Chapter 15 · free to read
HANDSHAKE 94%. Nine weeks ago she could not fly and think at the same time. Now there was no seam left between the two, and the number that measured how much of her remained was the price of it.
The hunter went tumbling into the Drift venting atmosphere, and for nine whole minutes it felt like winning. Then the hail came through, and it was the officer who had hunted her across four systems, stripped of her command and asking for help. The Curator had not lost anything on Yomi — he had simply stopped needing to hide. In twenty days he would put the master-key into the network core, and every memory the Reach still had would answer to one man. The severing wedge was in her jacket. Her own integrity readout said sixty-eight percent and falling. Whichever way this ended, one of the two people in this cockpit was going to be erased, and she had just refused, out loud, to decide which.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.