Page 25 of GlitchBorn Heart

A tingle runs up my spine, raising the hairs on the back of my neck. Don’t stare, Lyra...but I don’t listen to myself, and neither does my aching body. I’m so aroused, I have to continue to watch him.

He picks the sword up, flipping it in his hand so the lines of the handle face her. A couple of gentle caresses with his fingers, in...out...and he lines it up to her slick entrance, sliding the handle inside. She moans in sheer ecstasy. My eyes widen.

Two loud crashes fill the room.

I jerk toward the bar, stunned by a blinding white light bursting where the door once was. The music dies, the walls ripple.

A glitch tears through the DreamNet like claws dragging across skin. Whole sections of the RedRoom begin to pixelate and fold inward, lights flashing. Holos caught mid-laugh or mid-ecstasy before freezing, their faces smearing into static.

I stand too fast, and the room tilts with me. I grab for the bar, fingers slipping as the floor shatters beneath my feet, splintering into jagged shards of neon light. The room, the bodies, all of it stutters, then tears like paper-thin film being spliced.

The sound hits my ears with a painful piercing. I cover them with both hands to stop it, but it continues, as if it is being piped straight into my brain. Metal scraping metal. Not loud but shrill. It crawls up my spine, causing me to clench both eyes shut. The PleazureHolos freeze, mouths open, eyes glassed over.

My stomach drops.

I know this...

That sound. I’ve heard it before. through my thin apartment walls at three in the morning, curled up on my bed. I’ve heard it echo through the vents and through my dreams. It always startles me awake. A noise so wrong it makes your teeth ache, so familiar it fills me with dread.

The room continues to warp, code buckling, walls collapsing inward as if pulled into a black hole of invisible gravity. Cracks race up the bar, light leaking out like bleeding veins. I want to scream, but I know better. It will just glitch into static halfway through.

“No.” I’m already backing away, bracing for the drop into consciousness. My heart is pounding so hard it hurts. “Not here.”

The sound deepens. Angrier now. Refusing to be contained.

Eli.

My brother’s magic is tearing through DreamNet, collapsing it from the inside out, and I’m standing at the center of the rupture.

10

VoidChanneler

Playlist: Fallout - UNSECRET, Neoni

Lyra

It was a dream, yet it feels like my back was slammed into the mattress, like I’ve been dropped from one of the city’s towers, my breath knocked from my lungs. The impact is real, too real, and it rattles my body as DreamNet spits me out without mercy. Home , or whatever passes for home now. I’m back.

I don’t hesitate.

I bolt upright, feet hitting the floor hard, adrenaline flooding my veins. My pulse races as I rush toward my bedroom door.

Intense light bleeds from beneath it. A razor-thin line of neon violet stretches across the floor, slicing through the darkness of my room. It pulses so bright I shield my eyes.

I throw the door open to find the living room no longer resembling a room. It’s an angry storm of strobing sigils, blinding light, and splitting code whipping in furious ribbons. Data and code collide violently, filling the air before reforming and crashing again. The walls shift between solid and transparent, reality buckling under his surging power. Furniture flickers like it’s being shocked with electricity. The floor splits open in particles of black, purple, and silver, cascading in a perfect line, straight into a lightless void beneath.

The sound is back too, that haunting metallic echo reverberating through everything.

And at the center of it is my brother.

Eli’s power is creating another void. It’s flooding my space, and I know, with deep certainty, that if I don’t reach him right now, if I don’t calm him, pull him back, then there may be nothing left to come home to.

He stands in front of the tall glass doors to the balcony, all ten fingers splayed stiff and facing downward. Tiny particles of purple light gather at the tips like fizzy bubbles in a glass of champagne. His body spasms in erratic jerks like a marionette.

His eyes glow white-hot as the echo-noise pours out of him. It shakes the whole apartment, a low frequency that’s both sound and feeling, crawling under my skin.

The violet storm spirals tighter with every pulse of his heartbeat, black void threads begin wrapping around his arms, engulfing him. Reality flickers between DreamNet and the real world until I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. I know everyone inside is feeling it, probably being kicked out violently.