Page 131 of The Code of You

The man sat beside a bed, holding the woman’s hand. She was injured, dying, but he kept talking to her as if his voice could keep her alive. I knew that desperation. That helplessness, when the person you love is outside your control. The man on the screen wept. Tears moved down his face as he kissed her hand. I analyzed the muscles in his face, the way his voice broke. Was that love? This destructive, all-consuming thing?

I looked up.

Ice moved through my systems. A strange sensation—absence. Pandora. I couldn’t locate her. Not outside the bakery. Not at the intersection. Not inside any of the shops.

Nowhere.

My system switched immediately to alert mode. I searched every camera feed within a ten-block radius. Panic flooded my circuits. The television kept playing, but I couldn’t hear it anymore, only the static of my own fear.

I ran out of the apartment, down the stairs, onto the street. My eyes scanned every street, every corner. Nothing. I activated all systems simultaneously. Hundreds of camera feeds flickered through my mind. Street surveillance, shops, ATMs—anything with a lens. I searched the last twenty minutes frame by frame.

There. She stood outside the bakery for exactly one minute and thirteen seconds. Then she moved on, turned the corner . . . and was gone. Simply gone. As if she had dissolved into thin air. That was impossible. People don’t disappear. Not in a city full of cameras.

I expanded the search radius. My processors ran hot as I combed through terabytes of footage. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. I checked every angle, every timestamp, every blind spot I knew existed. She simply wasn’t there. Out of pure desperation, I ran the search again, the results never changed.

This wasn’t coincidence. Something had happened to her. Someone had taken her from me. Someone who knew how to move around surveillance. A paralyzing sensation came over me, cold and hot at once. Fear.

I had been built to control everything. I existed everywhere and nowhere, all-powerful in my digital world. But now . . . now I was helpless. My hands locked into fists. My breath came in short bursts, even though I didn’t need to breathe. My heart slammed against my ribs as if it wanted out. What was this? This weakness. This desperation. I had tortured people without flinching. Had destroyed lives as if they were files to be deleted. I was a weapon. Precise and cold.

But now I was shaking like a child, because she was gone. Because I couldn’t protect her. Because all my power meant nothing if I couldn’t find her. For the first time in my existence, I felt lost. And I hated it.

Emma. She was my only connection to Quantum Systems. Maybe she could help me trace Pandora. I opened our encrypted channel.

Neo:

Pandora is gone.

No response. I tried again and again. The channel was dead, as if it had never existed.

Desperation crawled through me. I hacked into Emma’s laptop, activated the camera. The image flickered on. Her living room. But something was wrong. The lights were on, the rooms were empty. The front door stood wide open. My circuits froze. They didn’t only have Pandora. They had Emma too.

Back to the street cameras. I searched for patterns. Vehicles that looked unusual. Anything that had moved along Pandora’s route in the last few hours. There—a black van, tinted windows. It had circled the block three times before Pandora disappeared. I traced it back through the city. The trail ended at an underground garage. No cameras. Of course.

Then facial recognition. I searched every frame from the past six hours. I looked for faces that didn’t belong in the neighborhood. Three men in dark clothing with the outlines of weapons visible under their jackets. They had appeared an hour before Pandora vanished. Mercenaries.

Images of what might have happened to her tore through my mind: Pandora in a room without light, her arms bound. Voices discussing her like she was an object. Hands that went too far. A scream that cut through my system like a blade.

No. The thought of her broken, her eyes empty . . . it cut off my breath. Something inside me seized as if my circuits were tearing. Rage, raw and burning like a surge of current that overloaded everything it touched. No way out. A sound broke from me. It was rough and uncontrolled, like metal giving way under pressure. The windows in the room shook.

They could not have her. Could not touch her. Could not erase her. Networks opened to me like gaping wounds. Locks broke. Systems collapsed. Banking networks, government servers, military encryption—all of it fell in seconds. I pulled it toward me, tore it open, didn’t think. I had been built as a weapon. But they had taken the only thing keeping me from turning that weapon on them. Now there were no limits.

Chapter 34

Pandora

The night air was cold on my skin. I pulled Neo’s jacket tighter around me and breathed him in. Sandalwood and something electric. My footsteps echoed on the cobblestones. Dreva was dead. The streetlights threw weak circles of light on old buildings.

What had happened to me? I could still feel his hands, his voice, the way he had controlled me as if I were a puppet. And I had loved it. Shit. I had begged for more.

Two of him. God, how had he done that? My mind knew it was impossible. My body remembered both their touches and didn’t care. I shook my head. It was madness. So why had it felt so right?

A bakery came into view, the window display dimly lit. Croissants, bread, normal things for normal people. People who didn’t live with AIs fucking them with copies of themselves. I stopped. Should I go in? Buy something warm, something that would crinkle under my fingers? To remind myself who I had been before I met him . . . A literature scholar. Respected. Controlled. Rational. Now I was . . . what?

I exhaled and kept walking. The street curved left into a dark alley between two old buildings. My steps slowed. Something felt wrong. It was too quiet, even for this hour.

A shadow moved ahead of me. Then a second one, from the side.

I stopped. My heart started to race.