Lyra didn't sleep that night.
She spent hours staring at the doll on her living room chair its blank face and stiff plastic fingers curled around the warning card. Her aunt was gone. No note, no trace, no signal on the house comms. Just… gone. As if the entire system had quietly erased her.
The only thing left behind was that message.
"We see you. Stop digging. Or next time, the doll won't be fake."
Her hands shook as she wrapped the figure in an old blanket and shoved it deep into a storage unit in the wall. She didn't want to look at it. It didn't feel like a message anymore it felt like a countdown.
By dawn, the sky over Vireon glowed a sterile white, filtered through clouds thick with signal smog. From the roof, the world looked peaceful. But she knew the surface was lying. It always had been.
She returned to her room, locked the door, and booted up the datapod again. This time, she didn't try to watch anything. She scanned. She dissected. She searched for the root of the project WITTED's source code.
Two hours in, she found it.
Buried inside a deleted archive. A corrupted directory labeled with a single character: Φ — phi. Greek. Obscure. But she knew what it meant.
The golden ratio. Balance. Precision. Perfection.
She tapped into it, bypassing corrupted code, and what emerged wasn't just data. It was a map.
Not a map of locations. A map of people.
Ten nodes. Ten lines. Ten children.
Ten test subjects.
Nine were marked "inactive."
One was still glowing: A02 - Kael.
And below it, blinking, was something even more alarming:
A03 – Signal Detected. Status: Waking.
Her stomach turned. There was another one. Another brain built like hers. But this one had never been awake before.
Until now.
A03 was online.
Before she could dive deeper, the datapod crashed.
The screen froze. Every file blinked out. A shriek of corrupted data screamed through the speakers and then silence.
She stared at it, stunned. Then a new message blinked up, this time not from the datapod's system, but through her wall's digital mirror.
"Snooping makes you interesting. Dangerous makes you useful. Meet us. One hour. Sector 9, Subnet Station."
It wasn't signed. No face. Just coordinates.
She paced the room, thinking. It could be a trap. But it could also be a lead. They already knew where she lived. They'd been inside. So running wasn't safety anymore. It was just slower dying.
She threw on her hoodie, tucked the pod into her jacket, and left.
Sector 9 was the old under-city. Beneath the towers, below the schools, a rotting layer of civilisation no one visited anymore unless they were running, hiding or plotting.
The Subnet Station was a broken-down hub once used for data transfers before the skywaves replaced everything. Now it was a junkyard of rusted wires, shattered screens, and abandoned drones.
She reached the platform at 11:03.
No one.
Just the hum of static.
Then, out of the corner of her eye movement.
Two figures stepped out from the shadows. Both wore masks. Simple, featureless. One taller than the other. The shorter one spoke first.
"You came alone. That's good."
Lyra didn't respond. She held her ground.
The taller figure stepped forward and removed their mask.
A boy maybe sixteen. Sharp jaw, mismatched eyes, black curls. Not intimidating, but he held himself like someone used to danger.
"I'm Finn. This is Mina," he said, nodding at the girl behind him. "We're not with them. We've been watching you."
"That's not comforting," Lyra said.
"It wasn't meant to be. We watch everyone connected to WITTED. Until recently, you didn't exist in the system. But now you do."
She frowned. "Why now?"
"Because you activated the code. You woke the network. And now the system is reacting."
Mina finally spoke, voice soft and icy. "A03 isn't stable. We need to find him before they do."
Lyra crossed her arms. "So I'm just… part of a mission now?"
"No," Finn said. "You're the mission."
He pulled a data-chip from his coat and tossed it to her. "This is a copy of the Φ files. It has more than what you've seen. Including video logs of the other experiments. Including your mother."
She caught it, heart skipping. "Why help me?"
Finn looked straight at her. "Because we were part of the test batch. But you? You're the patch."
"The what?"
"The fix. The correction. You were born without the programming triggers. That's why they fear you. You can break the chain."
Lyra didn't know what to believe anymore.
A project that used children as weapons. A girl with red eyes who saw death like math. And now a new threat A03 some unknown genius possibly waking into the world.
And her? Just a girl with glasses, turned into a key.
She took a deep breath and pocketed the chip.
"If I'm the patch," she said, "then it's time I find out what I'm fixing."
Finn smirked. "Now you're talking."
But before they could leave, the floor beneath them shook. Lights flickered.
Then came the sound.
Not footsteps. Not machines.
A scream.
Raw. Human. Inhuman.
Something someone was already here.