  Splinters snag in my hair and rake the back of my neck. Something stings along my cheek.

  On my wrist, Lix snaps awake, his pixel?fur bristling as his HUD?eyes flare warning orange.

  The mall’s skylights flood with amber reflections.

  Skylume beacons.

  Halos of slow, inevitable condemnation.

  Around us, storefronts begin to seal, shutters grinding down over bright displays.

  People slow, then stop. Heads tilt up to the amber light. A few phones come up. Someone finally screams.

  “They locked the elevators,” Aren pants, hauling herself upright as steel grates slam down with a heavy rattle.

  “Freight zone. Move!”

  I don’t hesitate.

  I grab Maya’s wrist and drag her after me. Lix flickers at my heels in a trailing smear of pixels, his tail snapping between warning icons as he highlights exits I’m too panicked to register. My shoes skid on polished tiles as we sprint past still?open kiosks, transactions frozen mid?gesture.

  Vendors drop to the floor. Hands raised. Bracelets offered like prayers.

  The Sentinels don’t shout warnings.

  They open fire.

  Flux pistols discharge without urgency, methodical, tracing blue lines that carve the air. There’s no crack of gunfire, only crushing pressure, like reality itself contracts around each bolt.

  A shockwave passes too close.

  My mouth floods with copper, sharp and electric, like biting a live wire.

  A beam grazes a civilian’s shoulder.

  The man lets out a strangled scream. His jacket blackens on contact, fabric shriveling, and the flesh underneath begins to blister and swell.

  The reek of cooked meat slams into me, obscene and hot, riding on top of the flux ozone.

  Lix glitches, his fox?form fracturing into static for a heartbeat before snapping back together, ears pinned flat. A low error chime rattles through my skull.

  The man crumples to his knees, fingers clamped around his arm. Skin peeled back in wet, red plates, dark blood seeping through and dripping onto the white tiles.

  His bracelet flashes a furious red.

  Around him, the crowd breaks.

  Kids start wailing, high and shrill. Adults shove without looking, faces washed blank with terror as they slam into each other trying to get away. Someone goes down and vanishes under a tangle of legs.

  Voices shred into a single, ragged noise.

  “Move—”

  “The kids—!”

  “Don’t push—”

  UNREGULATED FEAR

  SCORE DECREASING

  The number plummets faster than the blood spreads across the floor.

  No one helps him. No one dares.

  A Sentinel strides past without even glancing down.

  Collateral damage on is acceptable.

  Aren yanks Maya and me toward a service corridor.

  Above us, a Neraj Sol holo?banner still loops a soft, reassuring slogan about collective safety.

  Blue bolts lance straight through the projection, scorching the wall behind, but the smiling message keeps playing.

  We reach the freight zone.

  Aren rips off a safety panel and slams his burned wrist against a maintenance terminal. Metal hisses under his touch.

  “Stay in the blind spot.”

  He sends a raw signal. Unfiltered. Illegal.

  A dull whump

  Then a blast of ozone?thick smoke erupts, dense, prismatic, burning in the throat. It swallows the lights, smothers the cameras, makes nearby drones cough and wobble in the air.

  Four silhouettes step out of the murk.

  No network signatures.

  No IDs.

  Nothing to log.

  Layer?Zero Unit.

  Aren’s fake bracelet still clings to his wrist, its display dead except for the occasional glitch of static. Jax’s band is scratched and dim, frozen on a score that never updates, Ivo’s display crawls with corrupted symbols, and Zera runs a stripped?down module wired into her tools rather than into the network.

  Mara takes point. Her heating blade spits to life with a shrill whine. She slams it into a metal railing; the steel slumps, runs, and then hardens again into a warped barrier that seals off the way behind us.

  Around her wrist, a blackened metal ring still ticks faintly under the scorched surface, a half?burned bracelet the system can read just enough to fear and never quite erase.

  Ivo sprints past, already jacked into a bank of security terminals. Sliding doors all around us go haywire, opening and slamming shut at random, nearly crushing panicked shoppers.

  Jax plants himself as rear guard, back to the wall. His pale eyes sweep the blind angles. He smiles. He waits.

  Zera is already on her knees at a torn?open panel. Fingers stained with conductive ink dart across a raw debug interface.

  Camera feeds blink, stutter—then drop to black.

  “Sector D through F blind,” she murmurs. “Not for long.”

  A Sentinel punches through the smoke.

  Too close.

  He raises his weapon.

  My world snaps down to vectors.

  Lix overlays faint trajectory lines in neon across my vision, numbers cascading past his muzzle as he tries to keep up with the chaos.

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  Distances. Angles. Trajectories. Everything overlays in my head. A ghost reflection.

  Half a second of doubt.

  Enough to make the math not quite perfect.

  “Maya, down!”

  I grab her and hurl her into the narrow open vent. Metal grinds against her back; the breath tears out of her in a yelp. A heartbeat later, a flux bolt erases the section of wall where I thought her head would be.

  The impact bites closer than I planned.

  No explosion.

  Just deletion.

  In that instant, I understand:

  the Sentinels aren’t here to detain anyone.

  They’re here to erase an anomaly.

  I hit the floor, scramble for the black device Sael gave me. My fingers shake. I fumble the first strike at the door sensor, curse under my breath, then slam the tool in the right spot.

  A savage short.

  The door shrieks open.

  Another Sentinel swings into view, weapon already coming up.

  I shove Maya deeper into the vent just as a bolt slams into the wall. Heat washes so close I feel my hair crackle and the skin at the nape of my neck tighten.

  Jax moves.

  His shoulder crashes into the Sentinel, driving him into the concrete with a wet crunch. The impact rattles the wall.

  Something gives in the man’s throat; a thick, choking gargle replaces the scream that never makes it out.

  Jax keeps the pressure on a heartbeat longer than necessary, then steps back.

  The Sentinel slides down the wall, leaving a dark smear that runs and gathers in a spreading pool under our boots.

  “Move,” Aren growls.

  We fall back behind a shattered partition.

  I gulp air. My bracelet throbs against my skin.

  “We can’t stay together,” I get out. My voice shakes, but it holds.

  “If the main dome cameras catch all of us in one frame, I’m done. One link to the Silents and my score collapses. My mom goes with it.”

  Jax snorts.

  “Scared of scuffing that comfy little 4.0, kid?”

  I meet his eyes.

  “No. I’m scared for my mother. If I fall, she falls with me.”

  Zera finally looks up, eyes raw from screen?glow.

  “I’ve got a fifteen?second loop running on the surveillance servers,” she says. “Fifteen seconds where the system keeps replaying the same scene and thinks we didn’t move.”

  She tilts her chin south without bothering to stand.

  “Kai. South exit. Skyplaza. We’ll keep the Sentinels busy.”

  Aren nods at once.

  No argument. No sentimental look back.

  Layer?Zero Unit charges straight ahead.

  I hook my hand around Maya’s and cut right. Lix follows us.

  No goodbyes.

  Just tactical divergence.

  I haul Maya out of the vent.

  Lix reassembles at my feet in a trail of glitching fur, then vaults up to the edge of my HUD, overlaying red Xs on every transit icon in sight.

  We push through one service door, then another, and finally stumble into open air.

  We don’t even glance at the transit stations. Too many sensors. Too many lenses.

  Home isn’t far anyway.

  We spill into a narrow side street two blocks from the mall. The air bites colder here, heavy with fine grit and the tang of ozone.

  Lix perches at the corner of my HUD like a drenched fox, fur dimmed, his usual cheerful status pings replaced by a single, steady heartbeat icon.

  Behind us, sirens spiral away toward the sector where Aren is drawing fire.

  Maya is shaking uncontrollably. Her fingers are knotted in my jacket like letting go means dropping into a void.

  I ease her back against a damp wall—not to pin her, but to keep her anchored.

  “Maya. Look at me. Breathe.”

  She tries. It doesn’t really work.

  “They… they almost killed us,” she stammers. Her voice splinters.

  “We’re on some red list now, it’s over—”

  “No.”

  My voice comes out low. Edged. Too calm to be comforting.

  “To the system, we were just two panicked students running the wrong way. That’s it.”

  I tighten my grip on her shoulders, just enough to make sure she feels the pressure.

  “But if you talk, if you say their names, if you tell anyone what you actually saw… then yeah. We become terrorists.”

  She swallows hard.

  “You didn’t see anything,” I go on. “Just smoke. Alarms. People running.”

  “You don’t know that man.”

  “You’ve never heard of the Silents.”

  Maya is still trembling.

  “My score…” she whispers.

  I hesitate for a fraction of a second.

  Not long enough for the system to flag it. Enough for her to feel it.

  “Your score’s already shaky,” I say.

  “If they smell fear on you, they rewrite you. Like they rewrote my brother’s records.”

  The word hangs there.

  Brother.

  Maya doesn’t ask.

  She just nods slowly.

  Terrified.

  But clear?eyed.

  “Text me when you’re home,” I add. “Just… walk like we’ve known each other for years and today was nothing special.”

  She lets out a shaky breath that almost sounds like a laugh.

  “Sure. Just two normal classmates who had a bad day at the mall.”

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  The system just called me “normal”…

  and I know something in it has shifted.

  I step into the apartment with my heart still pounding against my ribs. Lix pads in behind me, metal paws clicking softly against the floor, ears low.

  The place is dim, thick with the familiar, suffocating smell of artificial fragrance.

  Mom, Sera, is sitting in front of the home interface. She finally looks up, more worried than angry.

  “You’re finally home, Kai. Your school sent a health notification this afternoon. They said you had to leave class because of a severe anxiety episode. Are you feeling any better?”

  I freeze.

  I’ve never had an anxiety episode in my life.

  It clicks, too neat, too convenient.

  Aren, one of his hackers, maybe even Nolan, has slipped a hand into the system. To Vyra, I’m not a threat. I’m a “fragile” student who couldn’t cope.

  “Yeah…” I mumble, dropping onto the couch. “It hit me out of nowhere. The noise, the crowd… I went for a walk to clear my head. Sorry I didn’t call.”

  She sighs, sadness flickering in her eyes.

  She’s probably thinking of Paul, and how the pressure always ends up cracking the men in this family.

  The wall display behind her flickers.

  The ad bleaches out, replaced by a Skylume news frame.

  [NEWS UPDATE – SECURITY INCIDENT]

  Overnight breach at K?17 Military Drone Fabrication Center, first reported to schools this morning, has now been confirmed.

  Three Sentinel units are currently listed offline.

  Preliminary analysis points to a low Resonance group.

  An unverified symbol resembling a slashed, stylized Z was logged at the scene.

  A news ticker glides across the bottom, calm and dry:

  [INCIDENT REPORT – SKYPLAZA MALL]

  Time:

  Status:

  Preliminary internal reports indicate an abnormal escalation in one hospitality sector (Café Parallax).

  No civilian fatalities have been confirmed at this time.

  Investigators are currently working to identify the individuals responsible for triggering the event.

  Citizens are advised to maintain regular activity. Irregular emotional responses may affect your score.

  Mom’s mouth tightens as she reads.

  “First a night attack on some drone factory, then half the day full of alerts on FluxPulse, and now the mall,” she mutters. “These low Resonance extremists… they never think about the people who just try to live their lives.”

  My bracelet suddenly buzzes hard against my wrist. Lix’s head snaps toward it, lenses contracting, a low warning hum starting deep in his chest.

  A priority Skylume notification slams over the alert in flashing red, flooding the room with harsh light.

  ADMIN ALERT: MANDATORY ORIENTATION

  Decision timer: 59 minutes remaining.

  

  Note:

  In my pocket, my personal phone starts vibrating as well.

  Twelve missed calls from Nolan.

  The system has decided I’m anxious, fragile, and almost out of time,

  and, somehow, that lie feels more dangerous than the truth. Lix presses closer to my leg, as if even a fox made of circuits can tell when the story is wrong.