The door seals shut behind me. Another student is already waiting in the corridor, just outside the white room. He steps past me as it opens again, and for a second we share the same recycled air.?

  His High Tier uniform is almost like mine but not quite. The cut is sharper, the blue insets humming on a tighter grid, and the fabric carries that expensive sheen you only ever see in private academies designed to keep certain people away from everyone else. His eyes are still a fraction too wide, like he has just seen something he was not prepared for, but the fear does not last. The moment he notices me looking, it hardens into something colder. His chin lifts. His shoulders square. A practiced arrogance locks into place across his face, precise and controlled, a mask he has spent years perfecting for the system. There is a quiet, unspoken message in the way he looks at me:

  You do not belong in my air.?

  Our gazes hook for a heartbeat. His bracelet hums a little brighter, numbers flickering just above the edge of my perception. Standing this close, it is hard not to think about all the ways the system has already decided he is worth more than me.?

  Inside the room, a fresh header floats above the table, a new file queued, a new case to be stripped apart and calculated. A clean string of probabilities waits to be written under his name. Mine must have slid off the wall the moment I stepped out, already archived, already turning into data.?

  I am the one who looks away first. The corridor feels narrower with him in it, like the walls know which of us is supposed to take up more space.?

  Pieces of his uniform fall into place in my head. One of those High Tier private schools that campaigned against “level mixing” when they rebuilt the education grid. No shared corridors with lower averages. No breathing the same air as kids who drag the curve down. No risk of “deviation” by accident.?

  His door closes behind him with a soft, heavy click.

  The corridor exhales, but the air he leaves behind still feels owned by someone else.

  A woman is waiting for me near the exit gates, older, hair pulled back too tight, tablet in hand. Her badge reads Civic Clarification Wing in small, polite letters.

  “Citizen Virek,” she says, not quite smiling. “Your attendance justification has been sent directly to your school HUD. The absence will be coded as administrative.”

  A notification pings at the edge of my vision.

  Justified Absence – Civic Clarification

  Stamped:

  “Thank you,” I say, because that is what you say to people who can make your day worse with a single wrong click.

  I take three steps toward the exit before it hits me.

  Nolan.

  The club.

  We have been in that club for almost a year now. It does not matter if you love it or hate it; you need the points. You miss too many scheduled activities, you let your score slide without building it back up, and the system does not care about your excuses. It just calculates.

  I picture Nolan waiting in the studio, checking the member list, watching my name stay grey.

  I do not want to see the notification he is going to send me later.

  Outside, the air feels different but not exactly fresher. I step out onto the plaza in front of the station.

  SECTOR VY 3 – CIVIC CLARIFICATION WING

  The words scroll politely along a holo arch above the door, as if this place is just another public service and not a building you are called to when the system wants to look closer at your life.

  I cross the tiles and follow the flow of people toward the bus lines. A Skyline bus docks with a soft hydraulic sigh, its doors folding open like a mouth.

  Line VY 3 to VY 2 – NovaHelix High School

  Perfect.

  I tag in with my bracelet and slip into a seat near the middle. The cabin smells of fabric cleaner, tired bodies and the faint metallic tang of charging ports. Outside, sector numbers slide past in neat white characters as the bus glides forward.

  We make it three intersections before everything jerks to a halt.

  There is no gentle slowdown. No polite announcement first. Just a sudden, sharp deceleration that throws everyone forward in their seats. The lights flicker once.

  Outside the window, a cluster of amber and red warnings blooms across the traffic grid.

  INCIDENT AHEAD – ROUTE BLOCKED

  SECTOR VY 2 BORDER – TRANSIT DISRUPTION

  People start to murmur, bracelets lighting up with fresh alerts. The bus hums again, but it does not move.

  Bodies shift. Irritation rises in waves now that everyone has been reminded how fragile “normal” really is. Bracelets glow brighter as feeds refresh, overlays stacking and collapsing in nervous loops.

  I lean back and raise my wrist.

  It rings once.

  Twice.

  My reflection stares back at me in the window, warped slightly by the glass and the shifting light outside. For a moment, it looks like someone else entirely, someone the system has already finished rewriting.

  Third ring.

  She answers.

  “Kai?” Her voice is tight. Not panicked. Controlled, like she is holding something in by force. “Are you okay?”

  “I am out,” I say. “They coded it administrative. I just… I wanted to check on you. Did they call you in?”

  There is the smallest hesitation, barely a breath.

  “No,” she says, a little too quickly. “Not like that. They did not take me to a station or anything. We just met on the way and went to the café in the Skyplaza. That is all I told them. I am at school now.”

  The bus murmurs around me, restless, but the sound feels far away.

  “What did you tell them?”

  “The truth,” she says. “That we met on the way and went to the café in the Skyplaza. That I did not see who started it or how. I told them what I had to say, and when they finally stopped asking the same questions with different words, they just told me to stay available. I am already at NovaHelix now.”

  Relief hits fast and sharp, like a breath I did not know I was holding, but it catches on something hard on the way out.

  “You are sure that is all?” I ask. “No Civic Wing appointment. No ‘preventive’ escort.”

  “Yes,” she says. The word lands heavier this time. “I am not in a white room, Kai. I am not sitting under their lights. I swear. I am at school, not with them.”

  There is a pause. The bus hums. Somewhere to my left, someone sighs loudly about the delay, as if the grid owes them personally.

  We both stay quiet for a few seconds. The café hangs between us, sharp and unspoken, like a word neither of us wants to say out loud while the bracelets are listening.

  Another silence stretches between us. The noise of the bus seeps back in: low conversations, irritated taps on glass, the soft chime of bracelets updating scores in the background.

  “I am supposed to be back at school,” I say instead. “Halo Club. Nolan is already tracking my absence. I know it.”

  She lets out a small, exhausted sound that almost turns into a laugh.

  “He lives for those notifications. I will talk to him, try to get him to calm down a bit. I will tell him I saw you, that you are okay, that it was administrative. Maybe he will stop refreshing the member list for five minutes.”

  “Yeah.”

  For a second, it almost feels normal. Then it fractures again.

  “If they call you again,” she says, her voice dropping, “if it is not just a visit at home next time, if they decide they want you in a room like the one they showed on the feeds… tell me. Do not disappear and let me find out from a broadcast.”

  “I will,” I say.

  The promise hangs between us, thin and fragile, while the warning banner over the frozen traffic grid keeps pulsing at the edge of my vision.

  I lower my arm and stare at the empty space where her icon was.

  The bus lights flicker again. Harder this time.

  Someone swears near the front.

  Points.

  The system ticking forward without waiting for me.

  And the Sael's cube.

  Not here.

  At home.

  The thought drags my attention inward, heavy and unfinished. That thing has been sitting in my room like a question I refuse to finish reading. Every day I ignore it, I pretend I am moving toward answers, toward my brother, toward something that makes sense.

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  I am not moving. I am orbiting.

  Maybe I should get rid of it.

  Maybe that is the only way to move.

  The bus lurches.

  Not a smooth stop. A hard one.

  People slam forward in their seats. A sharp intake of breath ripples through the cabin.

  Then someone screams.

  I look up.

  Two rows ahead, a girl is halfway out of her seat, her whole body jerking in sharp, ugly spasms. Her bracelet slams red, then amber, then red again, too fast, like the system cannot decide what kind of emergency she is.

  “She is having a seizure!” someone shouts.

  Bracelets light up all over the cabin. Feeds pop open in the air. In the corner of my vision, tiny icons spark to life as the system starts counting everything.?

  ASSIST REQUEST PENDING [+0.2]

  EMPATHIC RESPONSE DELAYED [?0.1]

  “I am calling emergency,” a man says, tapping at his HUD so fast his fingers blur. “It is not connecting—”

  “Do not touch her!” another voice snaps. “You could make it worse.” A small green tick appears above his band:

  LIABILITY AVOIDED [+0.1]

  “Recording,” someone says. A red REC symbol flares over their head. Their stream routes straight to FluxLine and FluxClip, tags already lining up:

  #SkylineGlitch #LiveIncident #VY2Border

  The air tightens.

  That pressure again.

  Not sound. Not light.

  It slides in behind my eyes, heavy and slow, like someone pressing cold fingers straight into my brain.

  And then my grey eye catches it.

  A blue haze, faint at first, shimmers into view. It hangs over the bus like heat over metal, wrapping around every passenger. It clings to wrists, to chests, to throats. It swirls around the girl in thicker waves.

  It pulses.

  I watch it throb in time with the beat under her skin. With every pulse, the HUDs around me twitch.

  ALERT ENGAGEMENT SPIKE [+0.3]

  DISTRESS SIGNALS CLUSTERING [+0.5]

  My stomach drops.

  The system is not just watching.

  It is feeding.

  The thought does not come as a sentence. It slams into me whole. The haze swells again. With each beat, it seems to drink in every flinch, every shout, every fast breath in the cabin. It is eating the panic.

  The pressure builds harder inside my skull. My grey eye burns.

  I press my palms into my thighs, trying to breathe small, quiet breaths. Calm down. Slow your heart. If it is feeding on this, do not give it more.

  Someone shoves past me.

  “Move,” a voice snaps right by my ear. “I am a med student.”

  He drops to his knees beside the girl, loud and sure, already giving orders. His shoulder slams into mine and knocks me aside.

  “Back up. Give her space.”

  I stumble, barely feeling my own feet.

  The blue haze thickens, crawling closer, pressing in on my thoughts like a wet cloth over my face. Around me, little numbers keep moving:

  PROXIMITY TO INCIDENT [+0.1]

  INACTIVE RESPONSE [?0.2]

  SPECTATOR STREAM VALUE RISING…

  Too much.

  I do not think.

  I push.

  I grit my teeth and pull everything tight inside my head. The fear, the noise, the pressure behind my eyes. I imagine it all condensing into a single point in the middle of my brain.

  Then I shove it outward.

  A pulse.

  The world stutters.

  For a split second, the blue haze rips open around me. It tears like thin fabric, leaving a rough circle of clear air about three metres wide. Inside that circle, everything drops. Bracelets flicker, then go dark. HUDs cut out. The girl’s bracelet dies completely, its light vanishing like someone snapped a wire.

  Gasps burst through the bus.

  “What—”

  “My feed just died—”

  “FluxLine cut the stream—”

  In my vision, all the tiny icons freeze.

  SYSTEM ANOMALY DETECTED

  SIGNAL GAP:

  DATA LOSS – LOCAL CLUSTER

  The pressure vanishes.

  The girl’s body jerks one last time, then loosens. Her chest rises, falls, then settles into a rough, uneven rhythm. Color creeps back into her face.

  Silence hits the cabin like a physical impact.

  Then noise slams back in, louder, sharper, full of panic and anger.

  “What did you do?”

  “My score just dropped—”

  “I lost connection, that was trending—”

  New tags start to form above heads. The system tries to rewrite what just happened, to attach an explanation and points to it.

  MED STUDENT STABILIZES PATIENT

  The bus doors slide open with a soft chime that sounds far too normal for what just happened.

  The instant the lock disengages, I am on my feet and moving.

  My legs feel stiff, like I am walking through water, but I do not stop. People shuffle aside without really seeing me, still arguing about connection drops and score penalties and who deserves credit. No one tries to hold me back.

  “Hey, you!”

  The voice snaps across the cabin.

  I glance over my shoulder.

  The med student is up now. He is taller than I thought, long?limbed and lean, the kind of build made for late nights and long corridors. His shoulders are narrow but roped with quiet muscle under his uniform. Dark hair falls in loose strands to his jaw, pushed back just enough to reveal a pair of thin rectangular glasses that look too academic on someone who moves like that. Behind the lenses, his eyes are sharp in a way that has nothing to do with panic.

  “Hey, you. Middle row,” he calls. “Look at me when I am talking to you.”

  I do not.

  I step off the bus and into the grey light of Sector VY 3, my pulse still racing, the echo of that impossible gap buzzing at the edges of my senses.

  Behind me, his footsteps hit the pavement.

  “Hey! You, with the uniform—wait a second!”

  Mine hit faster.

  I do not run, but I walk like I am trying to fall out of the frame. The street between the transport hub and the campus grid is narrow and uneven, a strip of old stone squeezed between newer holo ads and camera towers. The further I go, the fewer Skylumes hang directly overhead.

  Shadows thicken. Angles sharpen. The street feels like it is narrowing around me.

  “Hey! I am talking to you!”

  The voice comes from behind, closer now.

  I turn a little too sharply and slam into someone. The impact jolts through my chest. A shoulder hits mine hard enough to sting. A bag swings. Something clatters to the ground. A couple of passersby slow down just enough to enjoy the collision.

  “Watch where you are going,” they snap.

  “Sorry,” I mutter, already peeling away, head down.

  By the time the irritation behind me fades into the general noise of the sector, I have folded myself into the crowd. To anyone watching from a distance, I am just another student uniform in a stream of moving colors.

  Somewhere behind all of this, the bus doors close. The route recalculates. The grid patches over the incident as if the gap in its signal never existed.

  It was not the only thing the system missed.

  Back in my room, miles of sector and concrete away, Lix has not moved from his spot on the edge of my desk. His tail is curled neatly around his paws, his gaze fixed on the darkest corner of the room. The apartment is quiet in the way Vyra rooms are never really quiet: the soft hum of filtered air, distant traffic, and the low, constant whisper of data sliding through walls.

  The Nullnode does not belong to any of it.

  It sits exactly where I left it, a smooth black cube on the shelf above my bed, drinking in light instead of reflecting it. For a long time, it is perfectly still.

  Then my HUD flickers, even though I am not there.

  For a fraction of a second, the home interface stutters. A line of text ghosts into existence in the corner of the room display, glitch?sharp and pale.

  NULLNODE DETECTED

  HUD CHANNEL:

  The name Aren blinks once. Then disappears.

  Lix lifts his head, ears pricking. For him, the room is layered. He does not just see furniture and walls; he sees heat traces, micro fields, scent maps drawn as thin, pulsing lines. His nostrils flare, sorting through what the filters missed. Beneath detergent, recycled air and the familiar trace of my skin, something else hums.

  Not smell.

  Not exactly.

  A fingerprint in the network. A pattern in the quiet space between signals.

  Lix slips off the desk and pads toward the USB key. The closer he gets, the more the rest of the room fades from his attention. Sounds thin out. Light dulls. The Nullnode is not emitting anything a Skylume can name, but it is not passive either.

  It is insisting.

  He does not know what it is. He only knows that it is tied to Kai, and to that brief Aren ping that slammed into some invisible wall. That is enough.

  He needs to bring it to him.

  He hesitates for one breath. Then opens his mouth and closes his teeth around the USB key.

  It is heavier than it looks. A dense, unnatural weight that his frame was not built to carry. But Lix is not just code. His body is made to slide between icon and machine, between interface and floor.

  He jumps down. His paws land with a soft thud.

  Ceiling cameras follow his movement, but their focus blurs as soon as the Nullnode enters their field, as if the system cannot decide how sharp it wants this object to be. In the hallway, the low security drone that sweeps the building every hour drifts past the door, scanners whispering through the air.

  Lix pauses, nose lifted, listening.

  He knows the paths the drones favor, the lines of sight where Skylumes see everything, the angles where the light is thick with data. He also knows where that vision frays: delivery shafts, back stairs, maintenance gaps, lazy blind spots no one bothered to fix.

  He chooses those.

  The apartment door unlatches with a soft click when he sends a borrowed authorization ping through the lock. He slips out, Nullnode clenched between his teeth. Two neighbours pass him in the corridor without a second glance; in Lix’s overlay, he is nothing more than a small, low priority icon.

  PET COMPANION – NEUTRAL

  Outside, the district is a stacked maze of balconies, bridges and narrow streets. Lix moves along the edges, hugging walls, slipping through seams of shadow, avoiding every camera cone his models can draw. When he has to cross open grid, he lowers his head and tucks his tail, just another household bot running errands.

  Underneath, another thread runs constant.

  Kai.

  Even without a live GPS ping, Kai’s scent is fresh. Sweat. Station air.

  City dust. The faint trace of the soap from that morning. Lix slows just enough to taste every layer of it in the air, his overclocked olfactory sensors drawing a map from molecules alone.

  He tags the trail, then overlays it with transit logs and public route data, stitching smell and numbers into a single path.

  Destination probability spikes around VY 3.

  Aren’s last broken ping held one more line before the Nullnode pulled it out of the network:?

  VY 3 – CENTRAL PARK

  Lix sets his route.

  He cuts through maintenance alleys where trash chutes hiss and old stone shows through newer resin. He squeezes under a half?locked fence. He follows the low hum of Skyline lines from a level below, then climbs back up where the street narrows and the Skylumes thin out. Their light is patchy here. Their attention stretched.

  It is not safe.

  It is better than the main road.

  He picks up Kai’s trace again near a junction and pushes forward, the Nullnode a dark, stubborn weight between his teeth.

  Ahead, the buildings open just enough to give him a view down a tight side street.

  He sees him.

  Kai, further down the narrow lane, shoulders hunched, walking too fast. Lix watches him collide with a stranger, bags swinging, voices snapping. The human shoves back and keeps going. Kai does not look behind him. He is already folding himself deeper into the street.

  Lix shifts his weight, ready to run to him, Nullnode pressed between his teeth.

  He never gets that far.

  A shape slides into the strip of light between two parked bikes. Boots. A coat. A hand. Fingers close around Lix’s ribs in one smooth, practiced motion.

  He twists, claws scraping skin and fabric. The grip does not move. The Nullnode drags at his jaw, a cold, metal weight shaped like a key, suddenly heavier, like it hates being touched.

  Only then does the system sharpen. Warnings bloom at the edge of the man’s overlay in Lix’s vision:

  UNREGISTERED COMPANION DEVICE DETECTED

  UNMAPPED HARDWARE SIGNATURE

  FOREIGN OBJECT – CLASS:

  The man chuckles once, low and wrong, like he has just found proof of something.

  “Look at you,” he murmurs. “Hiding in plain sight.”

  Lix forces his head around, searching for Kai. He catches one last glimpse of a familiar back turning the corner, already gone.

  He tightens his jaw on the key. It is the only thing he can still choose to hold.

  The man lifts him as if he weighs nothing and steps out of the alley, one arm locked around fox and Nullnode with the casual care you use for expensive equipment, not living things.

  The district keeps moving. Skylumes blink. Bracelets talk.

  No alert pings. No warning flashes.

  No one notices that, in the space of a few seconds, Kai has just lost the only thing that was still trying to reach him.