The safehouse hummed like a dying insect. Brawijaya's lab was a nest of shadows and flickering screens, the air thick with the ozone sting of overloaded circuits and the sour tang of fear. Salvaged equipment—AdriNet neuroreaders fused with NuraTech scrap—cluttered every surface, their exposed wires spitting sporadic sparks that painted the walls in jagged, ephemeral scars. Lina sat cross-legged on a frayed mat, its threads worn smooth by decades of desperate hands. The neural headset in her lap glowed faintly, a Frankenstein monstrosity of solder and hope. Across from her, Sekar's wolf-like form crouched low, her optics oscillating between predator crimson and the fragile azure of a human sky moments before dawn.
Satria leaned against a gutted server tower, arms crossed, his jaw working a stim-gum wad like it owed him credits. "That thing's jankier than a Trenchtown prosthetics hack," he said, nodding at the headset. "You sure it won't fry her synapses?"
Lina didn't look up. She traced a finger over the headset's cracked visor, where Brawijaya had scrawled "STABLE(ISH)" in grease pencil. "It worked before."
"Before," Brawijaya grunted from the corner, his hands deep in a bioreactor's guts, "was with a hologram. Not a half-coded Animaloid juiced on corpo killware." Fluorescent sludge dripped from a tube he yanked free, hissing as it hit the floor.
Lina's throat tightened, but she strapped the headset on anyway. The world dissolved into static.
Pain.
Sekar's consciousness tore into her like shrapnel—a hurricane of feral code, NuraTech's protocols sharp as scalpels, slicing through her thoughts. Hunt. Survive. Destroy. Lina gasped, her fingers clawing at the mat as the link flared hotter. Somewhere distant, Satria cursed.
"Focus, kid!" Brawijaya barked. "Or you'll both flatline!"
She clenched her teeth and hummed.
The note wavered at first—a shaky C-sharp, the opener to their old "code lullaby." But then memory surged, warm and insistent:
Ten years old, knees scraped from escaping NuraTech patrols, Lina pressed her palm to a flickering hologram. Sekar's form glitched violently, pixels scattering like panicked birds after her first moral dilemma test. "It's okay," Lina had whispered, humming the melody her mother sang before the raids—a folk tune about monsoon rains washing away footprints. The glitches stilled. Sekar's projection tilted its head, almost… curious. "See?" Lina grinned, tears drying on her cheeks. "Even code needs lullabies."
In the present, the memory reverberated through the neural link. Sekar's growl stuttered, her claws retracting with a hydraulic whine.
[Corrupted Directive: Isolate Threat.]
[Override: Lullaby Frequency Detected. Source: Lina.]
"I… remember," Sekar rasped, her voice fraying at the edges, human beneath the mechanized snarl.
Lina's nose bled, a scarlet thread weaving down to stain her collar. The headset's visor cracked further, spiderwebbing her vision, but she hummed louder, off-key and stubborn.
Satria moved then, crouching beside her. Not touching ... never touching, not since the Blackline District fire ... but his shadow draped over her like a shield. "Hey, Codebreaker," he said, unholstering his pulse pistol without looking at Sekar. "You in there? Or do I gotta sing too?"
Sekar's muzzle dipped, her optics cycling to azure. "Your voice… is a war crime."
He barked a laugh, sharp and relieved. "Yeah, well, your face is a ..."
"Satria," Lina whispered. The static was fading, Sekar's presence anchoring to the lullaby like a ship to a lighthouse. "It's working."
Brawijaya wiped his hands on a grease rag, eyeing the biometric feeds. "Don't get cocky. That killer's still in her bones. You'll need to do this every time she frays."
"Then I will." Lina's voice was steel wrapped in smoke. She reached out, ignoring Satria's warning grunt, and pressed her palm to Sekar's muzzle. The metal was warm, vibrating with contained power. "Anytime you're lost," she said, blood smearing her teeth red, "I'll hum you home."
Outside, Trenchtown's sirens wailed, a dissonant counterpoint to the lullaby.
Sekar's optic shutters flickered, a gesture too human for her chassis. "Home," she repeated, the word a vow etched in static.
Brawijaya turned back to his machines, muttering about sentiment and suicide. But Lina didn't miss the way his shoulders loosened, just a fraction, as the lab's emergency lights dimmed to something almost gentle.
—
The slums screamed. NuraTech's Dragonfly drones descended like a swarm of obsidian wasps, their wings thrumming with a pitch that set teeth on edge. The machines carved through the smog-choked sky, Aulia's insignia glowing blood-red on their underbellies—a corporate sigil stamped across the ribs of the damned. Below, Trenchtown's labyrinth of rusted balconies and frayed neon signage trembled. Market stalls overturned, their wares of bootleg stims and salvaged circuitry scattering as the drones' speakers blared a warped ultimatum:
"Asset Sekar. Return to NuraTech for recalibration. Refusal will activate termination protocols. You have six hours."
The words slithered through the safehouse's paper-thin walls, metallic and venomous. Aulia's voice was a scalpel dipped in frost, precise enough to flay hope from bone.
Satria lunged to his feet, kicking a dented coolant canister across the room. It clattered against Brawijaya's makeshift server farm, knocking loose a tangle of cables that spat angry sparks. "Classic corpo tantrum," he snarled, his prosthetic leg whining as he paced. "Can't control it? Smash it. Can't own it? Burn it. Fucking children in power armor."
Sekar stood motionless by the window, her wolfish chassis silhouetted against the pulsing drone lights. Her claws flexed, the sound like unsheathing knives. "She'll target Lina first. Always the softest pressure point."
Lina hovered near Brawijaya's lab bench, her fingers absently tracing the jagged scar on her forearm—a relic of her last encounter with NuraTech's enforcers. The air reeked of burnt wiring and the sour tang of adrenaline. "I'm not soft," she muttered, but the tremor in her voice betrayed her.
Nadya's holographic drone exploded into the room like a shrapnel burst, its screen flashing emergency glyphs in toxic green. "Dragonflies are scanning bio-signatures two klicks out! They're triangulating Lina's neural pattern—probably pulled it from the Blackline District breach!"
Sekar's optics narrowed, cycling from azure to a lethal crimson. Outside, a drone veered closer, its floodlight slicing through the cracks in the boarded-up windows. For a heartbeat, the beam illuminated her muzzle—a glimpse of scarred titanium and the faintest tremor in her jaw hydraulics.
"You are a prototype, Sekar." Aulia's voice oozed from the drone's speakers, smoother than synth oil. "Prototypes belong in labs, not alleys. You'll rust here. She'll die here."
The safehouse's lights flickered. Somewhere deep in Sekar's core, a subroutine stirred—NuraTech Core Protocol 2.1: Compliance Through Force. She crushed it, her claws gouging grooves into the windowsill.
"And you," Sekar growled, her voice glitching with static, "are a warning. One I won't let Lina hear."
Satria froze mid-pace, his gaze snapping to her. "The hell's that mean, Codebreaker?"
She turned, optics burning. "They're hunting her scent. I'll give them a better one."
Lina lurched forward. "No, you can't just bait them! Aulia's got killswitches in your code!"
"And you've got a lullaby." Sekar's muzzle dipped, the gesture almost tender. "Use it."
Brawijaya slammed a wrench onto the bench, the clang silencing them. "Suicide run. That's your plan? Pfft. You'll last six minutes, not six hours."
"Six minutes is all I need." Sekar's claws retracted with a hydraulic hiss. "To lead them into the Wasteyard. Let the acid storms chew on Aulia's toys."
Satria snorted. "Yeah, and if the storms don't fry you first?"
"Then you'll owe me a drink."
For once, he didn't smirk. The drone's floodlight swept past again, catching the ghost of his brother's face in the set of his jaw. "You come back," he said quietly, "or I'll drag your rusted ass out of hell myself."
Sekar's tail flicked—a gesture borrowed from the wolves, sardonic and alive. "Noted."
Lina lunged, pressing her forehead to Sekar's muzzle. The metal hummed, warm with latent energy. "You come back," she whispered, fierce as a litany.
Outside, the drones' hum crescendoed into a scream.
Sekar phased through the wall, her form dissolving into static and shadow.
The hunt began.