"What the shit?" Kirk babbled as they pelted through the dock streets. "Was that what I think it was?!"

"Codewraith," Piper panted, stumbling as she went skidding around a corner. "Has to be."

"How did it get here?"

"How should I know? Let's just get out of here!"

They kept running, and she pulled out in front without thinking, pure terror lending her speed. Heavy metal steps echoed like someone striking a gong as the wraith gave chase, blurting out random scraps of binary codescreams. Piper felt her bones jangle every time the noise caught up to her, like the thing's animal howls were cutting right through her skin.

She hurtled around a narrow bend, skidding through the detritus of old food wrappers and bottles as she went. Another tight alley stretched off ahead of her, and she set off. But she only made it a few steps before she heard a curse and a clatter from behind her.

Twisting to a halt, she looked back to see that Kirk had lost his footing coming around the corner, sliding into a heap on the alley floor. He scrambled upright; glanced back the way they'd come.

Then the codewraith exploded into view.

It towered over him, easily seven feet in height, and Piper couldn't contain a scream as it swung one of its lethal appendages at him. In her mind he was already dead, pounded into a bloody pulp before her eyes.

She should have given him more credit.

Kirk's reflexes saved his life as he ducked, narrowly avoiding a blow that would have torn his head off. But the wraith barrelled on. Its heavy bulk cannoned into him, with enough force to lift him clean off his feet and hurl him into the flimsy wall of one of the pre-fab dwellings.

He smashed straight through it and vanished from sight. A howl of pain cut through the resulting crash of falling metal, a cloud of dust and sparks exploding all around the man-sized hole in the side of the building.

"KIRK!" Piper shrieked, taking half a step forward.

The codewraith examined the ruined wall for an instant before what passed for its head snapped towards her like a snake. Then it started walking, metal clawed toes pulverising the ruined sheeting of the wall as it moved, gathering speed with every step. Another scream of code dug its way into her brain and she felt the boiling cauldron of rage that coursed through the machine's processors.

That was when she truly knew it only wanted her.

Meaning that right now, if Kirk was alive, he was safer than she was. Piper strangled down a sob of fear, spun around and started running. Her worst fears were confirmed when a blurt of codescream echoed down the alley after her, followed by a crescendo of heavy footfalls.

This couldn't be happening. It was all too insane. It shouldn't have been here; shouldn't have been chasing some no-name street girl through a god forsaken slum.

But maybe that was just Hadrian for you – bad luck piled on calamity, piled on catastrophe.

Piper could feel her lungs screaming as she pelted through the tight-packed, ramshackle housing block, mind racing as she tried to think of an escape. Small mercies; the wraith didn't seem to be quicker than her, clanking along on rust-atrophied limbs, misfiring circuits making its movements jerky as it gave chase. With any luck, she knew the streets better than this creature that had walked out of Hadrian's sordid history books.

She twisted left, racing up an incline for a half a block before flinging herself into a tiny crevice of an alley on the right. Her slight frame ricocheted off the walls which shuddered dangerously, but luck kept the whole row of houses from crashing down around her. The smash and clang of the codewraith's steps didn't seem so close now, and she risked a glance back.

The wraith shuddered to a halt and rotated its body into the narrow defile. She'd gained some distance, but the thing wrestled its bulk in after her. Piper gulped in a lungful of air and kept running.

The narrow defile spat her out onto a broader street, this one full of people half-in, half-out of bars and clubs. A wall of cigarette smoke rolled over her and she jinked left, bolting into the thickest crowd of bodies she could find without breaking stride. Her shoulder crashed off of something solid and human; a wave of curses snapped at her heels but she kept running.

Cries of alarm rose behind her and she knew the codewraith had come blundering into the night. A scream cut through the bass music thumping out of windows on either sides, followed by a sputtering chorus of gunshots as residents took matters into their own hands.

Piper didn't stop. Maybe she'd get lucky and her fellow dock-dwellers would kill the wraith, but somehow she doubted it. Instead she went barging straight through the double doors of one seedy looking bar, ducking the swiping hand of the bouncer on the door. Her wild charge didn't stop for anything as she was engulfed in a sea of blazing neon and pounding techno music that shook her ribcage. A tray of luminous drinks went sailing across the bar as she clattered into a waiter, but she just spun with the impact, thinking of nothing but the crazed machine chasing her.

She blundered her way through to one of the grimy bathrooms, knife in hand. The thick smell of marijuana made her cough, and two bleary eyed patrons turned to her in confusion, but she barged them aside. One foot jammed down onto a pipe in the back wall, then she was up, levering herself to the small window that led out onto the back street.

With a wrench of the knife she snapped the flimsy, old-fashioned clasp holding the window shut and tumbled back outside. She hit the concrete below, rolled to her feet and sprinted off into the night.

*

Piper would have described her house as a dump to most people, but right now it was the most beautiful thing in the world.

With the codewraith apparently swallowed up by Hadrian's nightlife, she had raced through the dock slums until she reached the little clump of steel cubes that made up her neighbourhood. Every wall plate of every crappy dwelling bore a black stencilled logo of a hammer striking an anvil – the emblem of Cartwright Multi-Fab Construction Solutions – reminding every resident on a daily basis just who owned them. Just visible further away from the river was the multi-storey bulk of the local academy, an ugly cube of a thing lathered with corporate logos.

On another day it all would have filled her with anger, but right now she had bigger problems. She scrambled through the potholed street until she found her house. It didn't look any different to the other gun-metal blocks that lined the street, but muscle memory helped her find her way.

Piper swiped her wrist-link against the lock. Three seconds passed – long enough to almost make her scream – before the mechanism bleeped and she hurled herself inside.

Almost hyperventilating with fear, Piper slammed the door shut behind her and threw herself against it, eyes wide as she tried to get breath into her lungs. She dug one hand into her hair, a wordless noise of disbelief slipping from her gritted teeth.

Kirk? She didn't even know if he was alive. She hadn't seen any blood, but the thing had struck him hard enough to break bones.

"Piper? Piper is that you?"

A bleary voice cut through the fear. After checking the door was locked tight, she spun around. Tin-plated walls closed in around her to form a narrow hall, lit by an anaemic blue-white bulb in the ceiling.

"Mum?"

"Me too!" said another, younger voice.

"Arden?"

"Well, who else is it gonna be?"

Shit, shit, shit!

Knife still clutching in one violently trembling hand, Piper stumbled through the entry passage and into the dwelling's kitchen.

"Jesus!" her sister exclaimed as she blundered into the room. "What the hell happened to you?"

Piper's mouth opened but the words didn't come out. She stood for a moment, staring at Arden and trying to figure out what to say. Two years younger, Arden sported a pixie cut of dark hair, a dust of freckles across the bridge of her nose, and eyes currently goggling with surprise. A tank top hung loose on her elfin frame above a pair of ragged shorts. In one hand, a protein cracker had paused halfway to her mouth.

"Wraith," Piper eventually managed to blurt. "Codewraith on the docks."

Arden gave her an incredulous look. "How much have you been drinking?"

"I'm not fucking drunk, Arden," she snarled. "One of those things just tried to kill me!"

"What is going on?" grumbled the other voice. Piper swivelled to see her mother come sloping into the kitchen swaddled in a flimsy robe. Her brown hair was dishevelled with sleep and she yawned, scrubbing at her eyes with one hand.

"Piper's seeing ghosts," Arden teased.

"Listen, you little-,"

"Piper!" her mother barked, rapidly gathering her senses. "Calm down. What happened?"

The story spilled out of her like a waterfall. She let it go in a frantic rush, watching the faces of her mother and sister grow more and more incredulous. By the time she'd finished her breakneck retelling she was almost panting.

Sucking in a deep breath, she clamped her hands over her face for a moment, trying to steady her nerves. For a moment nobody said anything. Arden crunched down on the protein cracker; swallowed and cleared her throat.

"You're serious?" she said eventually.

"Yes."

"I'll ping the police," her mother declared. "If there really is something out there they need to know."

"What about Kirk?" Arden asked. "Is he alright?"

"I... I don't know." Piper shook her head. "The wraiths were chasing me so I tried to lead them away from him."

"Why were they chasing you?"

Piper never got the chance to answer, because the back wall of the kitchen caved in.

Arden screeched and hurled herself away from the cascade of broken metal and sealant, covering her head with her hands. Piper's eyes went wide as a hulking shape loomed into view, letting out a fearsome codescream that made half the electronics into the house spark and smoke.

It was another codewraith, this one bulkier than the first, with a single crimson iris mounted in the centre of its anvil-shaped head. Multiple arms splurged from its barrel torso, and it crunched forward on a tripod of legs, looking straight at her.

"Oh my God," he mother gasped. "Piper, get back-,"

"It's after me!" she yelled, quickly scuttling away from her family, the wraith following her movement. "Get Arden out of here!"

"Piper, what are you-,"

Arden's stunned cry disappeared in another screech of binary as the wraith crashed forward, demolishing a whole section of the kitchen as it moved. A chair disintegrated underfoot and the metal floors warped and buckled.

"GO!" Piper hollered, ripping their microwave unit from the counter-top and launching it at the machine with all the strength she could muster. It clanged harmlessly off the head section. She glanced to her left to see her mother wrenching Arden backwards out of the room. The codewraith paid no attention to them, instead stomping forward and raising three of its arms fitted with an array of blades.

She started grabbing anything and everything she could find, and launching them at the crazed killing machine. Knives, plates, a data pad, a screwdriver, a half-frozen hunk of synthmeat, all of them clattered against the thing's armoured hide, but it didn't slow down.

Piper dropped flat as two of the appendages when scything overhead. She rolled through the debris as a third punched a hole through the floor where she'd been lying. Then her body struck the door frame.

A shadow loomed over her.

Biting back a sob, she flipped over onto her back and found herself looking up at the codewraith, bathed in a hellish glow from its red iris. Circuits sparked and a million tiny mechanisms whirred as it screeched, the noise avalanching through her body and biting into her veins.

In that moment of complete terror she suddenly felt the wraith – felt every twisted balk of metal, every piece of corrupted circuitry; every screeching howl of agonized code in its traumatized skull. Once, this thing had been able to think. It had been alive. Then the corporations, not willing to share a world with anyone else, had torn it all away.

Piper wanted to care. She wanted to pretend that she felt some sort of sympathy for the codewraith. In other circumstances she might have, but right now it it was trying to kill her, and her only sensation was one of self-preservation.

So she screamed, and into that scream she channelled one thought: die.

And she felt the codewraith's whole existence come apart.

Its joints exploded in a maelstrom of snapping bearings and sparking wires. The red iris shattered, sending microshards of glass in all directions. Its chest imploded; she felt the core at its heart sputter and die and the mangled corpse of the machine crashed to the ground in front of her. The whole room shook as it landed, smoke rising from the remains.

Piper felt numb, and all she could do was stare. 

Had she really just done that? 

She waited to see if the whole thing was some kind of blissful mirage that a metal fist was about to obliterate, along with her skull, but it didn't happen. She sat there, alive and tingling all over. The feeling was raw in her mind – the sense of knowing every molecule of the codewraith.

Looking down at her hands, she took in a sharp breath. A faint orange red glow seemed to flicker beneath her skin, so quickly she couldn't be totally sure she'd seen it.

What the hell just happened?

||