The rain hit like razors. Acidic runoff from the upper tiers of the city, sluicing down the crumbling high-rises, turning the street into a chemical swamp. My coat did nothing. The damp chewed through it, gnawed at my bones, left my cybernetics aching.


    North Wharf was dead. No foot traffic, no vendors, no idling autoscrapers. Just the sick flicker of half-dead neon reflected in black water. The city’s forgotten sector. A perfect place for someone to die.


    Theo Corbin lay sprawled on the pavement, his body a tangled mass of wrong angles, as if some vast, unseen hand had reached down and crumpled him up like bad code. The meat of him looked… glitched. Like reality had tried to reassemble itself and failed. His skin was colorless, translucent almost, like something preserved in a vat too long. His mouth hung open, frozen in mid-scream, but his throat was full of something black and wet. Not blood. Something else. Something that shimmered in the low light.


    I’d seen enough bodies to know when a job was clean. This wasn’t clean. This wasn’t even messy. This was wrong.


    A gust of wind funneled through the alley, bringing with it the stink of melted plastic and rotting circuits. I wasn’t alone.


    She stepped into the glow of a broken holosign, and for a second, I swore she flickered. Isolde. A witness? A murderer. A ghost in the machine.


    Her dress clung to her like liquid shadow, soaking up the neon glow instead of reflecting it. Her hair was twisted into a severe knot, sleek as carbon fiber. But it was her eyes that stopped me. Too dark. No reflection. No whites. Just depthless voids drinking in the light.


    “You shouldn''t be here,” I said, voice low.


    She tilted her head. The rain didn’t seem to touch her. “Neither should you.”


    My fingers twitched toward my piece, but something in me knew better. Knew that whatever Isolde was, she wasn’t the kind of problem a gun could solve.


    I forced myself to look back at Corbin. His limbs were arranged in a precise pattern, one I didn’t recognize but felt, deep in the marrow of me, was significant. Like a cipher just beyond my ability to decode.


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    “You saw,” I said. Not a question.


    Her lips barely moved. “I watched.”


    I swallowed. “Who did this?”


    She didn’t answer right away. She just crouched beside the corpse, her fingers hovering above his ruined skin. The black ichor in his throat moved—a slow, undulating shift, as if responding to her presence. My stomach twisted.


    “Not who,” she murmured. “What.”


    A single word.


    My body knew fear before my mind caught up. Some primitive part of me, buried under augments and data feeds, was screaming to run. To erase this moment from memory before it infected me, before I ended up like Corbin—another broken thing, rearranged in the name of something I would never understand.


    “What did this?” I managed.


    She finally looked at me. A terrible kind of sympathy in those abyssal eyes.


    “Something that sees us,” she said.


    A static hiss ran through my skulljack. The kind that only happens when something is listening.


    The air around Corbin’s body warped, just slightly, like a heat shimmer. A distortion. A rendering error in real-time. His fingers twitched. My breath caught.


    “Corbin found something,” she continued, as though none of this was strange. “Something buried beneath the system. Something… waiting.”


    My skin prickled. “Waiting for what?”


    She stood. Smoothed the fabric of her dress. The rain still didn’t touch her.


    “For the signal.”


    A low, thrumming sound filled the alley. Sub-audible. Felt more than heard. My HUD flickered, feeds scrambled. And for a fraction of a second, I wasn’t here anymore. I was somewhere else.


    A place of vast, impossible architecture. Of things moving in the dark, dragging themselves through layers of broken code.


    A place that had been watching me since the moment I’d stepped into this alley.


    The sound stopped. The city snapped back into place. My knees almost buckled. My breath came in ragged gasps.


    Isolde’s expression was unreadable. “You’re already too deep,” she said. “You felt it, didn’t you?”


    I tried to play it off, but my hands were shaking. “Felt what?”


    Her smile was sad. “The other place. The one between the lines.”


    I didn’t answer. Couldn’t.


    She started walking, heels clicking, moving like a shadow dissolving into the night. But before she vanished completely, she glanced back over her shoulder.


    “They see you now,” she said softly. “They remember you.”


    Then she was gone.


    And I was alone with the corpse, with the rain, with the feeling that something just outside of human perception had shifted—and was now staring directly at me.