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She was pleading—for the one thing I could never give her. The escape she wouldn’t come back from. I shook my head, and one last tear rolled down her cheek before I saw her resolve harden.

That dead stare—the one I’d seen so long ago in her virtual—snapped into place, and the vibrant creature I knew died in front of me.

She ran her fingers over the keys again, navigating to the consciousness transfer protocol.

With each command, her electromagnetic field dimmed, as though parts of her were already shutting down.

On the floor, Taos stirred while assets hooked her neural implant to the node.

Her eyes fluttered open just in time to see Eon’s fingers hovering over the execution command.

Understanding passed between them in a single glance. Taos, to her credit, didn’t scream or cry—just gave a small nod.

“I’m sorry,” Eon whispered.

She pressed Execute .

The system hummed to life, interfacing with Taos’ neural implant. For one suspended moment, nothing happened—just the soft blue glow of initialization sequences cascading across the holographic display.

Then Taos’ body convulsed.

It started subtly—fingertips twitching, eyelids fluttering.

The connection established itself, creating microcurrents that raced across her skin in visible blue patterns—patterns I’d seen before.

Her neural implant began to pulse with unnatural brightness, its connection port to the node glowing white-hot.

“Process initiated,” the system announced with cold precision. “Neural mapping at seventeen percent.”

Taos’ back arched unnaturally, tendons standing out along her neck as her jaw locked. I’d seen pain in my years at POM—I’d caused more than my fair share—but nothing like this. I didn’t pretend to understand what was happening, but it was destroying her.

“P-please,” Taos gritted out, her eyes finding Eon’s. “Make it…stop…”

Eon’s fingers hovered over the interface, trembling. But Levi’s hand closed around her wrist, his grip unyielding.

“Continue,” he commanded. “The process will not be interrupted.”

The mapping percentage climbed: Twenty-three…Thirty-one…Forty-two…

Taos’ skin began to glow from within. The implant at her temple smoked as circuitry melted under the strain. Blood vessels in her eyes ruptured, flooding the whites with crimson.

“Neural mapping at sixty-six percent,” the system announced. “Warning: Subject biological stability compromised.”

Taos was no longer capable of coherent speech. The sounds coming from her throat were raw, primal—the body’s last desperate attempt to communicate as language centers failed. Her fingers clawed at the floor, nails cracking against the metal.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Levi whispered, his eyes fixed on the display with something like reverence. “The liberation of consciousness from biological constraints.”

I could feel the electromagnetic disturbance building through the nexus, circuits straining as the unstable Stellarium network struggled to sustain the massive data transfer. Warning lights flared across secondary systems as safeguards failed in succession.

“Neural mapping at eighty-two percent. Critical biological threshold exceeded.”

The electromagnetic field around Taos intensified, now visible as a corona of blue-white energy. Beneath her skin, capillaries burst, the glowing lines streaked through with blood. Her nose, ears, and eyes leaked thin rivulets of red.

“Almost there,” Levi murmured. “Just a little more…”

At ninety-four percent, something fundamental broke.

The transfer protocol hit a loop it couldn’t resolve, the power cycling back through Taos’ implant instead of completing the sequence. The casing cracked, revealing white-hot circuitry beneath. The electromagnetic field collapsed inward—then exploded outward in a concentrated pulse.

Taos’ head simply…came apart.

There was no other way to describe it. I watched in what felt like slow motion as the vessels in her skull ruptured. The pressure reduced her head to fragments and viscera, red mist and white shards spraying across the server room floor in a wide, terrible radius.

Eon screamed, the sound torn from somewhere painfully desperate, as Taos’ headless body slumped to the floor.

But the system continued its emotionless report: “Neural transfer interrupted. Data center integrity compromised. Initiating emergency containment protocols.”

The emergency protocols never engaged. Server racks began to overheat and spark, the chain reaction spreading exponentially.

“Warning: Catastrophic system failure detected. Emergency shutdown initiated.”

The shutdown came too late. The transfer protocol had already triggered feedback loops throughout the Magenta infrastructure, creating cascading failures no emergency system could contain.

The floor beneath us trembled as the first major power conduits blew somewhere deeper in the building. Through the walls, we could hear the distant sounds of explosions as the unstable reaction spread outward, following Magenta’s electromagnetic grid.

“This quadrant is experiencing a power overload. Evacuation window: six minutes, forty-seven seconds,” the system announced.

I couldn’t see them, but I felt them—thousands of bodies pulsing with panic just beyond the data center walls. The floors shook with footfalls, distant screams like pressure waves pounding against my chest. I felt their terror like a pulse in my own heart.

Levi released Eon’s wrist, seemingly satisfied with the destruction unfolding around us. “Excellent work, Ms. Ibarra.”

Eon didn't respond. She stood frozen at the terminal, eyes fixed on the spot where Taos had been—now nothing but a cooling corpse and scattered viscera. Her electromagnetic field had gone almost completely dark, like her own consciousness had retreated from what she’d been forced to do.

“Shall we?” Levi strode toward the metal staircase that led up and out of the control room. The beta squad followed, each with a rebel slung over their shoulder. Maddox was just behind them, casting a long glance over his shoulder—at me, and then at Eon.

She was still at the terminal, her knuckles white on the metal frame. I walked over and placed my hands on her shoulders.

“Time to go, doll.”

“Leave me,” she murmured, so low I barely caught it.

“Can’t do that.”

I expected her to fight me, but she didn’t.

She let me guide her up the stairs and out of that condemned place.

On the roof, air transports waited for us.

Levi boarded his billion-creds rig and lifted off without a backward glance.

I loaded Eon into a military transport beside Maddox and the others.

She wouldn’t look at me.

“Eon, please…”

She pressed her face against the glass as the transport lifted off.

“Don’t watch,” I begged.

She didn’t listen. She never fucking listened.

At first it seemed small, a deep rumble beneath hundreds of feet of concrete.

Then one building cracked. Then another.

Each fell inward on itself, clouds of dust rising like mushroom blooms into the night.

Neon lights in every unnatural hue blinked out, replaced by the primal glow of red and orange as flames erupted from the wreckage, consuming entire blocks.

Eon’s forehead slammed into the tetraglass window, her face lit by the burning city like she was descending into hell itself. She didn’t say a damn thing, but I saw the light catch on the tears streaking down her face.