The first thing she noticed was the silence.
Not the comforting kind of silence, like the hush before dawn, but a silence that pressed in on her skull, thick and suffocating—like the world itself was holding its breath. Her eyes flickered open to the sterile glow of failing lights overhead. A buzzing hum followed, stuttering, crackling, as if the very circuits in the walls were dying alongside her.
She sat up, slowly, painfully, and the motion was like waking from a drowning. Her lungs burned. Her chest heaved. And then she realized—there was no pulse.
Her hands flew to her neck. Nothing. No rhythm. No life drumming beneath her skin. The panic rose sharp and fast, but before it could overwhelm her, a voice crackled to life above the failing hum.
> SYSTEM BOOT SEQUENCE: INCOMPLETE.
IDENTITY VERIFICATION: FAILED.
WARNING: NO RECORD FOUND.
Her heart should've been pounding. Instead, there was just… emptiness. A void where life should be.
She staggered to her feet, the floor beneath her made of cracked tiles and dried stains she didn't want to name. The room was unfamiliar. No windows. No doors. Only metal panels, wires hanging loose, sparks spitting dangerously. A derelict chamber. A graveyard of machines.
And she was the only thing moving inside it.
Her reflection in the nearest panel stopped her cold. Pale skin, grayish under the flickering light. Hair in disarray, strands of black matted to her face. Eyes wide, too wide. But it wasn't the tired look that frightened her.
It was the blankness.
No scars. No birthmarks. Nothing identifiable. Like someone had erased her before sketching her back into existence.
> IDENTITY STATUS: ERASED.
The words pulsed across the wall screen, glowing in jagged green text.
She stumbled backward, breath rasping, though she wasn't sure she was breathing at all. Her throat constricted. "What… what does that mean?" Her voice was hoarse, cracked, like it hadn't been used in years.
No response.
The silence pressed in again, broken only by the intermittent hum of the failing circuits.
Her gaze darted across the room, searching for anything—anything—that might tell her who she was, why she was here, what this place was. A scattered heap of wires. Broken terminals. A toppled medical chair, straps still dangling from its arms. Something about that made her skin crawl.
And then the wall opposite her shifted.
A seam of light broke down the center, widening with a hiss. She froze, eyes glued to the widening gap as the door slowly opened. Beyond it, a corridor stretched into darkness, lit only by a faint neon glow.
She didn't move. Not yet. Because if the door opened, then something—or someone—had opened it.
Her instincts screamed at her to stay still, to wait, but the emptiness in her chest—the absence of her own heartbeat—pushed her forward. Answers had to be out there. She needed them, desperately, or the silence inside her would consume her completely.
Her bare feet padded against the cold floor as she stepped into the corridor. The neon glow pulsed faintly, guiding her deeper. The air was heavy, damp, carrying the faint smell of ozone and rot.
And then she heard it.
A whisper.
At first she thought it was in her head, just another crack in her unraveling sanity. But then it came again, softer, like static carried on the wind.
> Zera.
Her breath caught.
The name slipped through the air, wrapping around her mind like a brand searing itself into her skull. She stumbled, clutching at her head. The voice wasn't hers, but it felt—familiar. Like it had been waiting for her to wake up.
> Zera.
The corridor split into two paths ahead: one bathed in blue neon, the other in red. The voice hummed low, reverberating through her bones, urging her.
> Choose. The city is waiting.
She pressed herself against the wall, nails digging into the metal as she tried to steady her nonexistent pulse. Blue or red. Left or right. She didn't even know where she was, didn't even know if she could trust the voice in her skull.
But the silence behind her was heavier than the unknown ahead.
She stepped toward the red glow.
And that's when she saw them.
Figures, hunched in the shadows, eyes glowing faintly like predators in the dark. Watching her. Waiting.
One stepped forward, and the neon light caught its face—or what was left of it. A mask of steel fused to rotting flesh. A mechanical jaw clicked as it spoke, voice a warped echo:
> "No pulse. No name. No right to exist."
The others stirred, whispering in sync, a chilling chant rising in the corridor:
> "No name. No pulse. No right to exist."
Zera backed away, heartless chest tight, the whispers of the voice in her head clashing with the mechanical chant outside.
For the first time, she wanted to scream. But the silence inside her swallowed it whole.
And then—
The corridor lights surged, blinding white, and everything froze.
A figure stepped out of the brilliance, hooded, faceless, holding something that buzzed with static in their hand. The chanting broke off, the creatures retreating, hissing, into the shadows.
The hooded figure turned to her, and though she couldn't see their face, she felt the weight of their gaze pinning her in place.
The device in their hand crackled alive.
> "Run, if you want to stay forgotten."
The first day bled into the second, and Zera realized the city didn't care if she starved. Neon lights didn't dim, advertisements didn't pause to mourn, and the air carried on reeking of fried synth-meat and burnt ozone. The world had moved on without her—and it expected her to die quietly in its cracks.
But Zera wasn't dying. Not yet.
The Market That Denied Her
She approached a vending pillar outside a transit hub, its towering body wrapped in holo-ads that shifted every second: glowing celebrities hawking pills for "perfect skin ratios," influencers selling daily mood-filters, a fitness star whose entire jawline was branded property.
Zera just wanted water.
She reached out, fingers trembling, and pressed her palm to the biometric pad. The pad hummed, scanned… and pulsed red.
> ACCESS DENIED: NO REGISTERED IDENTITY FOUND.
The words stabbed across the screen in bold white. The vending unit's mechanical voice chimed, cheery and merciless:
> "Authentication failed. Please update your account through the Social Registry to continue service. Remember: Verified is Valued!"
Her throat burned with thirst. She slammed her hand again against the scanner, harder this time, as though her desperation could brute-force an existence into the machine. It beeped red again, louder, as if mocking her.
A man standing nearby glanced at her, then away just as quickly. His eyes slid past her, unfocused—trained by the system to ignore the nameless.
Invisible.
The vending machine whirred, locking its compartment doors as though she were a thief. Zera staggered back, pulse pounding in her ears. No name. No pulse. No drink.
The City's Predators
That night, she found herself drawn to the underpass below the transit lines. The air smelled of hot steel, electric brakes, and rot. People huddled in clusters—too thin, too hollow-eyed, too silent. The erased. Ghosts like her.
But not all of them were victims.
"Hey."
The voice cracked the silence. A man stepped forward, his jacket patched with corporate logos—cheap knockoffs, glowing faintly. His smile gleamed like a blade. Two others drifted behind him, shadows at his back.
"You're new."
Zera's muscles tensed.
He tilted his head, eyes narrowing. "Fresh wipe. I can tell. Still got that look—like the world ripped you out of its feed and you're waiting for someone to paste you back in."
She said nothing.
He grinned wider. "Relax. We're friends. We help people like you… trade what little they've got left. Nerve signals, memory fragments, reflex codes. You'd be surprised what the markets pay for scraps of a person."
His eyes glittered. "Or you can just come with us. Easier that way."
Her stomach lurched. His words dripped with rehearsed smoothness, but his stance was predatory. He wasn't offering—he was claiming.
Something deep in her spine snapped awake. A warning, sharp and primal. Without thinking, she stepped back into the shadows of the underpass, keeping her weight balanced, her eyes tracking the three of them like prey.
She shouldn't have known how to do that. She shouldn't have felt that instinct.
The man's smile twitched. "You'll come around. They all do. Just a matter of hunger."
Then he melted back into the dark, leaving the promise of his return hanging in the air like a noose.
The Instinct She Shouldn't Have
Later, when Zera found a corner to collapse in, she whispered into the dark:
"How did I… know?"
Her body had moved like it remembered something her mind didn't. The weight shift. The measured retreat. Even her silence—calculated, practiced, tactical.
She curled her knees to her chest, pressing the stolen mask tighter against her face. It was her only shield, her only fragment of anonymity. But anonymity was a knife with two edges: it cut her free from the system, but it also cut her free from help.
The city whispered around her, a constant hum of drones, screens, and chatter she wasn't part of. And in the gaps between the noise, she could almost hear a second hum—one that lived under her skin.
Like static. Like code.
Like she was more than she appeared.
But she couldn't chase that thought. Not yet. Survival came first.
The next morning, she made a mistake. She went back to the vending pillar, desperate enough to try again.
This time, when her palm hit the scanner, the machine didn't just reject her.
It glitched.
The screen stuttered, letters fracturing into broken lines of code. Symbols flickered, rearranged, and for half a heartbeat, Zera's reflection warped—her face overlaid with a digital mask of static and numbers.
The machine froze. Then rebooted.
Zera stumbled back, pulse hammering. Around her, people were staring. Not at her—but at the machine that had just spasmed like it had been hacked.
She hadn't done anything. She hadn't meant to.
But the system had recognized her anyway.
And now others might have too.
The world above the service ducts didn't hum — it screamed.
Through the grates overhead, Zera heard it: the pulse of neon billboards flickering with artificial warmth, the echo of drones announcing discount feeds, the laughter of influencers echoing off glass towers. But down here, crawling through the hollow skeleton beneath it all, it felt like a different city. The only light came from strips of malfunctioning conduit, stuttering every few seconds like broken breaths.
Zera paused at a junction where three tunnels met. Her lungs burned from recycled air, and her ears still carried the faint ringing from the tower alarm earlier. The one that had nearly tagged her.
Her hands shook as she pressed her palm to the cold metal wall, trying to steady herself. Why am I alive? That question had dug into her bones since the fall.
Because she should've been caught. Should've been flagged. Should've been erased like every other "nonexistent." The system didn't miss. And yet, somehow, when the alarm blared and the scanners swept, she slipped through. Like the system blinked — just for her.
A glitch.
Or maybe she wasn't supposed to exist in the first place.
A shiver traced her spine.
The tunnels weren't empty.
From deeper in the duct, the static of a broken speaker drifted, carrying with it scraps of voices. Not live voices — echoes, pulled from fractured comm lines still wired through the city's veins. She crouched lower, crawling toward it, her knees scraping against the metal floor.
"...identity… revoked…"
"...hungry ones waiting…"
"...ghost in the—"
The voice fractured, dissolved into harsh static, then bled into silence.
Zera clenched her fists. She wasn't imagining it. The city's veins carried whispers of its own decay. The erased didn't leave behind bodies; they left behind interference.
She pushed on.
Her body knew where to crawl, even when her mind screamed she was lost. Every turn of the ducts, every rusted ladder, every cross-passage felt half-remembered. Like she'd been here before. Like this wasn't the first time she'd fled into the city's underbelly.
But there was no memory to hold onto. Just flashes — smoke, fire, a voice calling her name. A name she couldn't recall.
Her head throbbed.
She finally emerged into a wider chamber, one of the old junction nodes where maintenance crews used to gather before drones replaced them. The ceiling stretched high, pipes webbed across it like tangled arteries, dripping condensation into stagnant puddles below.
And there, against the far wall, was something that didn't belong.
A terminal.
It was dead at first glance — its screen cracked, half the frame gutted, wires exposed like veins. But faintly, in the corner of the display, a cursor blinked. Waiting.
Her chest tightened.
She stepped closer, boots sloshing through the puddle. Every instinct screamed don't. Dead tech didn't stay dead long. Sometimes it carried trackers. Sometimes it carried bait.
But she couldn't stop.
The cursor pulsed faster as she neared, as if it sensed her. Then words bled onto the cracked glass, jagged, imperfect, like handwriting turned into pixels:
YOU SHOULDN'T EXIST.
Zera stumbled back. Her heel hit the puddle's edge and nearly sent her sprawling.
Her breath caught, but the terminal didn't stop. Letters scrolled across, unprompted.
YOU SLIPPED THE SYSTEM.
IT WON'T LET YOU SLIP AGAIN.
She swallowed, throat dry. "Who—who's writing this?"
The cursor froze. Then, slowly:
NOT WHO. WHAT.
Before she could react, the chamber shuddered. Somewhere above, the groan of machinery shifted, followed by the sharp clatter of metal hitting metal. A ripple of air pressed through the ducts.
They were moving.
Drones.
She bolted to the terminal, desperate. "Tell me why! Tell me what I am!"
The screen glitched, pixels stuttering into jagged shapes. Then one last message forced itself through:
FIND THE GHOST MARKET.
The cursor blinked, then died. The screen went black.
And from the tunnels behind her, the whir of approaching drones rose like a swarm of mechanical locusts.
Zera ran.
Her boots slammed the ducts, splashing through puddles, sending echoes racing ahead of her. The drones didn't hesitate — their rotors shrieked as they poured into the chamber she'd just left. A searchlight sliced through the dark, cutting across the tunnel wall inches from her back.
Not again.
She dove left, squeezing into a side shaft barely wide enough for her shoulders. Metal scraped her skin raw, her breath ragged as she clawed forward. The drones weren't built for tight spaces — but that didn't matter. They had cutters. They had gas. They had patience.
The shaft sloped down, gravity dragging her into deeper dark. Her palms burned from gripping rusted edges, but she didn't stop. Didn't dare.
Because above the noise of her own flight, she heard it again.
The voice.
Not from a terminal this time. Not from broken wires. From inside her head.
"Run left."
She froze, mid-crawl.
The shaft split into two ahead of her. She hadn't decided yet. Hadn't even thought about it. But the voice already knew.
"Left. Now."
Her heart stopped.
The drones' lights flared behind her. She didn't think. She obeyed.
She veered left.
And just as she did, a cutter beam seared past the right passage, burning it clean. If she'd chosen that way, she'd have been sliced in two.
Her stomach lurched.
"Keep going. Don't stop."
The voice wasn't hers. It wasn't imagined static. It was sharp, directive. And it was inside her skull.
Zera crawled faster, panic warring with obedience.
What am I?
The shaft spat her into another open space, this one littered with debris. Broken drones, shattered crates, tangles of discarded wiring. A scavenger's nest.
And someone was already there.
A figure crouched by a fire pit made of cracked circuit boards, the flickering glow casting jagged shadows against their mask. The mask itself was crude — welded metal, lenses scavenged from old optics, filters strapped on with tape. But the voice that cut through the silence was sharp.
"You're loud for a ghost."
Zera froze.
The figure tilted their head, the firelight catching the edge of a blade strapped across their thigh. "And stupid, too. Running from trackers down my shaft."
Drones buzzed closer behind her.
The figure sighed, grabbed something from the pile beside them — a jammer rig cobbled together from copper coils and a cracked power cell. With one brutal twist, they slammed it to the ground.
The air trembled.
The drones' whir went sharp, then dead. Silence swallowed the tunnels.
Zera stared, chest heaving.
The figure stood, brushing ash from their gloves. "You've got two choices, ghost. Stay here and die when the jammer burns out…" They stepped closer, mask lenses reflecting firelight. "…or follow me to the only place that might answer why you're still breathing."
Zera's throat closed. "The… Ghost Market?"
The figure paused. The silence stretched. Then, slowly, they nodded.
"Seems the city's already whispering about you."
**Predators in the Static**
The sound of boots slapping wet pavement followed her like an echo she couldn't shut off. Zera ran, her lungs burning, her legs trembling with every push forward. The scavenger's voice still rang in her ears—low, hungry, promising things that tasted of blood and smoke.
"Stay where you are, ghost!" one of them had hissed.
She hadn't.
Her pulse roared, ragged and unsteady, a drumbeat against the static of the neon streets. She ducked down a narrow alley, skidding past piles of rusted scrap and holo-signs that flickered weakly with advertisements no one had paid for in years.
"Ghosts fetch good creds!" the scavenger shouted behind her, voice distorted, as though he carried a broken modulator in his throat. "Even better if they still got memory fragments."
Zera bit down on her lip, hard enough to draw blood. Fragments. Was that what they saw in her? A collection of scraps worth more dead than alive?
Her body screamed at her to stop, but her mind kept whispering one truth: If they catch me, I'm gone.
The alley ended in a wall. Zera's chest seized in panic—dead end.
Her eyes darted upward. Pipes ran along the wall, slick with condensation. She jumped, fingers catching metal, body straining as she hauled herself up with a strength she didn't know she had. A hiss of pain escaped her throat, but she forced herself higher, scraping skin against cold iron until she reached the rooftop ledge.
She pulled herself over, collapsing on her side, breath shuddering in and out.
For a moment, silence.
Then—
Boots below. The scavengers slowed. One of them chuckled, a sound too heavy with certainty.
"You can climb, ghost. Means you're fresh."
Zera curled against the rooftop's surface, heart hammering. She peeked over the edge. Three of them stood in the alley: two men, one woman, all draped in scavenged tech strapped to their bodies like armor. One carried a hooked blade that sparked when it grazed the wall. Another had a pulse baton, the kind outlawed after the riots.
The woman tilted her head back, eyes glinting in the dim glow of the neon haze. She didn't smile. She just raised a scanner device, pointing it toward the rooftop.
The hum of it filled the air, a low drone that pressed against Zera's skull.
She winced, gripping her temples.
The device chirped once. A red light blinked.
"Alive," the woman confirmed, voice flat. "Unregistered. She's ours."
Zera's throat tightened. She wanted to scream back, to say No one owns me!, but the words died before they reached her lips. Because the truth gnawed at her: wasn't that what she was? An unclaimed thing? A glitch in a system that demanded names, IDs, proofs of existence?
The scavengers began climbing.
Zera scrambled backward, boots slipping against the rooftop's slick surface. She darted toward the next building's edge. The drop looked brutal, but hesitation wasn't an option.
She jumped.
The wind tore at her, her body weightless for a fraction of a second before slamming against the other roof. Pain lanced through her ankle, but she rolled, teeth gritted against the scream threatening to claw free.
Behind her, the scavengers shouted, voices vibrating with fury.
"Run, little ghost!" one of them jeered. "We'll catch you in the Feed!"
The Feed.
The word shivered through her. Not the public one everyone scrolled for entertainment—no, this was darker. She knew it, though she couldn't remember how. A hidden channel where lives were streamed not as stories, but as hunts. Prey. Victims. Erased ones forced into games they never agreed to play.
Her stomach turned.
Her body kept moving.
She ducked beneath a half-collapsed antenna, leapt across another gap, and stumbled down into a stairwell that smelled of mold and copper. Her ankle throbbed, but she forced herself down flight after flight until she spilled into another alley.
She pressed against the wall, gasping, her hands shaking uncontrollably.
She couldn't run forever.
The truth hit her like a blade to the chest. No name. No ID. No pulse in the system. She couldn't call for help. Couldn't buy safety. Couldn't exist where rules mattered.
But—
Her eyes darted to the shadows. Something had been nagging at her since the chase began: the way she moved. The instincts. She shouldn't have known how to scale rooftops with half-broken pipes. She shouldn't have been able to land that jump without breaking both legs. She shouldn't have recognized the word Feed with that much certainty.
Her fingers curled into fists.
Who had she been before she was no one?
The sound of static made her freeze.
Not city static—this was sharp, direct, aimed. Like a transmission breaking through.
"…Zera."
The voice crackled in her ear.
Her breath caught.
She spun, searching, but no one stood behind her. Just the flickering holo-ads and dripping pipes.
"…Zera. You don't remember, but you're not supposed to be here."
Her blood turned to ice. The voice wasn't hers. It wasn't in her head—not like an echo, not like a thought. It was external, but it carried her name like it belonged to her.
And that terrified her more than the scavengers ever could.
"Who—who are you?" she whispered.
The static thickened, swallowing the edges of the voice until only fragments slipped through:
"…they're hunting you… you were erased… but you're not gone yet."
Her throat went dry.
The scavengers' footsteps echoed again, closer this time, scraping metal against concrete.
The voice in the static sharpened suddenly, commanding:
"Run north. Don't stop. When you see the broken drone nest, go underground."
Zera's heart pounded. Questions screamed inside her, but there was no time. The footsteps were almost here.
North. Drone nest. Underground.
She pushed off the wall and ran.
The city blurred around her, neon lights streaking into smears of color. Each step was agony in her ankle, but adrenaline numbed the worst of it. She tore through the maze of streets, every corner a gamble, every shadow a threat.
And then—she saw it.
A mass of broken drones, tangled together in a nest of wire and plastic, shoved against a building like some grotesque art piece. Wings bent, lenses shattered, sparks faintly flickering as if the machines still remembered they'd once flown.
Zera didn't hesitate. She dropped to her knees, shoving wires aside until she found a gap large enough to crawl through. The scent of burnt circuits clung to her hands.
She slid inside, swallowed by darkness.
The scavengers shouted behind her, rage tearing through their voices, but they didn't follow. They lingered at the edge, as though something about the nest repelled them.
Zera crawled deeper, the static in her ear fading into silence. The air was damp, heavy, and cold. Her breath came in short, sharp bursts.
Finally, she dropped through another gap—into a tunnel.
Pitch black. The only sound was the slow drip of water and her own unsteady breathing.
Her knees buckled. She sat hard against the wall, chest heaving, ankle throbbing.
The silence pressed down on her.
Then—
A light flickered to life in the tunnel ahead.
Dim. Unsteady.
Someone was waiting.
Zera froze, fear prickling her skin.
And then the voice—this time not through static, but real, echoing down the tunnel:
"You made it."
The scavenger's blade shimmered faintly with scavenged light, its jagged edge hungry for flesh.
Zera's breath came shallow, ragged, but her eyes never left his.
"You're already dead, ghost," the man hissed. "You don't exist. So what's one more cut?"
Her body moved before her mind could catch up. Fingers brushed the fallen drone's panel, a surge of static rushing up her arms. And then— a pulse of blue light exploded outward, frying the scavenger's visor and sending him crashing to the ground in convulsions.
The alley fell silent, the stench of burnt circuits lingering. Zera stared at her hands. They were trembling, sparking faintly, as if she'd plugged herself into a current that wasn't meant for human veins.
She didn't remember learning this. She didn't remember anything.
And yet, her body had known exactly what to do.
From the shadows above, dozens of eyes lit up. Scavengers weren't solitary. They hunted in packs.
Zera's gut clenched. The blue light around her fingers flickered once, then died.
And the whispering voice of the city—soft, metallic, almost kind—brushed the inside of her skull:
"Run. Or be erased."