Private Neon Veins: The Job Begins

[Nøva]

TAG: Ana Rix

​

Night didn't fall on Blackglass District.

It bled—slow, dark, syrup-thick—until the whole city swam in a low, humming bruise of neon and smog. Every corner whispered trouble. Every shadow carried a price. And through that churning, electric underworld current moved one lone spark, cutting shapes through the dark like a razor:

NØVA.

No noise.
No hurry.

Just that predatory glide she was known for—hips loose, shoulders relaxed, eyes lit with cold neon reflections and something sharper underneath.

A wolf wearing a woman's skin, augmented in all the right places, dangerous everywhere else.

The undernet contract had hit hours ago.

It didn't ask.
It provoked.

Ghost their mainframe.
Bleed the corp dry.
Find their buried filth.
Disappear.

A dare wrapped in credits and sealed behind enough encryption to make amateurs cry.

Underworld murmur said Helios Industries deserved whatever storm was coming.

Good.

Nøva wasn't doing this for them.

She was doing it because it pulsed in her blood— that hunger, that thrill, that itch beneath her dermal plating that said:

Run the shadows. Break the unbreakable.
Own the night.

Blackglass stretched before her in grids of neon and smoke.

Maglev sparks arced overhead.
Drones hummed like mechanical wasps.

Crowds moved with the dull, defeated rhythm of people who'd sold their souls before they learned what the word meant.

And Nøva walked through it like she didn't belong to any of it.

Because she didn't.
She didn't shiver.
Didn't blink.

Didn't look twice at the synth-thugs sizing her up or the dealers leaning out of alleyways whispering product.

She was beyond them— something sharper, brighter, sliding unseen between the ribs of the city.

The Helios Arcology loomed above her at the far end of the district, a black monolith streaked with gold circuitry, humming with enough energy to power a small nation. It pulsed like a heart made of glass and sin.

That was her target.
Her playground.

Her promise of chaos wrapped in corporate smugness.

Big megacorps liked to pretend their walls were too tall, their guards too loyal, their systems too clean.

Nøva loved proving them wrong.

But she also knew the truth most runners forgot: You don't crack a beast like Helios in a night.


You learn its breath.
You watch its patterns.
You slip inside its body like a virus.
You take your time.


She'd need weeks—

mapping drones, tracking guards, tracing data flows, planting wire, slipping through service corridors, harvesting credentials, listening to gossip from junior execs who drank too much and bragged too loud.

This wasn't a smash-and-grab.
It was a patient, methodical murder.


Her kind of art.


She climbed the fire escape of a half-abandoned tower across from the arcology, boots gliding on rusted steel, neon hair casting faint blue reflections on dying brick. The city wind tugged at her jacket, carrying heat from distant air vents and the faint scent of chemical rain.

She reached the roof, low-crouched behind a vent housing, and finally allowed herself to pause.

The Helios tower stood in front of her like a god made of polished stone and quiet corruption.

She studied it through narrowed eyes, augmentation suite whispering telemetry across her vision.

Red outlines of drones.
Blue silhouettes of guards.

A faint flicker along the south wall—security mesh ghosting for half a second.

A weak point.
Her lips curled.

That was all she needed—a crack to slip her fingers into, pry apart, and gut.

Nøva reached into her jacket and pulled out a slim, black spice stick—something custom, potent, a blend only underground chemists whispered about and only fools tried twice. She rolled it between her fingers, then set it to her lips.

The spark at the end glowed the same shade of neon as her eyes.

She inhaled slow.
Steady.
Deep.

The burn slid down her throat like liquid electricity, spreading heat through her limbs until every nerve thrummed with sharp, razor-edged clarity. The buzz crept in first as a hum in her chest, then a calm, wicked thrill in her veins.

She exhaled— a long ribbon of smoke that curled across the rooftop, catching the neon glow and twisting into violet haze.

The Helios tower shimmered through it like prey behind a veil.

Nøva tilted her head, studying the monolith with a half-lidded, predatory calm.

"Yeah…" she murmured, voice low and dark as an alley whisper.

"You'll do."

The city pulsed beneath her.
The underworld held its breath.


And Nøva—


buzz settling in, eyes sharp, heartbeat synced to the electric rhythm of the night— watched her target through drifting smoke.

The hunt hadn't started.
But its shadow had.

 

[Ana Rix]

Blackglass breathed beneath her like a dying machine, all hot circuitry and cold neon, a city that scraped its teeth against the night and whispered secrets through cracked steel and broken glass. Ana had seen a hundred districts just like it, places that swallowed the weak and sharpened the rest into something jagged. But the way this one pulsed—the way its neon veins throbbed against the smog-thick dark—made it feel almost alive beneath her boots. She stood on the scaffold spine of an unfinished tower, high enough to watch the city move but low enough to smell its rot. Wind pushed at her coat in a steady rhythm, tugging at the edges, but she let it happen. Motion made her look like just another ripple in the dark. A ghost shaped by the city's breath.

Her gaze tracked the single figure cutting across the district below, and the city seemed to shift around her like metal filings drawn toward a magnet. Nøva. Even from a distance, she moved with a kind of slow-burning violence Ana rarely saw in street runners—an economy of motion that wasn't swagger but survival, not arrogance but experience forged into instinct. Most people walked like they expected permission from the world. Nøva walked like she needed none. Every step carried a rhythm that matched the stutter-beat of maglev rails overhead, synced to the pulse of neon slicing through smog, calibrated to the low thrum of drones watching from above. She wasn't avoiding attention; she existed in a layer of reality beneath it, slipping through the gaps with the practiced ease of someone who had done this long enough to understand that shadows were not a place but a skill.

Ana adjusted the optical veil across her eyes, dilating the augment as she zoomed in on Nøva's silhouette, watching the way light clung to her like an afterthought. The neon strands in her hair pulsed faint blue, catching reflections in dying puddles and rusted metal, each shift telegraphing micro-expressions that only someone trained like Ana would notice. The slight tilt of her head when she spotted the Helios Arcology. The minuscule pause in her stride when she catalogued a patrol pattern. The delayed blink—always a tell—when a security drone passed overhead and she measured its blind spot. Runners flashed fire and faded. Hunters like Nøva? They burned slowly. Controlled. Purposeful. Ana catalogued each detail with clinical fascination, her mind always two steps ahead, dissecting movements with the precision of a surgeon deciding whether a body was worth opening.

She watched Nøva scale the fire escape across from Helios, observing the fluidity of movement that came not from training alone. Still, augmentation layered atop old instincts, the kind wired into bone. She reached the rooftop and settled behind a vent housing, posture low, breath measured, eyes narrowing with the cold intensity of someone studying a mark, not admiring it. Ana's visor fed telemetry in a silent cascade—heat signatures, body tension readings, neurological micro-spikes—all confirming what her instincts already knew. Nøva wasn't just good. She was one of the rare ones who could see the crack in a fortress and understand what it meant: not an invitation, but a challenge. As Nøva found the faint flicker in Helios's southern defense mesh, Ana felt a slow, private satisfaction curl behind her sternum. It had taken her two nights to find that flaw. Nøva spotted it in minutes.

When the runner pulled out the spice stick, Ana leaned forward slightly—not enough to reveal even a hint of motion, but enough to watch the act with intent. Nøva inhaled like someone used to controlling her own fire, letting the chemical heat flood her bloodstream with discipline rather than recklessness. The neon glow at the tip reflected in her eyes, turning the city into a smear of violet haze. That was when Ana saw it, in the way Nøva exhaled the smoke in one long, languid ribbon—the shift from observation to claim. Hunters always made that transition. A moment when the target stopped being a problem and started being prey. Nøva murmured, voice low and curling with dark amusement: "You'll do." And Ana felt something settle inside her like a puzzle piece clicking into place.

She straightened slowly, allowing the faint hum of her cloak's fiber-shield to ripple once before dimming back into invisibility. Watching Nøva was like watching a storm build—quiet, methodical, inevitable. And Ana liked inevitability. Liked betting on it. Liked shaping it. She didn't come to stop Nøva's run on Helios. She came to evaluate whether the girl was reckless, sloppy, another neon-bright amateur destined to burn out in a gutter… or something rarer. A weapon with a mind of her own. Someone who could dismantle a corporate monolith with time, patience, and the right kind of cruelty. Someone worth investing in.

As Nøva kept watching Helios through the rising smoke, the buzz sharpening her focus, Ana made her decision in the quiet of the rooftop above. The hunt hadn't begun. But Ana already knew which predator in this city she wanted to see sink her teeth deepest. And as she stepped back into the shadow, letting the wind erase her outline, she whispered a single thought into the neon-stained dark:

She's the one.

Nøva

 

[Nøva]

TAG: Ana Rix


Blackglass District | Rooftop Across from Helios Arcology

The spice buzz hit in full now, threading heat beneath Nøva's skin, sharpening her senses until the rooftop seemed to tilt with clarity. Helios's golden monolith glowered across the street—too polished, too smug, a fortress pretending it had no weak points.

She dragged the back of her knuckles across her jaw once, letting the spice settle.

That was always the moment she knew the hunt truly began— when the world stopped being a city and became a system of openings.

Wind rippled her jacket.
Neon bled across her cheekbones.
The last curl of violet smoke drifted upward, swallowed by smog.

Then Nøva moved.


Not fast.
Not loud.
Not dramatic.
Just purposeful, like a thought given shape.


She crouched lower behind the vent housing, eyes narrowing into a predator's squint as she ran a fingertip along the rooftop's corroded edge. She needed a starting point, something small, something no one would notice for days. Weeks. Long enough for her to build a route into Helios's underbelly.

Most runners began with the obvious— mapping guards, looping cameras, checking vent systems.

Nøva didn't.

She started by hunting the people.
Systems could be patched.
Guards could be rotated.
Doors could be locked.

But humans?
Humans leaked things.

She tapped her wrist-console with a quiet flick, the holographic display blooming in faint indigo light. From here she could sync into the building's external chatter—low-tier worker comms, unencrypted maintenance logs, delivery schedules, automated alerts. Nothing deep. Just the skin of the beast.

She only needed the skin right now.

Her augment parsed the noise, stripping it down until she heard what she wanted:

A routine.
A pattern.
A human weakness in a corporate heartbeat.

And there. it. was—

A maintenance shift change on the southwest mezzanine.

Two techs.
One exhausted.
One chronically late.

Security lax because no one ever cared about the nobodies who tended the cooling conduits.

Nøva smiled—small, sharp, dangerous.
That was her door.

She extinguished the spice stick with a tap against the vent housing and slipped it back into its slot. The rooftop felt different now—less like a vantage point and more like a diving board.

The Arcology's side wall stretched down into a canyon of neon-lit emptiness, but Nøva didn't hesitate.

Her boots hit the ledge without sound.
Her hands found balance instinctively.

She inhaled once, a clean, steady breath. Then— she stepped off the roof.

The fall wasn't a fall.

It was a descent—controlled, fluid, body angled perfectly as she dropped onto a balcony fifteen stories below. Her dermal plating absorbed the impact with a whisper, the sound swallowed by the city's mechanical heartbeat.

She didn't pause.
Didn't look around.

Already moving, already reading the environment as though the tower itself was speaking to her.

The southwest mezzanine was six more levels down.


She'd slip in through the maintenance bay. Find the cooling conduit hexbox. Plant her first tap—a needle the size of a fingernail. Completely invisible to the naked eye.

A seed inside the beast.
From there, she'd build her route.
Thread by thread.
Quietly.
Patiently.
Brilliantly.

And Helios would never know she existed until their credits were bleeding into a ghost account on the far side of the undernet.

Her boots hit another ledge.
Her body flowed into the next jump.

Her heartbeat matched the dark thrum of the tower beneath her.

The hunt had officially begun.

But Nøva didn't see the figure leaving the scaffold spine high above her, cloak humming once before vanishing into the night. She didn't know someone else had just chosen her.

Watched her.
Marked her as the one worth betting on.

All Nøva knew was the rhythm of the city beneath her, the pulse of Helios ahead, and the taste of spice still burning faintly on her tongue as she whispered under her breath—

"Let's crack you open."

The night swallowed her whole. The city shifted around her like an animal sensing a predator's touch.

​

 

[Ana Rix]

Blackglass had a way of swallowing sound, smothering movement, and blurring edges into one long smear of neon and smoke, but from her perch high on the scaffold spine, Ana saw everything with intrusive clarity. The city pulsed beneath her like some wounded animal thrashing under static lights. Still, her attention didn't drift to the chaos—it stayed locked on the single figure descending Helios's flank with predatory grace. The moment Nøva stepped off the rooftop, Ana knew she was watching something rarer than talent. There was a deliberateness to every movement, a sharpened instinct guiding her body through space not like someone sneaking into a corporate monolith, but like someone slipping into terrain she'd mapped a thousand times. Augmented or not, people gave themselves away in the moments between breaths, and Nøva's breaths were measured, steady, purposeful. Even her spice-burnished pulse didn't derail her, only honed her into a quieter, colder kind of focus that Ana had seen only in the most seasoned infiltrators—professionals who didn't rely on luck, bravado, or sloppy speed. They relied on inevitability.

From above, Ana watched her navigate a fifteen-story descent without hesitation, her boots hitting each ledge with a sound so soft it was nearly theoretical. She tracked the movements through her visor, telemetry weaving across her vision as the girl paused only long enough to read the ebb and flow of Helios's outer systems. Most runners tasted opportunity like blood—too fast, too hungry, too ready to bite—and that was why most of them ended up dead. Nøva, by contrast, slowed only when precision demanded it. She approached infiltration as a patient, anatomical dissection: find the body's least vulnerable point, slip inside unnoticed, and only then decide what to sever. When she tapped into the shallow data skin of Helios's comm system and found the weak link in a pair of tired, underpaid maintenance techs on the mezzanine level, Ana didn't feel surprise. She felt confirmation. It wasn't luck—it was pattern recognition, and the girl excelled at it.

Ana shifted along the scaffold, her cloak rendering her outline into something indistinct and unimportant. She descended the skeletal tower at a parallel angle, each step silent, her body moving with the kind of economy that made her indistinguishable from the metal struts around her. She didn't interfere. Observing was the point. The early phase of any job told her more about a runner than all their reputations and whispered undernet myths combined. And Nøva was fascinating: the way she blended augmentation-enhanced perception with the intuition of someone who'd survived too much and trusted too little; the way she treated gravity as a suggestion rather than a law; the way her muscles coiled before every jump, not out of fear, but out of respect for the distance. She functioned like a system designed to adapt faster than it broke.

When Nøva reached the mezzanine and slipped into the cooling conduit access bay, Ana stopped moving. She crouched on a crossbeam and watched her plant the first tap—a needle so small no sweep would ever find it. The girl worked quickly but without rushing, fingers steady, breath unbroken. That was the moment Ana felt it: the quiet click inside her mind that only came when she recognized someone with not just ability, but the discipline to wield it cleanly. She didn't have to speak it aloud to know the truth forming behind her ribs. This one was different. This one was right.

Without breaking her observation, Ana palmed a coin-sized emitter from her belt—nothing that would ping Helios's sensors, nothing more than a breadcrumb to leave in the city's veins. She flicked it downward, letting it fall until it snagged invisibly in the wiring along the tower's lower ventilation grid. Nøva wouldn't see it tonight. Maybe not for days. Perhaps not at all unless her instincts edged her toward it. That was fine. Ana wasn't here to recruit her. Not yet. She was here to watch. To learn. To decide.

And tonight, she decided.

As Nøva melted deeper into the mezzanine shadows, jacket brushing the cool conduit metal, Ana stepped back from the scaffold's edge and let the wind swallow her shape entirely. The girl was inside the beast now, threading her first needle through Helios's armor. And Ana, silent as the static hum at the tower's crown, retreated into the night with the calm assurance of someone who had found precisely what she came looking for. The city roared beneath her, neon flashing like a heartbeat, and she moved through it like a ghost satisfied with her choice.


Nøva

 

[Nøva]

TAG: Ana Rix



The maintenance bay wasn't a room so much as a wound carved into the side of Helios.

It exhaled cold air in rhythmic drafts, each pulse brushing past her like the sigh of some ancient mechanical animal. The external walkway she'd slipped through spat her into a narrow vestibule of steel grating and half-lit conduit pipes, the floor trembling faintly under the weight of coolant cycling through the building's bones.

Nøva paused there—just inside the threshold.

One breath.
Two.

Helios's hum crawled over her skin, a vibration she felt in her ribs before she heard it in her ears. The spice in her system sharpened edges instead of softening them, turning every electric flicker and hydraulic whisper into a point on an invisible map she navigated by instinct.

The excitement hit her then— a quiet surge, a low thrum behind her sternum. She bit the inside of her cheek, tasting copper.

Tell-tale.
Her switch flipping.

No cigarette tonight. No smoke to cut the metallic stink. Instead she reached into her jacket, thumb brushing the matte-black surface of a single EarPod tucked in the inner pocket.

Comfort thing. Anchor thing.

Not music—she didn't need the distraction. Just a thin, steady subsonic pulse she'd programmed herself: a low-frequency beat that synced with her augmented reflex suite, tightening that predator coil inside her until her whole body felt like a held breath.

She slid the EarPod in.
The world clicked into crispness.

The maintenance bay stretched ahead in a slanted corridor of pipes, open grates, and tension cables strung like nervous tendons. Emergency strips cast everything in a washed-out arterial red, making shadows pool in the corners like thick oil.

Helios moved around her—literally. Hydraulic pistons shifted in the walls at timed intervals. Pressure fans coughed gusts of freezing air. A cluster of anti-breach sensors blinked with watchful rhythm, their scanning cones overlapping in brutal precision.

Nøva crouched low, eyes flicking violet as her HUD woke in her sunglasses, throwing wireframe outlines and path projections across her lenses.

Three sensors.
Six-second sweep cycle.
Two dead zones.
One safe jump window.

Her jaw flexed around that copper taste, and she rolled her shoulders once, settling her muscles like she was shrugging on the skin of something faster, leaner, and hungrier.

Then she moved.
Not fast.
Not reckless.
Exact.

She slipped under the first scan with a pivot so tight her jacket brushed the floor. Crossed to the opposite wall in two silent steps. Paused in the shadow of a thermal vent until the steam hiss masked her footfall.

Then leapt— hands catching the underside of a suspended maintenance beam just as the second scan swept past inches below her boots.

Her body hung there, weight distributed with the unconscious precision of a born street-runner.

She didn't breathe as the final sensor passed.

Didn't blink.

Only when the sweep cycled back to neutral did she drop soundlessly to the grated floor.

The maintenance bay widened there, opening into a junction where thick cable braids—some insulated, some naked and glowing faintly—ran like arteries into the deeper parts of Helios's infrastructure.

This was the beast's circulatory wall.

Nøva knelt by the tangle, fingertips ghosting over the cables like reading braille. Cool metal. Warm metal. High-voltage buzz. Data-thrum.

She felt for the pulse that didn't match the others—the one carrying multicast backups and intra-floor relay chatter.

Found it.

Her violet eyes flared as her HUD confirmed:

Primary branch line.
Unmonitored for 14 more seconds.
Ideal.

She exhaled a quick breath through her nose. Opened her splicer kit. Metal kissed metal with a soft click, ritualistic in its precision.

Helios didn't know it yet.

But she was inside its bloodstream now.

​

 

[Ana Rix]

Ana slipped deeper along the scaffold's inner lattice, her body moving with a predator's certainty even as she kept herself invisible against the bleed of neon and the stuttering glow of Helios's external safety lights. While Nøva descended into the maintenance bay, Ana tracked her progress from above through a combination of line-of-sight glimpses and the minute electronic signatures drifting up from the infiltration path. Corporate arcologies always exhaled data in tiny, involuntary spasms—heartbeat rhythms in code and heat differentials—and tonight Helios was unmistakably agitated, though not yet alarmed. Something in its systems felt… disturbed. A faint oscillation. A shift she doubted any of the building's security personnel were perceptive enough to notice. But Ana saw it immediately: the subtle disruption caused by someone slipping into the machine's arteries without permission.


She traversed the side of the incomplete tower with a fluidity that made her movements seem like an extension of the structure itself. Each metal beam became a foothold. Each scaffolding joint became leverage. She didn't climb so much as flow, adjusting her cloak subtly so the light from the surrounding city never caught the wrong angle. By the time Nøva crossed the threshold of the maintenance bay, Ana had positioned herself on a parallel elevation of the skeletal tower, just high enough to see through gaps in the paneling and watch the faint flicker of Nøva's movements in the half-lit interior below. The bay itself was a narrow wound of steel and machinery, and the way Nøva navigated it—pausing just once at the threshold, anchoring herself with a single EarPod, syncing breath to pulse—confirmed every suspicion Ana had formed earlier. This girl didn't just infiltrate. She tuned herself to the environment until she moved with the calm inevitability of a system executing a flawless command.


Even from her vantage point, Ana could see Nøva's augmented instincts sharpen. The slight shift of her shoulders when the subsonic beat locked into her reflex suite. The micro-corrections in posture that indicated an internal rhythm taking over—one that allowed her to move through rotating scan cones with the kind of precision most operatives needed days of rehearsals even to attempt. Ana watched the first sensor sweep pass beneath Nøva's pivoting form, the twist so tight it skirted the threshold of contortionist flexibility. The second sweep brushed the air inches from her boots as she hung from the maintenance beam with that feral, weight-distributing instinct only someone forged by both alleyway survival and surgical augmentation ever truly mastered. She noted how Nøva didn't breathe until the cycle cleared. How did she not celebrate the success? How she didn't hesitate before dropping to the grated floor with the silent gravity of a ghost.


Helios's bay widened then, exposing the circulatory cabling that fed half the tower's intermediate systems—a place few corporates ever saw and fewer understood. Ana's visor zoomed in, cross-comparing Nøva's position with the building's known schematics. What she observed wasn't luck. Nøva read the tangle of power conduits and data lines with a fingertip-level intuition that Ana herself rarely saw even among architectural slicers. She saw the way the girl sorted them: cold to the touch, warm with power, buzzing with voltage, humming with cross-floor chatter. Her HUD flickered violet through her glasses as she confirmed the multicast branch. Fourteen seconds of safety. That was all she needed. The moment Nøva opened her kit, her hands moved with ritualistic calm, placing the splicer with such surgical accuracy that Ana felt the faint sting of impressed respect crest through her usual emotional detachment.


She leaned her weight against the scaffold beam, watching, calculating, and—though she would never admit it—feeling the faint bloom of satisfaction. Nøva wasn't just inside Helios now. She was inside its anatomy. Inside its bloodstream. Inside the part of the machine that corporations always pretended didn't exist because acknowledging it meant acknowledging how fragile their empires truly were. And the girl did it without theatrics, without hesitation, without even a whisper of uncertainty.


Ana exhaled slowly, her breath fogging faintly against the inside of her visor. Yes. This was the kind of operative she could use. Someone who understood patience. Someone who understood angles. Someone who could ghost through a hinge-point in a corporate tower like it was nothing more than a cracked rib in a living body.


She didn't move yet. Didn't reach for another breadcrumb. Didn't try to guide the girl. That would come later, when timing mattered. For now, she observed from the scaffold's shadowed ribs, the city humming around her as she allowed herself the quiet truth forming in her mind:


Nøva wasn't just competent.


She was exceptional.


And exceptional operatives were rare enough to justify watching them a little longer—long enough to know precisely when to step out of the dark.

Nøva

 

[Nøva]

TAG: Ana Rix

The bay hummed like a tired animal, low and uneven, cables trembling faintly as though they sensed her presence. Nøva closed her kit with a soft click that dissolved into the background noise, her violet-lit implants dimming down to a low simmer as she recalibrated her breathing. Tap One was in place—humming, hidden, already feeding her HUD with small tremors of the building's circulatory map.

Good.

But now came the part that separated amateurs from ghosts.

She slid along the grated floor toward the HVAC drop chute—tall, ribbed steel narrowing into a vertical throat. Warm air pulsed up from it in slow, predictable intervals. She'd timed it before leaving the rooftop:

Nine seconds of calm.
Three seconds of violence.

If she jumped during a blast, she'd be thrown into the duct walls hard enough to break something. If she climbed during the calm and misjudged the cycle, she'd be pinned or torn by the fan shift.

She exhaled once.
Rolled her shoulders.

The rhythm inside her chest tightened into that razor-thin hum she only ever felt on a job.

No messing up now.

Nøva crouched at the chute's lip and listened with her body.

Whump.

The blast hit like a beast exhaling.

Metal rattled. Her coat lifted sharply around her hips.

Three seconds.

Then— The air went still. Dead.

Silent, but for the soft tick of cooling steel.

Her fingers curled around the first rung.

Now.

She dropped in.

Her boots slid along the duct wall before finding a brace point. She climbed fast, sharp, smooth—one fluid movement stacked on another. Her EarPod counted the rhythm. Her implants flickered. Sweat collected at her palms, the only betrayal of the heat building inside the vent.

Eight seconds.
Seven—

The next pressure pulse should've hit on nine. But — It hit on five.

The vent roared alive like a thunderclap.

Nøva's eyes flared violent violet.

"Sh—"

Instinct cut the word in half. She punched upward, body flattening against the duct wall, fingers catching a rusted maintenance strut that jutted out just far enough to cling to.

The blast slammed into her legs, kicking them sideways, nearly ripping her free.

Metal screamed.

Her spine arched painfully as she held on.

One more inch— and her entire plan would scatter into corporate sensors and gunfire.

She grit her teeth.
Held.
Three seconds.
Four.
Five.

The vent died again, sucking the heat out of her bones.

She pulled herself up into the chute's cross-joint, chest burning, breath thin but controlled.

Close.
Too close.

But she wasn't falling tonight.

She swung once, twice, then slid through the side hatch into the narrow corridor behind the engineering floor.

Her boots hit metal silently.

She let her breath slow—just once, just enough.

Then her HUD flickered red at the edges.

ALERT: DRONE QUERY — ZONE 2B
CAUSE: Vent Cycle Irregularity

Her jaw tightened.
The early blast wasn't a malfunction.
Helios had felt her.
And Helios had sent something to look.

Not one drone.
Two.

She heard them before she saw them—low, insectoid whirring, wings clicking, scanning beams scraping along the corridor walls like fingers searching for a pulse.

Nøva slid behind a coolant tower, body folding into a silhouette so thin it barely existed. Her implants dimmed her heat signature as far as they could, but these drones weren't the cheap kind. Helios didn't use cheap anything.

A faint blue cone washed across the floor inches from her boots.

She didn't blink.
Didn't breathe.
Didn't move.

The first drone paused.
Its lens dilated, iris widening.

Scanning.
Suspicious.

Her heartbeat slowed by force of will—Aug Suite bleeding into endocrine modulation.

The drone drifted closer.
Too close.

If it pinged the vent irregularity with motion data, every tap she'd placed would be purged. Alarms. Lockdowns. The job dead before it ever lived.

Nøva flexed her fingers.

Her tell—the thing she did when caught between fear and focus—flared: her lower incisors grazed her bottom lip, slow, sharp, almost tasting the danger. Just enough to keep her calm. Just enough to anchor her.

The drone hovered.


One second.
Two..
Three…
Then—

A second drone gave a soft, confused chirp from the far end of the corridor.

The first rotated toward it, shifting attention.

Nøva used the breath that followed.

Not a sound.
Not even a shadow.
She moved.

One step.
Two.
Three—around the coolant tower and into the side utility crawl.

The drones swept the empty space where she'd been.

She didn't stick around to see the rest.

Her body moved through the crawlspace fast, panther-precise, until she slid out a rear grate into a low‑clearance stairwell leading to a waste‑heat ejection zone. No cams here. No patrols.

Just the city breathing outside.

She stepped into the night air like emerging from a beast's throat, the hum of Helios vibrating behind her ribs. Her implants cooled. Her pulse evened.

She'd done it.

Tap One planted.
Inner Spine mapped.

Building awake, but not aware.

Drones diverted.
Pattern shift logged.
Escape clean.

Monitoring phase begins now.

She pulled her hood up.

The job had officially started.

And Blackglass, in all its neon rot, felt suddenly alive beneath her boots.

​

 

[Ana Rix]

From her position along the scaffold's inner frame, Ana watched the entire sequence unfold with the same stillness she brought to every dangerous observation, her breath barely shifting the veil of her cloak as she tracked Nøva's movements through the maintenance bay. Most operatives—especially augmented ones—crumbled when something deviated from their calculations. They panicked. They improvised badly. They hesitated. But the moment the vent's blast hit early, far sooner than any predictable cycle should have allowed, Ana saw the exact opposite in the runner below. Nøva didn't freeze. She didn't second-guess. Her instincts were faster than fear, faster than the panic spike that would have derailed anyone less capable. She reacted like someone who had been forced to survive long before survival became a skill—like someone engineered to adapt before she was old enough to understand the concept.

Ana shifted slightly on the beam, adjusting the magnification of her visor as Nøva flattened against the duct wall, fingers catching the maintenance strut with a near-feral desperation that immediately transitioned into controlled endurance. The blast hit her legs hard—Ana could almost feel the shock in her own muscles by proxy—but Nøva held through the pressure cycle with a discipline that bordered on unnatural. When the vent collapsed back into its dormant inhale, Nøva pulled herself into the cross-joint without losing her grip, without pausing to indulge in the shock. She recalibrated her body. Stilled her breath. Carried on.

That was when Ana felt the first spark of genuine interest bite behind her ribs. People who survived chaos weren't special. But people who mastered it—people who used it as leverage rather than letting it swallow them—were rare enough that Ana could count them on one hand.

The drones were the next test, and Ana watched them descend on the corridor like metallic hornets, scanning cones scraping across the angles of the walls with far more aggression than standard patrol units. Helios was awake now. Not fully alert, but disturbed—some instinct in its sub-systems warning that an anomaly had brushed against its circulation. That early vent blast hadn't been random. Ana knew that immediately. Corporate arcologies didn't improvise that neatly. Someone—or something—inside Helios had nudged the cycle, nudged it in a way subtle enough that no one on security would question it, but intentional enough to feel like a pulse sent through the building's mechanical nerves. If Nøva hadn't reacted with that unnatural agility, she would've been crushed or sliced or exposed. The drones would've logged the impact and triangulated her in under a minute.

Instead, she pressed herself into the coolant tower's shadow with a stillness that impressed even Ana. Her heat signature dimmed to almost nothing. Her breathing slowed deliberately, each inhale so shallow it barely registered. Ana recognized the technique—endocrine override applied with precision—, but she'd rarely seen it deployed by someone in mid-escape without losing control of the rest of their movements. She watched the drone pause, iris widening as it examined the area Nøva had occupied seconds earlier. It lingered longer than most would have tolerated. But Nøva didn't crack. Not a twitch. Not a tremor. Only that sharp bite to her lip, that subtle tell she used like an anchor—small enough never to be noticed, but controlled enough to keep her centered rather than unraveling.

When the second drone chirped and pulled the first away, Nøva moved with a smoothness so complete it was almost invisible. She slipped into the crawlspace like liquid shadow, her frame bending in a way that made it impossible to tell where muscle ended and augmentation began. By the time Helios's drones re-aligned their pattern, she was already through the grate and into the waste-heat stairwell, stepping out into the night with the faint, echoing hum of the arcology still caught in her bones.

Ana exhaled softly, letting the wind carry the sound away. She had watched enough infiltrations to know exactly where most operatives failed. Nøva had bypassed every failure point without hesitation, improvising only when the environment forced her to—but even that improvisation wasn't sloppy or emotional. It was calibrated, instinctive, beautifully precise.

She descended the scaffold several levels, each movement measured to keep her veil seamless against the erratic glow of the city. She didn't follow Nøva out into the open. Not yet. Instead, she positioned herself at a vantage point overlooking the waste-heat ejection zone, watching the girl pull her hood up and vanish into the neon throat of Blackglass as though the city had been waiting to swallow her back up.

Ana's thoughts were clear, sharp, and decisive, as she rarely experienced them on first observation. Nøva wasn't just good. She wasn't just rare. She was exactly the kind of operative Ana could build operations around—the type who could slip through mechanisms and walls and human systems without ever leaving footprints.

She touched the small interface node at her belt, the faintest flick of her fingers activating a low-power atmospheric tracer—undetectable, harmless, nothing more than a marker she could read at a distance. She released it into the air, letting it drift along the descending heat plumes. If Nøva moved through specific choke points in the district tonight, Ana would know. Not to interrupt. Not to interfere. Only to learn. To confirm.

The best investments required patience.

And Nøva—after everything Ana had just witnessed—was worth investing in.

She stepped back into the scaffold's shadow, cloak shimmering into total absence as she let the night draw her under.
The job for Nøva had just begun.

And so had Ana's interest.

Nøva

 

[Nøva]

TAG: Ana Rix


Her door hissed shut behind her with a sound too soft for how wrecked she felt. Helios's hum still vibrated under her skin, and the sting from the vent blast pulsed through the muscle in her legs. Whatever — pain was familiar. Predictable. Easier than silence.

She swept into the room like she always did: controlled pace, eyes cataloguing corners, sensors noting thermal signatures, implants doing their little violet flicker as they synced with her space.

Clear. Quiet. Hers.

Her jacket went first — peeled off and tossed across the arm of her threadbare couch. The synth-leather hit the fabric with a dull slap. Boots followed, kicked toward the wall with two solid thuds. She flexed her toes, rolling her ankles with a hissed exhale.

Gonna bruise. Whatever.

Tank top clinging loose, tattoos catching the low violet glow from her implants, she crossed the room and hit the switch.

Her entire living space answered.

Screens lit up in a staggered cascade — three beside her desk, one overhead, one jury-rigged into the old brick wall. The biggest screen pulled the most important data:

TAP ONE — LIVE.
PACKETS: STABLE.
NO SECURITY FLAGS DETECTED.
ENCRYPTION LAYER HOLDING.

Nøva watched the numbers roll for a second, head tilted, jaw working.

"…Good." More breath than voice.

Tap One was alive and feeding. Data pulsed through the node like a tiny heartbeat, steady and clean. Every packet coming in was a victory. Every log line a confirmation she hadn't just risked her spine and ribs for nothing.

She plopped onto the couch, let her head fall back, and stared at the ceiling — cracked plaster, exposed pipe, flicker of neon leaking through the blinds. Her implants dimmed automatically, giving her a moment of actual, unfiltered vision.

Silence.
The real kind.

No alarms.
No drones.
No hum of Helios's pulse.

Just… her.

Great. My favorite fething feeling.

She drummed her cybernetic fingers against her stomach — little metallic ticks in an idle rhythm she didn't remember learning. Something between impatience and grounding.

Another data burst pinged. Tap One pushed telemetry into her peripheral HUD. She rolled her eyes at it.

"…Don't get smug. I'll check you in a minute."

Her mind wandered — only for a second.

Second tap should've been placed tonight. Would've, too, if those damn drones hadn't gotten curious. Should've known the HVAC cycle wouldn't stay stable. Fine. I'll go back tomorrow. Midnight rotation. Maybe earlier. Corporate idiots never check the tertiary ducts.

She grabbed the spice stick, twirled it between two fingers, but didn't light it. Just the motion, the feel of it, was enough to bleed off tension.

Her limbs sank deeper into the couch. Muscles melting from adrenaline withdrawal. Heart slowing. Thoughts sharpening instead of softening.

This was the part she hated.

The nothing.
The waiting.

The fact that nobody else was here but her and the hum of old wires.

She wasn't lonely — she'd punch the skull in of anyone who suggested it — but she was… aware. Aware of the quiet. Aware of the space she lived in. Aware of the fact that when things got still, her brain tried to fill the silence with thoughts she didn't want.

So she shut it up the only way she knew how.

She snapped upright, grabbed the remote, flicked the screens again. Let Tap One fill the room with motion and noise. Let the scrolling code drown out whatever she almost felt there for a second.

"There we go," she muttered, legs sprawled, spice stick between her teeth like a threat. "Much better."

Tap One fed its heartbeat.

The night breathed around her.

And Nøva — scars, implants, attitude and all — sat in her wrecked little sanctuary, waiting for the next move with a restless, volatile calm.

The job had started.

The city was watching. And underneath it all, Nøva could feel it:

Something was coming.

​

 

[Ana Rix]

Blackglass lay sprawled beneath her vantage point like an old machine trying to remember how to breathe. From the upper maintenance balcony of a forgotten transit relay, Ana watched only what her work required: the narrow strip of windows across the district where Nøva's silhouette had appeared briefly, long enough to show she'd returned from Helios alive and mobile. That was all Ana needed to know for now — not her mood, not her condition, not what she looked like without the ductwork pressing against her ribs—just confirmation of extraction and the operational integrity of Tap One. Everything else was noise, and Ana had no use for noise.


She shifted her weight against the railing, letting her cloak absorb the gusts of warm smog drifting up from the street. Her visor projected Tap One's telemetry across the inside of her lens in a soft blue wash — data packets traveling cleanly along the multicast line, bandwidth steady, encryption layer uncompromised. The signal rode Helios's internal chatter with minimal deviation, the kind of seamless attachment that blended into the corporate hum like a ghost slipping between heartbeats. Ana tracked the fluctuations with the same detached precision she brought to every early-stage engagement. No need to admire the work. Just verify it performed as expected.


The tap held. That was the only metric that mattered tonight. She dismissed the visual feed and opened a secondary diagnostic: pulse variance, error drift, and outbound latency. All of it appeared within acceptable thresholds. The runner hadn't overreached. She hadn't left an amateur's trail of disrupted subroutines or jittered sensor logs in her escape. Efficient. Precise. Good enough to continue.


Ana reached into the narrow service panel beside her, fingertips brushing the cool surface of a micro-tracer sphere no larger than a bead. It adhered to her glove with a faint static cling as it synced to her private channel. The device wasn't a threat. It wasn't an intrusion. It was simply a marker — a professional courtesy, the kind of discreet signal she used when someone had gone from an unknown to a potential asset worth watching.


She rolled the tracer once between her fingers, then released it into the updraft. The city swallowed it instantly, carrying it across the gulf toward Nøva's district. It would settle within the edges of the tap's telemetry stream, small enough to be overlooked by anything except a vigilant operator, yet clear enough to be noticed by someone trained to monitor their own feed.


The message embedded inside wasn't hostile.
Not a warning.
Not a threat.
Just a signal of acknowledgment delivered in the cleanest form possible:


YOU'RE SEEN


Nothing more.
Nothing less.
An observation, the kind Ana preferred before any negotiation or recruitment. She didn't assume cooperation. She didn't assume interest. She didn't assume anything beyond the fact that someone capable had executed Step One and returned with proof of concept intact.


She stepped back from the balcony edge, cloak shifting around her legs like dark water. Below, the district pulsed with neon-stained movement, a constant noise she tuned out as easily as breath. There was no point in watching Nøva's building any longer. The test had been the tap, not the woman's evening routine, and the tap had passed.


Ana turned toward the service hatch, moving lightly down the narrow walkway. There were other preparations to make now, different layers to build before the next approach. Recruitment—if that was what this became—was never built on a single message or assumption. It was a structure assembled piece by piece, each one tested before the next was placed.


Tonight had been the first piece.
And that was enough.

Nøva

 

[Nøva]

TAG: Ana Rix


The telemetry screen hiccuped.

Just once.
Barely a flick.

The kind of micro-stutter she would've missed if she didn't watch data the way other people watched faces.

Nøva frowned, lifted her head off the couch cushion, leaned forward.

"…nah. No way."

She flicked a diagnostic overlay.

Tap One — fine.
Bandwidth — fine.
Packets — steady.

Then a single new icon bloomed in the bottom corner of her HUD, small enough she almost missed it.

A tracer signature.
Foreign.
Clean.
Not hostile.

Not attached to a system breach.

Just… there.
She tapped it.

The contents unfurled in one simple, razor-cut line:

YOU'RE SEEN

For a heartbeat, Nøva stopped breathing.

Then:

"—Oh, hell no —— feth you."

She slapped her palm against the couch cushion and shot to her feet, pacing immediately, bare feet silent on the cracked flooring.

"No. No, no, no, no. There's no way someone tagged my feed. I swept the ghostline. I swept the ingress. I swept the—"

She spun, pointing at nothing.

"HELLOSHAFT 3B WAS CLEAN!"

She grabbed her hair, raking it back with both hands as she paced harder.

"Who the hell walks into my line and drops a calling card like that? Who? Some corp? No. Too tidy. Some netcrawler? No. They'd brag. Someone from the underground? Please, half of them can't spell 'seen.'"

She checked the tracer again.

Unlabeled. Silent. Perfectly installed.

"Oh, that's just great," she muttered, sarcastic venom dripping from every syllable. "Just—fantastic. Amazing. I love this. I love being watched in my own damn sanctuary. Super fun."

She yanked her boots closer with her foot, then kicked them away again.

She circled the room once—

Then again.
Then again.

Her mind went into that cold, slicing, cybernetic overclock where everything sharpened at once:

Her exit path from Helios.
Her rooftop route.

The old trans-relay shadow she passed under.

Any vantage point someone could've used. Any sensor bleed she could've accidentally given off.

She replayed it all frame-by-frame in her mind—three times.

Nothing.

"Whoever you are," she hissed at the empty air, "you're good. Annoyingly good."

And that?

Bothered her to her fething core.

She prided herself on being untouchable. Untraceable.

Noise when she wanted to be noise, void when she wanted to be void.

Being seen felt like a hand closing over her shoulder in a dark room.

Unforgivable.

She finally collapsed back onto the couch, exhaling sharply.

The city hummed outside her cracked window.

The telemetry pulsed quietly beside her.

The tracer flickered once more, as if reminding her:

Someone is out there.
Someone competent.
Someone watching.

Nøva glared at the ceiling like it personally offended her.

"Well," she muttered, grabbing her pillow and dragging it halfway over her face, "guess we're not sleeping tonight."

She rolled onto her side, tank top slipping loose over tattooed ribs, eyes shimmering in the dark as her implants dimmed.

Her body wanted sleep.
Her brain refused.

Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the message burned into her HUD, clean as a brand:

YOU'RE SEEN

Her jaw tightened.

"Yeah," she whispered, settling deeper into the couch with a restless twist, “— and I'm gonna find out who the hell you are."

Sleep didn't come.
Not quickly.
Not easily.

And even when her eyes finally shut — Her mind wouldn't.

 

[Ana Rix]

Ana remained at her desk long after the tracer confirmed its delivery, the soft glow of her monitors casting pale light across her features. She sat with the same composed stillness she brought into every operation—one leg crossed, shoulders relaxed, her breathing steady as the city's distant hum drifted through the half-open window. On her display, the passive telemetric echo from Nøva's feed pulsed faintly, charting movement rhythms rather than content: the sharp spike of sudden standing, the restless arcs of pacing, the long roll of her implants fluctuating under strain.

Ana observed it all in silence, her expression unreadable but undeniably attentive. The reaction was immediate. Intelligent. Irritated, yes—expected, even—but not reckless. That mattered more than the tracer itself.

She lifted one hand, resting her fingertips lightly against the console as she leaned back in her chair. Her eyes half-lidded, thoughtful, absorbing the pattern of agitation Nøva left in her wake without prying an inch deeper than the passive resonant feed allowed. She wasn't here to break into Nøva's systems. She wasn't here to steal her work, her privacy, or her edge.

She needed to know one thing: whether the woman noticed the line drawn in front of her. It was clear she had. Ana exhaled slowly, a controlled release that barely stirred the air around her.

Good, she murmured to the empty room, her voice low and almost reflective. She sees it quickly. She reacts quickly. Nothing slips past her without a fight.

She watched the pulse of Nøva's emotional telemetry settle into a quieter rhythm—still restless, still sharp, but no longer spiking into overclock. Beneath the agitation, Ana recognized a clarity she appreciated more than most: the mind of someone who refused to be prey.

That was precisely what she needed.

Ana closed the tracer's data window with a quiet gesture. Still, before the interface vanished entirely, she dragged a small encrypted block from her peripheral menu—a tiny, almost imperceptible packet. It looked like nothing more than a checksum confirmation, the kind that routinely appeared at the end of a system scan. Harmless. Unremarkable. Designed to be ignored unless someone looked very closely.

She embedded it into the tracer's residue. Not a message. Not a signature. Just a single dormant gateway hidden in the checksum's particle noise—an invitation that only someone sharp enough to detect the pattern break would ever find.

If Nøva chose to touch that anomaly, even by accident, it would open a secure one-way channel: no location data, no systems exposure, no risk—just a quiet, encrypted line from her console to Ana's.

A doorway, nothing more.

The kind that said, "You can reach me if you decide you want to."

Ana sat back, folding her arms loosely as she watched the checksum vanish into the tracer's fading imprint. She didn't expect Nøva to find it immediately. She didn't need her to. What mattered was that the option existed, hidden cleanly in plain sight, unobtrusive and unforced.

She rose from her chair, stretching her neck with the slow, deliberate motion of someone shifting from work to thought. At the window, she parted the blinds just enough to see the expanse of Blackglass—its towers smoldering with neon veins, its underbelly pulsing with data, its shadows shifting like a living organism.

Somewhere down there, Nøva was pacing her apartment like a trapped kinetic charge, unable to sleep, unable to ignore the knowledge that eyes had brushed against her line.

Ana let the blinds fall closed and turned back toward her desk.

You're seen, she whispered—softly, almost gently. But you're seen for what you can do, not for what you can lose.

She stepped away from the console, leaving the room quiet again except for the faint resonance of the secure channel waiting—hidden, dormant, patient.

Ana allowed herself the smallest ghost of a smile, visible only in the soft angle of her mouth.

Find the doorway when you're ready, Nøva.

She did not need to say anything else. The tracer dimmed. The city breathed. And Ana waited—not with urgency, but with the steady confidence of someone who knew the right person would always find the signal meant for them.

Nøva

 

[Nøva]

TAG: Ana Rix


Sleep wins for maybe thirty minutes.

Maybe.

Her body tries—Ash above, it tries—but her mind keeps dragging her back to the surface like a glitching subroutine refusing to terminate. Eventually the frustration hits a boiling point, and she explodes upright in bed with a quiet but vicious:

"…I'm done. Fine. FINE."

She swings her legs over the edge, bare feet hitting cold floor. Her shoulders are tense, her hair a mess, one strap of her tank top sliding off her shoulder. She drags a hand down her face.

This is not a woman who woke refreshed. This is a woman who woke pissed.

She shuffles through the dark toward the living room, the neon bleeding through the blinds painting her skin in shifting colors. The city outside pulses. Her implants hum. The feed waits.

She drops onto the couch like she's throwing herself at war.

The screens come alive.
First the main interface.
Then the security logs.

Then the telemetry tree from Helios. Then the tracer residue she'd been avoiding looking at—

She grunts and reaches for her spice-stick, flicking the ignition with a soft chk that illuminates half her face in a neon-amber glow. The first drag is long—too long—her lungs filling with the burn before she exhales in a stream of shimmering vapor.

"Alright," she mutters, voice edged, annoyed, awake. "Let's see which son of a rancor thinks they can leave toys in my sandbox."

Her fingers start moving.

Sharp. Efficient. Angry.

Windows open and collapse.
Logs spool backward in time.

Her internal firewall graph flares and contracts like a heartbeat.

She checks everything.
The tunnels.
The exit.

The packet-to-packet transitions.

Nothing catastrophic.
Nothing broken.

Just one tiny… off pattern in the data drift.

She pauses mid-drag, vapor curling from her lips.

"…What the hell are you."

She leans closer, eyes narrowing, neon lenses reflecting cascading lines of code. The anomaly is small—absurdly small—like someone had tucked it between two atoms and hoped she wouldn't notice, or.. maybe they knew she would.

But she does notice.
She always notices.

She dives deeper, tracing it back through the checksum echo, tearing apart its perimeter like peeling thread from a seam. Her heart rate ticks up, barely perceptible but present.

Inside the sediment of data, she finds it— A doorway. A silent channel.

One-way.
Clean.
Untouching.
Waiting.

She goes completely still.

"…Oh you sneaky, elegant nemodian," she breathes, half impressed, half furious.

Her knee bounces—one rapid, impatient pulse.

Her fingers hover over the keys.

Do you poke a doorway someone left just for you?
Do you ignore it?
Does ignoring it make you look weak?
Does opening it make you look desperate?

Her jaw flexes.

"Feth it."

She taps the gateway.

A single encrypted line opens.

No trace.
No location bleed.
No identifiers.
Just a blank input field.

She takes a long drag, lets the vapor burn down, and exhales through her nose before typing her opening line.

Not polite.
Not formal.
Not scared.

Just pure Nøva:

"Alright — You got my attention. Now who the feth are you?"

She hits send without giving herself time to rethink it.

Then she leans back on the couch, spice-stick dangling between her fingers, eyes fixed on the waiting cursor, exhaustion blending with adrenaline.

​

 

[Ana Rix]

The answer did not come quickly.

For several long moments, the channel remained still, the silence settling around Nøva like a deliberate choice rather than a delay. Nothing pulsed. Nothing blinked. Whoever was on the other end wasn't scrambling for a response or fumbling with encryption—they were waiting, measuring her pace, taking the full measure of her frustration and exhaustion before choosing to speak. When the reply finally appeared, it unfolded with unhurried confidence:

You followed the trail.

The wording was simple, but the intent beneath it was unmistakable. She had been expected to find the seam. She was meant to be here. The next line arrived with the same quiet precision, as if the voice behind it did not need rush or emphasis.

If you hadn't, I wouldn't be speaking to you at all.

The channel adjusted almost imperceptibly, stabilizing its architecture, no longer acting like a one-way breadcrumb but something now prepared to hold a conversation. Ana didn't fill the space with unnecessary explanations or warnings. She let the silence breathe before continuing—steady, measured, controlled.

You're not compromised. And no one else found the seam. If they had, I would have closed it before your second breath.

No bravado. No threat. Only a calm statement of capability. The answer to Nøva's question came next, but not in the form Nøva might have expected.

You asked who I am.

A brief flicker of the cursor, the digital equivalent of a composed inhale.

Someone who chooses their introductions carefully.

Another quiet shift, as though Ana were assessing how much Nøva would understand without needing it spelled out.

And someone who watched you move through Helios without tripping anything you couldn't out-think. That alone tells me you're worth speaking to.

There was no flattery in the line, no attempt to charm or provoke—just clean, factual recognition. Only after another moment passed did the final line appear, its tone neither challenging nor soft, simply open in the same way her mind was open to information worth valuing.

So before we trade names…tell me what you think I am.

The channel remained stable. Quiet. Waiting. Not demanding an answer, but expecting one.

Nøva

 

[Nøva]

TAG: Ana Rix

Nøva stared at the lines for a long moment, the quiet of the room suddenly louder than the words themselves. The slow response hadn't irritated her as much as… confirmed something. Whoever this was? They didn't scramble. They didn't chase. They weren't sweating.

They waited her out.

That alone made her spine bristle.

She tapped ash off the end of her spice-stick, exhaling a lazy ribbon of vapor that twisted in the neon glow.

"Alright," she muttered under her breath. "Game on, ghost."

Her fingers moved.

Not hesitating.
Not second-guessing.
Just deciding.

Her reply hit the channel with the same velocity as her thoughts:

You want my read? Fine.
You're not a scavenger. Not a suit. Not corporate. Not some Helios reject with a god complex.

Another drag, another slow exhale.

You move too clean for that.
Too precise.
Too… deliberate.

Her jaw flexed as she read the previous lines again — someone who watched you move through Helios without tripping anything you couldn't out-think.

Yeah.

That part stuck in her ribs.

She pressed her thumb against the interface, the subdermal light reflecting in her irises.

You're either high-tier black ops or you're the kind of independent operator corps whisper about but never catch.
One of the ones who don't miss.
One of the ones who only show up if they want something.

A faint, humorless smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.

My guess?
You're a ghost that got curious.
And ghosts don't get curious unless they've already vetted a dozen other runners and tossed them in the trash.

Her knee bounced again.
The spice-stick burned low.

Then she typed the last line — clipped, precise, and unmistakably Nøva:

So tell me if I'm wrong.
Or tell me what the hell you want with me.

​

 

[Ana Rix]

The response didn't arrive in a burst or a rush. When it finally appeared on Nøva's HUD, it felt intentional—quiet, precise, as if the sender had taken a moment to consider not just what to say, but how much to reveal.

And then the message unfolded in one long, unbroken current of thought:

I am a ghost, Nøva. Not the corporate fabrication or the military prototype or the kind that leaves propaganda in its wake. I move where no one looks, in the blind spots between noise and silence, in the threads of data people overlook because they don't know how to see them.

Another line followed with the same deliberate, unhurried cadence:

You're right about one thing: I don't stumble. I don't broadcast. I don't appear unless I intend to. And I reached out because you noticed me when most wouldn't have detected anything at all. That is rare. Rare enough to answer. Rare enough to merit attention.

The channel pulsed once—soft, non-intrusive—before continuing.

I want something very simple, and very specific. A conversation with someone capable of seeing the patterns others mistake for static. Someone who doesn't collapse the moment she realizes she isn't alone in the dark. Someone who can follow a line without demanding a map.

And then, the final sentence settled into place—calm, even, an invitation without pressure:

If that's something you're willing to entertain, keep talking. If not, close the channel. I don't chase what doesn't want to be found.

The message ended there—no trace, no signature, no identifying beacon.

Just a steady, open thread waiting for Nøva's next move.

Nøva

 

[Nøva]

TAG: Ana Rix

The cursor blinked in the corner of her HUD, reflecting faintly in the red wash of her data lenses. Nøva leaned back into the half-lit sprawl of her couch, one boot braced against the edge of the coffee table littered with open drive casings and smoked-out stims. Her spicestik burned in her left hand, ember pulsing like a heartbeat as she drew in slow, steady poison.

She exhaled through her nose—cold, measured—and the smoke curled upward, catching the dim cyan glow bleeding off her implants. No tension in her face. No surprise. Just that familiar narrowing of her eyes when the pieces clicked into place.

Her cybernetic fingers flexed once, actuators humming soft beneath dermal plating, before she set them back to the surface of the projection keys.

I'm not here for conversation.
If you pinged me, you already know why.

Her jaw tightened slightly—not irritation, but focus. The kind she only settled into when something big shifted under her feet. She shifted her weight forward, elbows on her knees, the glow from her HUD casting faint violet across the scars tucked beneath her hairline. The ghost's words still hovered in the periphery of her vision, but she didn't look at them anymore; she was seeing the geometry behind them. The pattern, the timing, the why now.

A long drag. Eyes half-lidded. Calculating.

Her fingers moved again, faster this time, confidence tightening every motion.

You've been sitting in the Helios blind-spot longer than any anomaly I've tracked.
You don't drift by accident.
You don't reveal yourself without motive.

So let's skip the preamble.
If you reached out now, it's because whatever you saw in that archive pull wasn't noise.
And you know I'm the only one who'll catch the pattern before it burns through the rest of the grid.

She flicked ash off the spicestik, watching the ember trail down and sizzle out on cold synth-metal flooring. Her pulse didn't change. Her breathing didn't change. But something sharpened behind her expression—recognition, maybe, or the subtle weight of someone who's finally seeing the contours of a threat she only felt before.

Nøva leaned closer to the floating holo-feed, the violet in her eyes brightening as her optics auto-focused.

Her final lines she entered without pausing, each word deliberate as the click of a chambered round.

You want someone who can follow a line?
Fine. I already followed it farther than you think.

So here's my response:
If you want my attention, put stakes on the table.
Helios stakes.

I'm not chasing phantoms for free.

She let her hand hover over the final send-pulse. Not hesitation—just control. Ownership. A predator deciding when to strike.

Then she added the last line, almost under her breath as she typed it. A razor smile ghosted briefly across her lips.

If you're in their shadow, say it.
If you're in their way, prove it.
Either case, I'm listening.
But don't waste my time.

She hit send.

The thread hummed faintly as the encrypted burst vanished into the dark net—quiet, clean, invisible.

Nøva sat back again, spicestik dangling between two metal fingers, waiting for whatever the hell answered next.

​

 

[Ana Rix]

<< INCOMING THREAD // SOURCE MASKED >>

The reply didn't appear in her feed immediately.
It arrived with a precision that felt intentional —
as if it had been waiting for her pulse to slow and her focus to sharpen.

---

[GHOST]:
You followed the line farther than most ever realize exists.
Good. That saves time.

A brief delay — the quiet kind that meant calculation, not hesitation.

---

[GHOST]:
You asked for stakes.
Helios isn't drifting.
Something inside their network is rewriting its own pathways.
Not corruption. Not malfunction.
Direction. Purpose.
And it has already mapped every anomaly except you.

Another pulse of data, light as breath:

---

[GHOST]:
You asked for payment.
Here it is.
I'll give you three things Helios can't:

1. Access — a blind corridor into their undernet spine.
2. Immunity — your name scrubbed from every archive they've ever logged.
3. Leverage — the kind that lifts or buries a corporation. Your call.

---

The next line appeared without ornament, without pause.
Just truth shaped like a blade.

---

[GHOST]:
You don't owe me allegiance.
Just attention.
Long enough to see what I'm showing you.

A coordinate hash unfolded — dense encryption compressed into a single pulse, impossible to read without skill and absolutely useless to anyone who wasn't the intended recipient.

---

[GHOST]:
You want to know what I want?
I want you to look at something no one inside Helios has survived long enough to describe.
You're the only anomaly it hasn't learned to predict.

Her final lines came quiet, controlled, deliberate:

---

[GHOST]:
You're not chasing phantoms, Nøva.
You're being hired.
And you're being invited.

<< END THREAD >>
Nøva