#Ghosts in the Wire
#014
Pain bloomed behind Asher's eyes.
He woke in a haze of smoke and static, face down in broken concrete. Alarms wailed in the distance—warped, glitching.
The blast had fried the enforcers first. Their bodies sparked and twitched on the floor, neural stingers melted into their hands.
Asher staggered to his feet. His headset was cracked but still intact.
Small miracle.
He had to move.
The bunker's hallway stretched out before him, half-collapsed in places. Ash drifted through the air like black snow.
Asher stumbled toward the maintenance hatch. It hung open—pried apart from the blast. No sign of Eden or Juno.
Footsteps echoed behind him.
Not Bliss enforcers.
Something faster. Harsher.
He pressed himself into the shadows.
Around the corner came figures he didn't recognize.
Half-machine.
Human shapes wrapped in synthetic muscle and exposed wiring, faces covered in masks etched with ancient resistance symbols.
Ghosts.
Or at least, that's what the old stories called them—survivors of the earliest Bliss experiments. Broken. Forgotten. Dangerous.
One of them spoke, voice gravel dragged across steel. "Tracker found a flare signature. Somebody's alive down here."
Another sniffed the air. "Fresh memories. Good ones."
Asher's heart hammered. They weren't looking for enemies.
They were hunting memories to steal.
Silently, Asher edged backward—straight into a loose chunk of debris.
It clattered. Loud.
Heads snapped toward him.
No choice.
He bolted.
The Ghosts gave chase, moving with jerky, terrifying speed. They didn't run like people. They twitched forward, short bursts like spiders.
Asher sprinted down the ruined hallways, mind racing.
Think. Ghosts can smell fresh memory impressions. They'll track me no matter what.
He had to scrub his trail.
Up ahead, an old server room yawned open—half the racks still sparking from the mind burn blast.
Asher dove inside, yanking down a tangle of melted cables, slashing them open on jagged metal.
He wrapped the smoking wires around his hands—ignoring the burns—and pressed them to the walls, flooding the corridor with static noise.
The Ghosts reeled back, hissing.
For a heartbeat, Asher thought he had won.
Then one of them shrieked—and lunged straight through the interference.
Asher threw himself aside. The Ghost slammed into the server stack behind him, ripping through it like wet paper.
Not good enough.
His pulse pistol was dead, fried by the earlier blast.
All he had left were fists—and desperation.
The Ghost swung again. Asher ducked, grabbing a shattered metal rod from the floor, driving it upward into the thing's exposed wiring.
Sparks exploded.
The Ghost convulsed and dropped.
Asher didn't wait. He ran again, blood pounding in his ears.
Somewhere deeper in the labyrinth of Deep Storage, he could feel it—an exit.
Eden. Juno. They'll be heading for the surface.
He had to find them before the Ghosts—or Bliss—caught up.
Behind him, more shrieks filled the air.
The past wasn't dead.
It was hunting him.