Neon Ghost

Chapter 7: The Sunken Zone

Water dropping. *Plink. Plink.*

The "Sunken Zone" at the bottom of Neo-Tokyo. A dead subway station. Now, just ankle-deep black stagnant water. The air choked with the stink of rust and black mold.

Adrian knelt before a rusted ticket machine, staring dead at his reflection in the water.

Left eye. Dark red. Bloodshot. Belonging to Adrian Shaw, human.

Right eye. Ghost-blue. Ice cold. Microscopic data streams cascading in the pupil. Belonging to Lena.

His trembling right hand came up. Thumb and forefinger dug into the rim of his right eye. Nails sinking into the soft, wet meat between the eyeball and the socket.

"Are you out of your mind?!" Isabella lunged, clamping his wrist like a vice. Her knuckles bone-white. "The optic nerve is fused to the brainstem! You gouge that out, you sever your own brainstem!"

"It's looking at me..." Adrian's voice fractured, leaking suppressed panic. "Isabella, it's looking inside my head. I can feel her digging through my memories..."

*"Don't be so rough, darling."* Lena's voice didn't just hit his ears. It detonated directly across his visual cortex.

Adrian's right eye snapped into focus against his will. The reflection in the water warped.

The dead subway station vanished. Overwritten by a sun-drenched afternoon three years ago. Lena in a white dress on the beach, wind whipping her hair. She looked back over her shoulder, smiling.

*"Remember this? You said you'd take me away from Neo-Tokyo. You broke your promise, Adrian."*

"Shut up! Shut up!" Adrian clutched his head, slamming his forehead against the metal casing of the ticket machine. Blood sheeted down his face, dripping into the black water.

Hallucination and reality strobed in his right eye. Sunlight and neon. Beach and sewage. Lena's smile and Isabella's terror. His brain felt like two radios jammed on different frequencies, tearing his gray matter apart.

Isabella didn't speak. She let go, ripping a black, wire-frayed neural dampening patch from her med-kit.

"Bite down."

She roughly peeled back the skin around his right eye, slamming the patch hard onto the neural node above the socket.

*Zzzzt.*

The stink of cooking flesh. The ghost-blue light flickered twice, then died like a blown bulb. Pure, absolute dark. Half his world just ceased to exist.

Adrian gasped, collapsing backward into the filthy water. The voices and images in his skull were brutally severed, leaving only a ringing, dead silence.

"Buys you twelve hours." Isabella slumped against the ticket machine, hands painted in his blood. Voice dead. "The patch is frying your local optic nerves. In twelve hours, if I don't swap it, your right hemisphere will liquefy from the overload."

She looked at him. Pure, unadulterated despair. "Adrian, you're being eaten. Meat and soul. We can't beat Omega."

Adrian stared at her with his one good eye. He fished out the brass Zippo.

*Click.*

The weak flame painted their battered faces in warm orange.

"Promised I wouldn't make you bag my body," Adrian rasped. Soft, but iron-clad. "Victoria said Lena's 'intuition' is the final piece of the Hive Network. That means the thing in my skull is the only weapon that can fry the Advisor."

He snapped the lighter shut. Dark again.

"Take me to Zero."

Isabella froze. "The dark-net ghost? Nobody knows who he is. Nobody even proved he exists."

"He exists." Adrian stood up. His lone left eye gleamed with feral ruthlessness in the dark. "Because right before he died, Ray sent the Sector 4 blueprints to him. He's the only one who can get us in."

---

Chapter 8 Hook

Two hours later. Deep in the Sunken Zone. An unmarked cyber-scrap yard.

Isabella shoved the heavy iron door. No lights. Just rows of ancient servers blinking sickly green in the dark. Cooling fans humming like a massive hive of wasps.

"Wrong address, doc." A voice heavily modulated through a cheap vocoder bled from the shadows. "Nothing but scrap here."

"Zero." Adrian stepped up, slamming a blood-crusted memory chip onto the console. "Ray's relic. Trade for a way into Sector 4."

The server hum died instantly.

From the gloom, a frail silhouette rolled out on a motorized chair. No legs. No arms. No face. His entire head was replaced by a massive, archaic server rack bristling with cooling fins.

"Ray's dead?" The flat synthetic voice ground out from the rack. "Then who's going to tell me why the 'Ghost' in your neck is using my encrypted frequency to broadcast our coordinates to Omega?"

***