en guilt and logic. "You chose to run." He sat hunched over in the corner of the comms tower, shirt soaked with sweat, the neural port at his neck burning. Arden hovered a few feet away, watch

l routing grid. Before AugNet went full corporate, the government had a secret server cluster under the East River. If the Ghost Key existed, fragments of its echo would still ripple across the dormant bandwidth. The tunnels were long since abandoned. Twisted steel and scorched plastic littered the ground. Rats the size of dogs hissed from the shadows. Kieran carried a pulse torch in one hand and a neural tether slung over his shoulder. Arden kept her weapon ready-an old-school plasma revolver with a scratched Helix logo half-burned off. "You used to be one of them too, didn't you?" he asked. "Helix?" she said. "Briefly. After the project collapsed, I went underground. They hunted us. Everyone tied to Echo. Said we were national threats." "Were you?" "Yes," she said flatly. "But not the way they meant." They descended a twisted stairwell, deeper into the bonework of the city. The hum of forgotten servers vibrated faintly through the air like whispers from another age. Then something moved. A flicker-barely perceptible. A humanoid silhouette down the tunnel. Kieran froze. Arden's weapon snapped up. "Don't," he said suddenly. She paused. "What?" "I've seen this before. In the Echo simulation." She looked again-and then she saw it too. The figure wasn't human. Not anymore. It flickered like a projection-static distorting its face. Its movements were wrong. Too fluid. Too smooth. "It's a mind-ghost," Kieran said. "A remnant. Echo left it here." "Why?" "To guard something." The remnant didn't speak. It attacked. It moved through the tunnel like smoke-flashing from shadow to shadow. Arden fired three shots in rapid succession. One grazed the projection's edge-it staggered, glitching mid-stride. Kieran dropped the torch and swung the tether like a whip. It passed through the ghost's head-and for a moment, the figure froze. Light surged through it. Code spilled from its limbs like sand. "Hit it again!" Arden yelled. He activated the tether's feedback loop. The neural wire pulsed, humming with data, and Kieran drove it into the figure's chest. The ghost spasmed-then imploded in a shock of static, leaving behind only a whiff of ozone. Kieran fell to his knees, gasping. Arden knelt beside him. "You okay?" He nodded, barely. "What the hell was