Page 4 of Neon Flux

Lock faltered for a moment, but he recovered quickly, sheathing his knife with a shrug. “Fine, fine. No need to get your circuits in a twist. Where do you want us?”

“Somewhere out of the way,” Taos muttered, turning her attention back to the sprawl of towers.

We moved deeper into the room, the glow of the servers painting the space in shifting patterns of blue and green. Lock and his crew trailed behind, cracking jokes and making far too much noise. I clenched my fists, resisting the urge to snap at them. No one should be in here. The operation ran autonomously. We’d deactivated security. We would be fine.

Taos stopped in front of a particularly dense cluster of servers, her fingers flying across her virtual keyboard as she scanned for a viable node. “This one should work,” she said finally.

Lock leaned against the server rack, crossing his arms, eyes locked on me. “What’s the plan, boss?”

“The plan,” I said, shoving past him, “is for you to shut up and let me do my job.”

Taos was already hardwiring into the port in front of us. She handed me one cable. I pulled my physical keyboard out of my jacket pocket and attached it.

“Whoa, retro,” one boy behind me murmured. I ignored him, but he wasn’t wrong. I’d dug this relic out of a trash heap and fixed it up. Something about the physicality of it kept me grounded when I was in cyberspace. The satisfyingclackmy nails made as I worked only made it better.

I placed my hand on the server, and with my Flux, I felt the activity inside. Electrons flowed like blood, and I was here to rip out its heart. The electricity inside me flared, and I heard a gasp behind me as sparks arced from my skin to the server.

“Bet you wish you had Flux like that, huh?” Lock teased Taos.

She crossed her arms and glared at him.

I shook out my hands.Focus.I pushed the raw power down and instead let the electricity within the server dominate. I let it guide me, mold me, instead of fighting it. My Flux made me malleable, adaptable like no other cyberrunner could be. I feltthe flow of electrons in each transistor—a language only I could speak.

All around us, the Stellarium lines glowed with their perfect, clean power. If Stellarium was the city’s blood, then the Net was its nervous system, carrying data everywhere at once. This data center was the brain—and right now, it was all mine.

I sat down on the floor, legs crossed, keyboard on my lap. The warmth of the tower spread through my forehead as I leaned against it. My body relaxed as my Vysor flashed in front of my eyes. The faint pink glow clashed with the blue of the servers, but I was in a world beyond. Cyberspace spread out before my eyes, its infinite void slowly populating with glowing lights that represented the maze of data before me. Towers of shifting code in every color rendered, spread over an ocean of memory.

As technology boomed after the discovery of Stellarium, cyberspace had been created for more people to interface with the Net without technical knowledge. For those with the skills, however, it was a world of limitless possibilities. I’d always felt out of place in the physical, like I never belonged anywhere. In here, I was everything. Spread before me was one of—if notthe—most powerful networks in the world, and it was mine to command.

Nothing had ever felt better. Not drugs, not sex, nothing. I let out a sigh and let everything else fade away.

I heard Taos’ voice, and it felt like a dream, both real and not.

“Installing the ICE breaker now. You should see it in three, two, one…”

The programmer who had written this ICE breaker code was a pervert. The program appeared beside me. The avatar was a six-foot-tall woman with enormous breasts and an outfit that was a horribly offensive bastardization of a qipao, covered in scales and snakes. Around her, a giant serpent of pure light wove through the virtual space.

A few strokes on my keyboard, and we were moving. Terabytes of data flashed by in an instant, but nothing I wanted. I pulled up my program, much less flashy than the one beside me. Threads of purple light spread around me, searching for their quarry.

“Damn, she’s fast.”

Fucking idiots. I felt them now, trailing me in cyberspace. I wrapped a firewall around them with a few more keystrokes. I heard complaints but ignored them. They could watch, but no touching.

A tug on one of my threads. My program had found something. We flew through beams of light and code to a directory labeledExperimental Tech, a glowing orb tethered by intricate pathways of firewalls and proxy nodes. At the center, a rotating cube pulsed with ominous red light—ICE, Corp-grade, aggressive, and far too advanced for a standard breach.

I smirked. “Easymode.”

The light serpent materialized beside me, its body rippling with digital scales. The creature’s eyes glowed violet as it slithered toward the cube, coiling around it with predatory grace.

The ICE reacted instantly, its edges flaring like a star going nova. Spikes of red light shot out, but the serpent darted between them, its movements impossibly fluid. Bit by bit, the ICE cracked, its surface fracturing under the serpent’s relentless assault.

Damn, at least they got their money’s worth on this one.

The cube shattered with a soundless explosion, and we surged forward, diving through the open pathway. Behind us, fragments of the broken ICE reassembled—too late.

“We’re in,” Taos’ voice said.

We landed in the data repository, a vast chamber of shifting walls and floating archives. Each one was a glowing shardcontaining terabytes of classified information. Purple streams of light pulsed through it all. The noise of the server room hummed in my ears.This wasn’t going fast enough.The longer we lingered, the greater the risk of detection.