The darkness inside the stairwell was total.
Miles took the stairs two at a time, his shins banging hard against the concrete edges — sharp pain, but distant, muffled by the crimson static blinding his left eye.
00:04.
00:03.
Below, the ground-floor doors slammed shut, heavy glass hitting the frame, followed by the flat scuff of rubber soles on the lower steps.
Not running.
Walking.
A steady, unhurried pace that didn’t change even in the pitch black.
He reached the third-floor landing, breath coming in ragged gasps that tasted like cold stairwell dust, and stopped with his back against the wall beside the trash chute.
The countdown in his vision froze.
CONNECTION COMPROMISED.
HOST UNDER ACTIVE HARVEST.
BANDWIDTH RECOUPED: 42%.
STATUS: UNSTABLE.
He wrapped his fingers around the drive in his pocket.
The footsteps grew louder, heavy and rhythmic.
Step.
Step.
“You can’t keep the data, Miles,” the voice called up from the dark — layered, distorted, like a vocal sample run through three pitch-shifters at once.
“The laptop won’t take the patch.
The hardware’s too old.
The green flicker?
That’s your motherboard melting.
Been melting since you hit post.”
Miles held his breath, eyes shut, trying to clear the red static from his sight.
In the dark his senses sharpened — the low wet hiss of wind through the broken wire-mesh window on the second floor, the damp calcified smell of the building’s mortar.
The scuffing stopped, right at the bottom of the flight.
Silence came back, heavy enough to press on his ears.
Then a small metallic click — a flip-knife opening.
Not fire.
The man’s eyes, gears spinning fast enough to cast two thin electric beams straight up the concrete stairs like laser levels, catching the toes of Miles’s boots.
“There you are,” the man whispered.
The beams snapped up to Miles’s face, cold enough against his skin to twitch his eyelids, and the red static in his vision flared into blinding neon blue.
LOCK-ON ESTABLISHED.
TRANSFER INITIATED: -$12.00/SEC.
The numbers on his liquid balance started counting down.
$1,842.10.
$1,830.10.
$1,818.10.
His hands started vibrating again — not fear this time, the muscles themselves losing power, his grip loosening around the drive.
The 87/100 production skill in his head felt like it was dissolving, the clean waveforms breaking apart into jagged noise.
He had to move.
Up to the fourth floor and his apartment, or straight down into the blue light waiting below.