02 — The Hand-Off

April 17, 8:01 PM (D7 Sub-Lines)

Chez had two voices: the one for emergencies, and the one for pretending there wasn’t one. Right now, he was leaning hard into bravado, a bright lie stretched over a slow panic.

“It’s just a relay,” he said in her ear, his tone playful enough to be fake. “You plug; you unplug. You don’t marry it.”

Leila ducked under a pipe dripping rust and rainwater, her boots skimming across slick tile. The corridor sweated condensation like the city was trying to leak itself dry.

“Do I at least get dinner first?” she muttered.

“I’m a snack-machine romantic,” he shot back. “You know this.”

She almost smiled. Almost.

---

The relay nest waited like a ribcage, metal bones corroded and stubborn. She slid her ring blade into a seam and coaxed it open. Metal complained like it had opinions but relented just enough to show its throat. She fed the drive home.

The terminal purred awake.

Static scattered across the screen, then folded into shape:

SIMEX MIRROR LIFT – AUTH OVERRIDE

File trees unfurled like wet paper flowers. Bandwidth climbed so fast her teeth ached just watching the numbers.

Then the thumbnail bloomed.

An oval face. Skin too pale, hair drifting like sea grass in blue gel. Pads blinked steady on her throat and chest, green lights that promised a heartbeat even if no one asked her.

The camera drifted. Another pod. Then another.

Rows.

The audio lagged, like it didn’t want to arrive. A hiss. Breaths woven with machine hum. Then a voice—flat, clinical, professional boredom trimmed down to surgical sharpness.

“SimEx canvas separation, host eight-H—stand by—”

Leila froze.

Her body knew that sound. The memory wasn’t just ears—it was tongue, lungs, skin. Cold steel pressing down, antiseptic sharp enough to taste, light so white it burned the whites into absence. Straps that made you want to leave your body behind because staying inside it hurt worse.

Her breath fogged the cracked plex of the terminal.
“Chez.”

“I know,” he said, too fast. Too guilty. “It’s not what we thought. It’s… more.”

Her voice came out as a test.
“Geisha?”

Silence. Not long enough to be ignorance. Just long enough to be shame.

“Yeah.”

---

The feed shivered. A reflection caught in glass: a tall figure, long coat that moved like it had signed a deal with gravity. His face never quite resolved, but everything else in the room leaned away, like the air itself gave him space.

Leila’s fingers curled before she’d even decided to clench them.

On the corner of the screen, Chez’s text crawled crooked:

8 exabytes.
No ransom.
We burn it.

☠️👑

The skull-and-crown. His way of saying this isn’t just dangerous—it’s endgame.

“These girls,” she whispered. But the words stuck. To finish the sentence would have meant drawing a border, and this had none.

“Just plant,” Chez said. His bravado had drained into something softer now, almost apologetic. “Get out.”

---

The drive’s light pulsed coy, then steady. A progress bar crawled across the screen like a patient snake.

One minute can be a decade. She counted conduit hums just to stop her hands from ripping the machine apart for the crime of obedience.

At 100%, the terminal chirped polite victory. She wanted to puke.

She pulled the drive, slid it back into the groove against her ribs. The tape bit her skin, sealing the secret there. She closed the panel with her palm, not a slam. This wasn’t a place to wake gods.

“Done,” she said.

“Run,” Chez said.

She did.

---

Up through a stairwell that smelled like vent grease and mold. Past a municipal drone that wheezed scorched plastic into the air. Into the neon dusk of District Seven where the Squid’s glow bled like a wound that refused to scab.

The line outside curled around the block—velvet and teeth, glass and glitter. The city’s prettiest prey parading toward the maw. The bouncer’s eyes did their math on each body.

Leila didn’t play the math. She cut down the service alley. Past dumpsters sour with rotting fruit and spilled synth-champagne, to a door with a dead camera that didn’t look dead to anyone dumb enough to touch it. She touched it.

Inside, the bass rewrote her pulse.

For a breath, she wasn’t Leila. She was just motion, a body in a storm of light.

Then the pods came back. The girls drowning on drip-fed air. The man whose shadow bent rooms around him.

The forgetting ended.