CHAPTER 2: BREAKPOINT
271 Words
The corridor lit up with the flash of energy bolts. Rilo dove behind a support beam, dragging Cyra with him. The masked figure had backup—silent, fast, and heavily armed.
“Three shooters,” Cyra hissed, tapping furiously into the station’s dead comms. “If I can reboot the internal gravity field, we can buy ten seconds.”
Rilo nodded. “Ten seconds is enough.”
He yanked out his short-range disruptor and peeked around the corner. The shooters moved with precision—military, no doubt. But they underestimated one thing: this wasn’t Rilo’s first close-quarters skirmish, and Cyra wasn’t just a hacker—she was a tactician.
“Go!” Cyra shouted.
The hallway lurched. Gravity flickered. Suddenly, the mercenaries floated mid-air, limbs flailing. Rilo launched forward, spinning through zero-G, disabling two with precise shots. Cyra, meanwhile, used her magnetic boots to walk calmly across the wall, overriding the last attacker’s helmet with a surge of code that fried his neural HUD.
They crashed back to the ground as gravity resumed. Cyra groaned, wiping a scratch off her brow.
“Someone sent professionals,” she said. “And they knew we were coming.”
Rilo checked the tag on the fallen merc. EarthCorp issue—no surprise. But there was a second marking burned into the armor.
Cyra’s eyes widened when she saw it. “That’s the sigil of Project Echo.”
Silence hung between them.
“Rilo,” she whispered, “that’s the project where they took you. When you disappeared.”
Rilo’s jaw tightened. “Then it’s time I found out why they brought me back.”
- Writer
