“Kael?” Her voice trembled. “The news said… something happened. They said we’re all preyme now. Forever. Is that good?”
She stared at him for a long moment. Then she smiled—not the bright, ignorant smile of before, but something deeper. Something that had chosen to stay.
“It means,” he said, “you get to keep your drawings.” preyme
She blinked. “Why? Everyone’s doing it.”
“Don’t sign up,” he said, voice too sharp. “Kael
That night, Kael met with the Fragments—an underground network of preyme who’d learned the truth. Their hideout was a decommissioned subway car, walls covered in hand-drawn maps of the city’s old data tunnels. Their leader, an old woman named Sef, had been processed fifty years ago. She was a ghost, technically. But somehow, a piece of her had survived. She called it her “shard.”
But the virus needed a carrier: a living neural stream to smuggle it past the firewalls. Kael volunteered. Forever
The alarms stopped. The drones froze, then turned and flew away, repurposed.