I hit the Kennel’s concrete floor hard enough to rattle my ancestors, rolling out of the drainage chute in a tangle of bruised limbs and bad attitude. The air down here tasted like wet rust and rat droppings—a charming downgrade from the ozone stench of the laser blasts up on the roof.

  I dragged myself up against the wall, forcing air into my lungs in jagged gasps. Blood slicked my arm, the gash dripping with a rhythm that was way too fast for my liking. Pat. Pat. Pat. My hands shook—not just from fear, though I was terrified—but from the adrenaline cocktail flooding my system. The wolf inside me wasn’t interested in hiding. It paced and snarled against the cage of my ribs, clawing at my control, demanding I turn around and finish what we’d started.

  “Handy.” My voice cracked, dry as the dust coating the floor. “I need you to find something.”

  The wristband snapped to life, casting a harsh blue glare across the dark. The light crawled over water stains and ancient graffiti—faded tags from gangs that died out before the city sealed this place. “Vital signs concerning,” Handy chirped, sounding like a worried school nurse. “Heart rate critical. Blood pressure dropping. I am detecting high levels of cortisol and—”

  “Skip the medical drama,” I snapped, clutching my shoulder. “I need a kill switch. Hack Pandora’s R&D servers. Find out what that thing is and how I break it.”

  “Accessing Pandora R&D is a violation of forty-two separate federal laws and—”

  “Handy! A Terminator had literally kicked my ass tonight. Do it!”

  “Understood. Breaching.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut, but it didn’t help. The memory was burned into my retinas—Brick’s face, or what used to be his face. Rotted flesh. The glowing red eye that tracked me with machine precision. The hydraulics where tendons should be, hissing and clicking with each movement.

  The wristband vibrated against my ulnar bone. I slid down the wall, collapsing onto the grimy floor. Fifty feet above my head, beyond layers of rebar, Chicago hummed. Normal people were going to climate-controlled apartments, ordering synth-burgers, and complaining about their algebra homework. Me? I was bleeding out in a sewer while my dead enemy hunted me down. Typical Tuesday.

  “Firewalls are aggressive,” Handy murmured. “Bypassing… now.”

  It didn’t take hours. It took seconds, but each one stretched out like a rubber band about to snap. I listened to the drip of water in the distance, my heart hammering so loud I was sure it was echoing off the walls.

  “Got it,” Handy said, his tone dropping its usual digital warmth. “Nikki… you are not going to like this.”

  “I didn’t like the plasma cannon either. Show me.”

  The display flared, shining a grid of light into the humid air. Text scrolled in a crisp, cheerful corporate font: PROJECT DEATHLOK. Below the header, images cycled.

  I felt the synth-burger I’d eaten for lunch doing back flips in my stomach.

  They had harvested him. That was the only word for it. Chrome plating was fused directly to bone, bolted into the organic mess left behind with surgical staples. Military-grade servos replaced his limbs. One image showed his brain—exposed, preserved in translucent blue gel, spiked with hundreds of fiber-optic needles like some twisted biology class experiment. The photos cataloged the desecration step by step. From corpse to chassis. From person to asset.

  “Oh god.” The words tasted like copper. “They turned him into a science project.”

  “A Revenant unit,” Handy corrected. No jokes. Just cold data. “Designation: Anomaly Retriever. Specialized in catching supernatural entities or terminating them. They didn’t just use his body, Nikki. They uploaded his neural patterns. His combat experience. His hatred. Every memory he had of you has been digitized and weaponized. He isn’t just hunting you; he’s solving you.”

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  I swiped through the files, my fingers leaving sweaty streaks on the light projection. Requisition forms. Integration stress tests. Kill efficiency charts. A line of text floated in red: SUBJECT DEMONSTRATES OPTIMAL HOSTILITY TOWARD TARGET DESIGNATION: NIKKI NOVA.

  My name. Reduced to a glitch in their system. A spreadsheet error requiring a violent correction.

  A video clip auto loaded. Deathlok in a white-walled simulation chamber, facing off against a decommissioned tank. The cyborg blurred—inhumanly fast—and drove his fist through the tank’s armor plating like it was wet cardboard. He ripped the turret off with a screech of tearing metal that made my teeth ache.

  “They didn’t bring him back,” Handy said softly. “They built a monster to catch one.”

  The words landed like a physical blow. Is that all I was to Pandora? Just a rabid dog that needed to be put down by a bigger, stronger mechanical dog?

  “Okay,” I said, swallowing the lump in my throat. “He’s strong. We established that when he tried to turn me into roadkill. How do I shut him off? Does he have a battery pack? A reset button?”

  Handy expanded the schematics, rotating the 3D wireframe of Brick’s new body. “The chassis is ceramite. Small arms fire will merely annoy him. Heavy impact will be absorbed by hydraulic dampeners.”

  “Fantastic. So he’s a tank. Please tell me they cut corners somewhere.”

  “Heat management,” Handy said, highlighting a section under the left rib cage in pulsing red. “The plasma core generates immense thermal buildup. To prevent a meltdown, these vents open for exactly 1.5 seconds during and immediately after a high-energy discharge.”

  I stared at the red zone. “So… I have to make him shoot at me?”

  “Correct. You need to be within close range to strike the core while the vents are exposed. If you miss, the vents close, and he will likely tear you in half.”

  “Right. Bait the murder-bot into firing a plasma bolt at my face, then punch him in the heart before he turns me to ash. Easy peasy.” I wiped sweat from my forehead. “What’s the catch?”

  “There is… a complication.” Handy’s hesitation algorithm was working overtime. “He is a relay. The connection is live. Every move, every target acquired, every heartbeat detected within a hundred yards feeds directly to their private server. Real-time video. Full signal stream.”

  My blood froze. “They’re watching me through his eyes.”

  Maybe that’s why Pandora hadn’t sent a tactical team to the Kennel yet. They were studying me. Watching the beta test of their new toy.

  “If he sees you, Pandora sees you.”

  I scrambled up, head spinning. “Then I can’t go home. I can’t go to school. Anywhere I go, I’m just leading a guided missile to my friends.” Panic clawed at my throat. I felt safe nowhere in this city.

  “Actually,” Handy chirped, his usual sass booting back up, “I have a theory.”

  “Does it involve me dying?”

  “Statistically? Only a little.”

  “Comforting. Spill it.”

  The display shifted, cascading with waterfalls of hexadecimal code. “The signal stream is bidirectional,” Handy explained while the code scrolled faster than I could read. “If I bridge the connection, I can feed Pandora a ghost. Spoof the location data. Make them think the ping is coming from the South Side while you head North. I can cat-fish their own monster catcher.”

  “Can you do it?”

  “Can I? Simple. Should I? Probably illegal. Will I? Execution in progress.”

  I stopped pacing. “You’re getting better at this whole rebellion thing.”

  “Your uncle was the best teacher.” The code flashed green. “Nikki… regarding the ‘monster’ designation earlier. My phrasing was sub-optimal.”

  “You weren’t wrong.” I rubbed the scar tissue hidden beneath my torn school jacket—the bite mark that had ended my life and started… this. “We’re both their creations now. They made me by accident; they made him by design. The difference is, Brick doesn’t get a choice. No free will. Just code.”

  “And you still have yours.”

  “Yeah.” I turned toward the exit tunnel. The bleeding had stopped; the itch of rapid cellular regeneration was already setting in, stinging like a swarm of angry bees. “I choose not to die. Not tonight. And definitely not to a corporate science project wearing Brick’s corpse like a suit.”

  “That’s the spirit. Highly inspirational. I’ll bookmark that line for your biopic.”

  “Shut up and keep hacking.”

  The tunnel stretched ahead, a black throat waiting to swallow me. Somewhere above, the city slept. Somewhere behind me, a dead man with chrome bones was hunting my heartbeat.

  I took a breath.

  One monster at a time.

  “You know what,” I whispered. “We need a signal spoof plan.”