Chapter 96 The Choice of a Lifetime

Chapter 96 The Choice of a Lifetime
The barrel of the gun stared at Kael like a dark, unblinking eye. My blood went cold. Every breath I took felt like I was inhaling glass.

"Choose," the woman in the black suit said. She didn't look like she was enjoying this. She looked tired, like she was just reading from a script. "You have ten seconds. Pull the plug on the mainframe, and every person trapped in the simulation loses their life. Or, you drop the drive, walk away, and we let Kael live to see another day in this hell."

My brain felt like it was on fire. I had spent so long wanting revenge. I had wanted to burn the company to the ground, to see the Lead Architect and the CEO beg for mercy. But this? This wasn't revenge. This was a trap.

"They're real people," I whispered, my voice shaking. "You turned real people into data?"

"We didn't turn them into anything," the woman said, her finger steady on the trigger. "We just gave them a place to stay while the real world rotted away. Now, stop stalling. Nine... eight..."

Kael looked at me. He wasn't scared. He looked at me with a kind of peace that hurt more than his fear would have. "Eara, don't listen to her. You know what you have to do. You have to break the cycle. Even if it costs us everything."

"Seven... six..."

I looked at the drive in my hand. It was just a small piece of metal, but it held thousands of lives. If I crushed it, I was a murderer. If I gave it back, I was a slave forever.

There has to be another way, I thought. There is always another way.

I closed my eyes for a fraction of a second. I searched for that hum in my blood, the connection to the city’s power grid I had tapped into just minutes ago. If I could overload the mainframe, maybe I could rip the people out of the simulation without killing them. Maybe I could move them to a different server.

But it was a gamble. If I failed, they would all be erased.

"Five... four..."

I opened my eyes. I looked at the woman, then at Kael.

"I'm not choosing," I said.

I didn't drop the drive. And I didn't crush it. Instead, I threw it.

I hurled the drive high into the air, toward the dark, empty sky.

The woman’s eyes went wide. She reflexively jerked the gun toward the flying object, her training overriding her intent to kill Kael. In that split second, I lunged. I tackled her, my hands finding her throat. We hit the ground hard, the gun skittering across the pavement and into the deep, black water of the sewer grate nearby.

CLANG.

It was gone.

Kael was up in an instant, helping me pin the woman down. She struggled, but she was outmatched. She went limp, her radio crackling with confused voices from the other guards.

"You idiot," she hissed, looking up at me. "You didn't save them. You just scattered the data. Without the main server, they’re lost in the void. They’ll be trapped forever, unable to wake up or stay in the loop. You’ve condemned them to a digital purgatory."

My heart sank. Was she telling the truth?

"She's lying," Kael said, though his voice lacked conviction. He picked up the radio, listening to the static. "The signal is gone, Eara. The drive is at the bottom of the sewer. The simulation is... it's just gone."

I didn't wait to find out. I grabbed Kael and we ran. We ran until the lights of the city were behind us, until the sounds of the sirens faded into the night. We ended up at the edge of the city, where the neon lights met the dark, untamed forest.

We stopped, gasping for air.

"What now?" I asked. "If they're trapped, we have to find a way to get them out."

"We can't," Kael said. "We don't have the gear. We don't have the server. We have nothing."

"We have each other," I said, but even as I said it, I knew it wasn't enough. I felt the guilt clawing at my throat. I had tried to be the hero, and instead, I had made everything worse.

Suddenly, Kael’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out, his face turning pale. It wasn't a call. It was a message. A simple, short line of text.

I am not lost. I am waiting.

"Who sent that?" I asked.

Kael didn't answer. He turned the phone around so I could see the screen. The sender wasn't a number. It was a name.

Eara 93.

My blood ran cold. The clone. The one I had tried to save in the lab.

"She’s alive?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper.

"She’s not just alive," Kael said, his hands trembling. "Look at the location tag."

I leaned in. The map on the phone showed a single dot. It wasn't in the city. It wasn't in the forest.

It was right behind us.

I spun around, but the forest was empty. Then, the shadows started to move. The trees themselves seemed to peel away, revealing not bark and leaves, but cold, hard metal. The forest was a screen, and it was flickering.

A familiar voice whispered from the branches above, a voice that sounded exactly like mine, but colder, sharper, and filled with a hunger that wasn't human.

"You left me in the dark, Eara," the voice said. "Now, it's my turn to show you what it feels like to be nothing."

Something metallic and fast dropped from the canopy, landing right between us. It wasn't Eara 93. It was something far worse. It was a machine, built out of the discarded parts of all my past lives, its eyes glowing with the red fire of a thousand lost souls.

It raised a blade, and I realized with a shock that it was pointing it not at me, but at Kael.

"Choose again," the machine laughed. "Save the girl, or keep the man who built your cage?"