The signal spoof was working perfectly. According to Handy, Pandora’s strike teams were currently tearing apart a warehouse on the South Side, chasing a digital ghost.

  Problem was, nobody told the Terminator.

  I crouched behind the parapet of the power sub-station, watching the alley below. I’d rigged the transformer to blow—a classic move. Draw him close, fry his optics with a voltage spike, vanish in the smoke. It had worked twice before on lesser goons. It was foolproof.

  Deathlok walked right past the bait.

  It didn’t even turn its chrome-plated head. Its red sensor eye flicked over the setup once and dismissed it. No hesitation. No curiosity. The targeting laser swept across the rigged transformer, lingered for a fraction of a second, and moved on. It had done the math—calculated the blast radius, the escape vectors, and the odds. It filed the trap under “ineffective” and kept walking.

  My stomach dropped like I’d just realized I was wearing my pajama bottoms to school.

  It wasn’t hunting me. The old Brick fought with rage and ego, and ego made him predictable. This thing had every memory of our previous fights cataloged in its hard drive, but none of the pride I’d learned to exploit. It was Brick’s experience running on cold code, stripped of the flaws that made him beatable. Even with Handy feeding it false GPS data, it stayed on course.

  It wasn’t chasing. It was commuting. It was heading somewhere specific.

  I scrambled over the parapets, my enhanced speed barely enough to keep the target in sight. Below, Chicago was a blur of wet asphalt and a neon smear of pink and blue light streaking across the skyline. Wind whipped my jacket, and my lungs burned, sweat cooling instantly against my skin in the October air.

  Deathlok moved with terrifying efficiency. No pausing to scan side streets. No checking blind spots. It had already calculated the destination; every step in here and there was just an equation to be solved.

  Then it dropped between two towers and vanished.

  I hit the roof edge three seconds later and skidded to a halt. The gap was barely six feet wide—a service alley for waste compactors that reeked of rotting synth-protein and chemical runoff. I scanned the darkness. No glint of chrome. No crimson laser. Just steam vents and the distant grinding hum of the city’s guts.

  I tore that block apart. I ripped up grates until my fingers bled and squeezed into ventilation shafts tight enough to crush my ribs. I listened for the whir of servos, sniffed for the sharp ozone tang of its exhaust. Nothing. The city had swallowed it whole. I stopped, chest heaving, hands shaking.

  Not from the cold.

  Not from exhaustion.

  I was shaking because the denial was finally wearing off. It wasn’t hunting me. It wasn’t patrolling. It was executing a fetch quest.

  I landed on our balcony, shifting back into my human form before I froze. The apartment was blazing. Every light was on at 2:00 a.m.—living room, kitchen, hallway. Dad treated the thermostat like a museum exhibit and the lights like they cost a kidney per hour. To see the place lit up like a Christmas tree in July wasn’t just unusual.

  It was wrong.

  I slipped through my window and crept down the hall. Dad’s voice drifted from the living room. It was tight, controlled—the tone he used when he was trying to keep a panic attack behind his teeth.

  “—yes, we’ve checked everywhere. Her closet, the basement, the roof. No, no sign of forced entry. The security system was armed. Please, she’s eight.”

  Jackie.

  The floor felt like it turned into liquid under my feet. I grabbed the doorframe to keep from sliding down. Mom was standing in the center of the living room, holding herself so tight her fingers dented the fabric of her sleeves. Her face was the color of skim milk, mascara tracking dark lines through the tears on her cheeks. She was still wearing her university work clothes, right down to the heels. Like she’d walked in the door, seen the empty space where her daughter should be, and turned to stone.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  “Nikki.” Mom’s voice cracked. She took a step toward me, then stopped, hands hovering. As if touching me might make me vanish too. “Where have you been? We’ve been calling—”

  “What happened?” I demanded.

  “Jackie’s gone.” Dad lowered the phone. His eyes were wet. I’d never seen my father cry—not at funerals, not ever. “We don’t know when. Your mother checked on her at eleven. By midnight…”

  “Show me,” I said.

  Jackie’s room looked like a toy chest explosion. Drawers were gutted, the mattress half-off the frame. Stuffed animals lay scattered across the floor. Mr. Whiskers face-down by the closet. Captain Fluffington kicked under the desk. Steve, the rainbow unicorn, was torn in half, white stuffing spilling out like guts. My eyes snapped to the window. I checked that latch three times a week. I’d reinforced the mountings myself. Now it hung open. Someone sliced the security mesh with a monofilament blade, creating a perfect, straight line.

  No noise.

  No vibration.

  Professional.

  There was no blood on the sill. No scuff marks on the floor. They’d taken her while she slept. Probably an aerosol sedative; she wouldn’t have even woken up. In and out in under ninety seconds.

  A chime pinged from my bedroom. I crossed the hall in two strides. My monitor was glowing blue in the dark. There was a window open on the desktop—not an email, not a chat app. A hard-coded system override popup.

  23:00 Tomorrow. North Pier. Come alone.

  Below the text was a high-resolution image.

  Jackie. She was zip-tied to a chrome chair, eyes wide and wet. She was wearing her favorite pajamas—the purple ones with the cartoon monsters reading books and playing soccer. She’d begged for them because Nikki will kick their butt.

  I zoomed in until the pixels fractured. No bruises. No blood. She was terrified, but she was alive. My hands curled into fists, nails biting into my palms until the skin broke. The pain was sharp, and utterly useless.

  Handy’s holographic avatar flickered to life on my wrist. “Nikki, I am detecting a cortisol spike. Your heart rate is one hundred and eighty beats per minute. You are in pre-cardiac arrest territory.”

  “They took Jackie.”

  The avatar paused, processing.

  “The machine located your vulnerability,” Handy said. “He is spawn-camping your emotional weak points. It analyzed your psychological profile during previous encounters. It identified a leverage point with maximum emotional impact and zero defensive capability.”

  “It turned her into bait.”

  “Correct. It is a tactical emotional nuke. North Pier creates a tactical bottleneck. The twenty-three-hour window is calculated to let anxiety degrade your decision-making capabilities. The isolation demand neutralizes your allies. This is not a brawl, Nikki. It is a dismantling.”

  I sat down. Stood up. Paced.

  My brain was misfiring. Every tactical thought shattered against the image of Jackie in that chair. Jackie, who asked me to check under her bed for monsters. Jackie, who wanted to be brave like her big sister. I had failed. I’d kept the secret to protect them. I’d pushed everyone away, convinced that isolation was strength—that handling it alone made me a hero. I was just a stupid kid playing dress-up. And because I was too proud to ask for help, the only person I really loved was going to pay the price.

  My parents appeared in the doorway. Dad was clutching his phone like a lifeline. “The police are sending a detective,” he said. His voice was hollow, academic. “They said to preserve the scene. They said… they said most missing children are recovered within forty-eight hours.”

  “I’m handling it,” I said. The words came out flat. Cold. Metallic.

  “Nikki, what do you mean—”

  “I said I’m handling it!”

  They flinched. Mom gripped Dad’s hand so hard her knuckles turned white. I couldn’t tell them. I couldn’t sit them down and explain genetic experiments, or tell them their daughter turned into a wolf two months ago, or that the machine holding Jackie was wearing a dead man’s face. The truth wouldn’t comfort them. It would break their minds. Better they thought I was having a breakdown.

  Better they thought I was cruel.

  “I need to be alone,” I choked out. “Please.”

  They backed out. They closed the door with a careful, terrified silence—the kind you use around a bomb that might go off. They weren’t wrong.

  I waited until the latch clicked, and then I came apart. I buried my face in the pillow—the one Jackie had borrowed last week for movie night, the one that still smelled like strawberry shampoo—and screamed. I cried until my throat was raw, until the guilt felt physical, a burning ache behind my eyes.

  Jackie was eight. She collected stuffed animals. She checked out library books about wolves because she wanted to “bond over shared interests.” She believed in magic. She believed in me. And I had let them take her.

  The coordinates blinked on my monitor. Twenty-three hours.

  I wiped my face. The tears were stopping, replaced by a cold, numb focus. The machine wanted a reaction? It wanted the emotional, predictable sister?

  I sat up. I looked at the photo of Jackie in her monster pajamas, trying so hard to be brave. Exhaustion pulled at me, but I didn’t close my eyes. I watched the cursor blink. Twenty-three hours. I wasn’t going to sleep.

  He wanted a monster?

  He was about to get one.