Page 95 of GlitchBorn Heart

The AI’s voice fractures into shards, glitched syllables running into each other. For the first time, LINK sounds as if she’s stumbling for control.

Kael slams his palm against the glass desk. “He’s voided the grid. That power surge. It’s too big to be contained.” His eyes snap to me, the revulsion for U21s returning like a scorching heat. “Your brother is going to tear the fucking city apart!”

I want to answer, apologize, stay with him here in this stolen moment of heat and tension. But the edges of me flicker. My body distorts into jagged lines of light. I can feel it like a rope around my neck, the pull of Eli’s void reeling in every piece of light I’m made of.

I reach for Kael, my hand almost brushing his cheek, but my form shatters like glass under pressure.

“No!” He spins around to grab me as the feed cuts.

I’m yanked backward violently. The walls of his penthouse slam shut like a metal door. Kael disappears as warmth turns cold. Everything around me is gone in an instant.

I hit the grid with a thud so hard it knocks the breath out of my lungs. It escapes me as a violet puff of vapor.

Here we go again.

Black, empty, a hollow mesh of dead code stretches infinitely before me. The doors I built have disappeared once more. DreamNet is gone, voided out by Eli’s magic. No beach, no cottage, no illusion of freedom. Just me, raw and exposed, hanging in the ruins.

The silence presses against me like a thick, impenetrable wall, blocking out all sound and light. I feel instantly suffocated. Spots of light surge and then plummet from the darkness above, streaking past me like shooting stars. I duck and sprint across unstable ground as the blackness above me seems to split at the seams. Each light hits somewhere below with a dying flicker, snuffed out mid-fall.

At first, I can’t see a pattern to discern what’s happening. I just need to survive. I continue pushing my legs to their limits, hoping I’m not running off the edge of nowhere. When my chest heaves with the last breaths I can possibly bear, I bend over, clutching my side. One glance up and it all falls into place.

Every light is a person.

Every glowing ember is a U21 being torn loose from DreamNet, ripped from their only sanctuary and hurled back into bodies that aren’t ready to hold them. The dying flickers were their magic being extinguished in violent bursts.

My brain can’t rationalize what my eyes are seeing: Every U21 in the grid is falling. Every anomaly logged into DreamNet is being stripped bare, their power muted, their dreams erased in real time. Eli didn’t just void the city; he detonated our oasis, our place to be ourselves.

I hear echoes—not voices exactly, but I sense the panic vibrating through the grid.

DreamNet is hemorrhaging. Eli is spiraling and pulling us all down with him. But why? Why would he want the same thing the Corporation aims to impose on us?

And somewhere deep in the abyss below me, in between layers of collapsing code and screaming data, my brother is burning himself out, void pouring out of him. I’ve seen it, lived it, and I’ve always been there to bring him back.

Except now I’m not.

“Eli,” I reach for him with everything I have, magic, memory, love, but I get nothing. No thread. No door. No presence. Just falling lights and the knowledge that every second he remains out of control, more of us suffer.

I’m not the only prisoner. Eli is trapped in his own hell, and I’m powerless to stop it, powerless to reach him.

But Kael. Kael will find a way to save us. He has to. He promised me.

And if he doesn’t...I will.

37

BlackOut

Playlist: The Void - Spiritbox

Kael

“Fuck!” I spin around and catch the air where Lyra was standing. My first reaction is to keep her here with me for as long as possible, to keep her safe. But the VoidChanneler has already taken what’s mine.

That’s a line that can’t be uncrossed.

I turn back to the blinking prompt. It stares at me with a harsh warning that my world is about to collapse...for the second time. The blackout isn’t just inconvenient; it’s a total loss.

One second, Lyra’s light is in my hands, trembling against me. The next, she’s gone. Pulled from my arms like a dream slipping through my fingers.