The warnings were background static, a hum that had settled into my skull like tinnitus. Always there, flashing neon on the edge of my vision, flickering like a broken bulb that just wouldn’t quit. I’d considered taking the System in for a replacement, back when FedClinics still existed. But the War ended that. Now, the soldiers who’d crawled out of the fire were either dead or had upgraded, and the clinics lost their funding. Even if I did find someone to swap out the guts, the price tag was enough to make you sick—not that there’d be much left of me worth keeping afterwards.
Movement caught my eye at the far end of the alley. A flicker in the dark, a shadow shifted, and there she was—Sarah. Her eyes met mine, wide and bright, like she was seeing straight into me. Her hair hung loose in a braid, messy like it always got no matter how many times I tried to make it neat.
“Dad.”
Her voice cut through me, slicing past bone and muscle to bury itself deep in my heart. A word like a wound, and then she was gone, swallowed back into the dark.
A glitch. A Ghost. That’s all she was—a memory fragment seared into the System. A burn mark on the synapses, an echo that tech could never quite scrub out. She’d pop up from time to time, like embers that refused to die after the fire had gone cold. Replace the System, they said, and the glitches would stop. But replacing the System would mean losing her—losing the last parts of her that I still had.
Sure, my rig was outdated. Everyone else had moved on to the new models long ago—sleeker, faster, loaded with Grid sync capabilities, user-friendly interfaces, and hell, maybe even a coffee app if you asked nicely. But this one? This one was built for the kind of work I do. Heavy, clunky, unrefined. Just like me. It was military-issue tech, a relic from the War, a direct line for orders, a threat assessor, a field ops tracker—simple, functional, brutal. Perfect.
It even knew how to read people. Not true AI, not since the laws got passed—since people decided giving machines a personality was a step too far. Highly illegal, they said. Unethical. Dangerous. So the Systems stayed cold, calculations without compassion, processing without perception. Clever programming, sure, but no spark, no soul.
The new models promised better Humanity retention—less bleed-out, more “optimized for balance” garbage. Balance wasn’t what I needed. I needed something that could take a hit, keep running. This System? It could handle whatever I threw at it, no questions, no complaints. And I wasn’t planning to Cast, not ever.
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Casters—don’t even get me started. Pulling raw aether from the Otherworld, burning their own humanity away, bit by bit, as if they could earn it all back in the end. People talk about Humanity like it’s currency—spend it on tech, or spend it on demons. Either way, it runs out. Me? I’ll stick with the metal and wire, thanks. Wasn’t like I had much humanity left to lose, anyhow.
Something shifted in the darkness ahead.
“Hear that?” Jac asked nervously.
“I don’t hear anything,” Jean replied. My retinal enhancers adjusted, zeroing in on the source of the noise.
I lifted my hand with the universal sign for “shut the hell up.”
There was an eternity of silence, and then… something shifted again. A can rolled out from around a corner. Then there was the sound of claws on metal. A dumpster. Not too unusual to find lost demons rummaging for leftovers. But something was wrong. The sound was... wrong.
I signaled them to stay back and moved forward, every step deliberate, avoiding the slightest noise. Touching the ground, I confirmed it. More rift-soot. Except this time my hand was covered. This was no small fission.
I was a few feet from the corner when I felt something sticky under my feet. It wasn’t until the streetlamp flashed again that I saw it. Blood. Not the type of blood you wanted to see alone at night. Demonic pale blood, almost white. My breathing stopped and I froze. The streetlamp flashed again, and the carnage illuminated around me. I was standing in the middle of countless chunks of flesh, bone, and blood. This was the demon I was hunting—something had gotten to it before I could. I heard the sound of a low growl, scraping, and wet gnashing teeth in the darkness.
I slowly started walking backward toward the twins. Inch by inch, I moved back with the silence of a trained cat burglar.
“Hey! What’s taking you?” One of them shouted from behind me.
The alley went silent and my face must have turned pale as the moon.
I frantically held up my hand again, mouthing for them to be quiet. We stood there in silence for a heartbeat.
Maybe it didn’t hear them. Maybe it went away. Where are you?
As my body flew sideways across the street and slammed into the hood of an abandoned car, I got the answer to my question. Blood stained my shirt as adrenaline quickly numbed the pain. It was going to be a long, cold night. Too cold for this time of year. I should have brought my coat.