Glitch on the News — The Polymorph

You don't go back to the tunnel.

Not because it's compromised — it is, but that's not the reason. Two Hunters walked those corridors and found an unregistered civilian. They filed a report. "Maintenance tunnel seven." Someone will follow up. Not today, maybe. Not tomorrow. But the tunnel has a name now. It exists in a database somewhere, tagged with a time stamp and an incident number and the particular embarrassment of a grown man filing a stolen-boots report.

The tunnel is dead. You knew it the moment you laced the boots.

The scrapheap is bigger than you thought. You'd been working in one corner of it — the section closest to the industrial buildings, where the discarded equipment was relatively intact. But the lot extends another hundred metres south, past a collapsed chain-link fence and into a section that looks like someone abandoned a construction project mid-sentence. Concrete foundations. Half-walls. A ceiling in one corner where two slabs lean against each other at an angle that's either structural engineering or an accident that hasn't finished happening yet.

Three exits. The gap in the fence you came through. A drainage pipe wide enough to crawl through, running under the lot toward the commercial district. And the lot itself — open, no walls, you can run in any direction if someone comes from only one.

It's not as good as the tunnel. But it's further from the transit network, further from the patrol routes, and surrounded by enough discarded machinery that you can build walls out of it if you need to. Privacy made of garbage. It's not the worst thing you've owned.

You spend day four building a nest.

Not the word you use. You don't use a word. You find the corner where the two concrete slabs meet, and you drag a sheet of composite panelling across the opening to block the wind. You line the floor with insulating material stripped from broken cooling units — silver, flexible, designed to keep machines at operating temperature. It keeps you at operating temperature too. You pile salvaged casings around the entrance until you have walls that look like more junk from the outside and feel like a room from the inside.

Your boots stay laced.

You eat. The restaurant skip is four blocks north and it restocks every night. You go at three in the morning, when the streets are emptiest and the cameras are pointed at main roads instead of alleys. You bring back as much as you can carry. The self-sealing containers keep the food fresh for days. You line them up against the wall of your nest like ammunition.

You work.

Day five changes everything.

You're walking past a row of shops — head down, boots quiet, the particular gait you've developed that says I'm going to work and I'm boring and there's nothing interesting about me — when a wall-screen stops you.

Not the scrolling headlines. Not the transit schedules. Something else — a video feed, cycling through a news segment, and the image on the screen is a blurred rectangle of motion that your brain recognizes before your eyes do.

It's you.

The footage is bad. Grainy, compressed, shot from a security camera mounted on a building across from the construction site. But it's you — unmistakably, horrifyingly you. A figure in a too-big T-shirt and sleep shorts vaulting a chain-link fence with the fluid precision of someone who has trained for years, which you haven't, except your body decided to train itself in real time while you were running for your life.

The clip loops. Eight seconds. Vault, roll, sprint. The Hunter going down in the background. The figure — you — disappearing around a corner.

The text below the video reads:

UNIDENTIFIED EVOL — DISTRICT 7 — HUNTER PATROL INCIDENT — PUBLIC ASSISTANCE REQUESTED

And below that, in a different font — the kind of font that means someone added it later, someone who wasn't the original broadcaster:

"gremlin girl goes FERAL on hunter squad 💀💀💀"

You stand in front of the wall-screen for too long. You know you're standing too long. You know there are cameras. You know that the girl in the footage is wearing the same T-shirt you're wearing right now, and the only difference is the boots, and if anyone in this street has seen that clip and looks at you and does the math —

You walk. Briskly. Different direction from the scrapheap. Never go straight home.

The clip is everywhere.

Not the official version — the official version is dry, clinical, a security bulletin with a low-resolution still frame and a request for information. That one is on the news screens and the transit station displays and the Hunter Association's public feed.

The other version — the one someone ripped, edited, and re-uploaded with commentary — is on every personal screen you can see. People watching it on their wrist-screens while they walk. A group of teenagers clustered around a bench, replaying it and laughing. A woman on the metro platform showing it to her friend, pointing at the screen: look at this, look at what she does with the fence.

You hear fragments.

"—barefoot, right? Like, no shoes, and she just—"

"—Hunter said she stole his boots. His BOOTS. While he was on the ground. I'm—"

"—calling her the Gremlin. Like, the Gremlin of Linkon City—"

You pull the collar of your T-shirt higher. You keep walking. Your feet — in the stolen boots, double-knotted, stuffed with scraps — feel suddenly conspicuous. Every step sounds like evidence.

The Gremlin of Linkon City.

They think it's funny. The public, the people watching this on their lunch breaks and their commutes — they think it's a comedy. A barefoot girl in pyjamas outrunning a trained Hunter squad. Stealing a man's shoes while he's trying to arrest her. It's slapstick. It's absurd. It's the kind of story you tell your friends because the world is grim and the news is heavy and sometimes you need a girl in an oversized T-shirt making the military look stupid.

They don't know what you are. They don't know what you did on that bench four days ago. They don't know about the scanner clipped to your waistband or the thing your body does when it decides you need to be something you're not.

To them, you're entertainment.

To the Hunters, you're an open file.

You need to get off the streets. You need to change what you look like. And you need to learn what this city knows about you before it learns anything else.

Hacking is the wrong word for what you do. You don't have a keyboard. You don't have a screen. What you have is a half-functional networking node pulled from the scrapheap, three metres of optical filament, and the same accelerated learning that let you build a scanner in nine hours.

Your brain does the thing again. Not the physical thing — not the muscles rewriting, not the pulling sensation. Something quieter. Your fingers connect components and your mind understands the architecture before you've finished the wiring. The city's network isn't like anything you've seen — it doesn't use protocols you recognize, doesn't route data the way you learned in a world that now feels like someone else's memory. But the logic is the same. Data moves. Signals connect. Security has gaps. Every system built by people has the fingerprints of the people who built it, and people are predictable even when their technology isn't.

By midnight on day five, you can read the city's surface-level data traffic. News feeds. Public bulletins. Transit schedules. The information that anyone with a wrist-screen can access, except you're accessing it from a concrete slab in a scrapheap through a device held together with solder and desperation.

By day six, you're deeper.

The Hunter Association's public database is locked, but their filing system has a pattern. Incident reports are tagged by district, date, and threat classification. You can't read the reports — not yet — but you can read the tags. The metadata. The shape of what they know, even if you can't see the content.

Your incident — your incident, there's a phrase you never expected to have — is tagged:

D7-2048-0827 — UNIDENTIFIED — EVOL(UNCONFIRMED) — THREAT: LOW — STATUS: OPEN

Low threat. Open status. They haven't escalated it. You're a curiosity, not a priority. The clip is viral but the Hunter Association sees it as a minor patrol incident with an unregistered civilian. No Evol signature detected. No confirmed powers. Just a girl who ran fast and stole some shoes.

You let out a breath you didn't know you were holding.

But there's a second tag. Older. From day one.

D7-2048-0824 — UNIDENTIFIED — EVOL(CONFIRMED) — THREAT: MODERATE — STATUS: ACTIVE

The bench. The woman. The light in her chest and the thing your body did without asking. That incident has a different classification entirely. EVOL CONFIRMED. MODERATE THREAT. ACTIVE STATUS.

Someone saw what you did. Someone filed a report. And someone connected the energy signature from that bench to a database that tracks people with powers.

The two incidents aren't linked yet. The blurry girl in the dashcam isn't connected to the unidentified Evol from the bench. Different days, different locations, different responses. But you — you know they're the same person. And eventually, someone else will figure that out too.

You start building something new. Not a scanner this time — a scrambler. Something that can disrupt the camera feeds in your immediate vicinity. Not all the time. Not everywhere. Just enough to walk from the scrapheap to the restaurant skip without leaving a visual trail that someone can match to a looping eight-second clip.

It takes you three days to build. Your brain learns faster each time, and each time the nosebleed comes quicker and lasts longer. Fifteen minutes on day five. Twenty-five on day six. Your body has opinions about the speed at which your mind is operating and it's expressing them in blood.

You wipe your nose on your sleeve and keep working.

The T-shirt has to go.

Not because it's ruined — it's been ruined since day one. Because it's identifiable. The grey, the bleach stain, the oversized cut — it's the same shirt in the dashcam footage. The same shirt that's being screen-printed onto actual T-shirts by street vendors who think the Gremlin is hilarious. You saw one in a shop window. A cartoon version of yourself vaulting a fence, with text that read: "GREMLIN MODE: ACTIVATED."

You find clothes in the scrapheap. Not clothes, exactly — work coveralls, the kind that maintenance crews wear. Dark blue, heavy fabric, built for durability rather than fashion. The legs are too long and you roll them up twice. The sleeves cover your hands. There's a name stitched on the chest pocket — HENG — and you don't remove it because a girl in coveralls with a name tag looks like a girl going to work, and a girl going to work is invisible.

You fold the T-shirt. You don't throw it away. You put it at the bottom of your nest, under the insulating material, where it can't be seen. It's the last thing from home. You're not ready to lose it.

Your boots stay on.

Day eight. You've been here for eight days.

The scrapheap is not comfortable but it is yours. You have a nest with three exits. You have a scrambler that gives you a fifteen-metre radius of camera blindness. You have a scanner that tells you when Evols or Wanderers are nearby. You have four changes of work coveralls in different states of repair. You have a food supply that would last three days if you stopped scavenging.

You have a routine. Wake before the city. Check the exits. Check the scanner. Eat. Work — always work, always building, always learning. Check the news feeds for your face. Scavenge at three in the morning. Sleep with your boots laced and your back to the concrete slab and the drainage pipe two metres to your left.

It's not a life. It's a system. And systems are what keep you alive when everything else has failed.

At night, in the dark, with the hum of the city vibrating through the foundations, you think about the woman on the bench. Not the power — you try not to think about the power. You think about her face. The way she looked at you like you'd handed her something she'd been missing for so long she'd forgotten it existed.

I can remember all of it.

You don't know what she meant. You don't know who she is. You know that whatever you did to her chest left some kind of mark — the second incident report, the ACTIVE status, the confirmed Evol classification. They're watching her now. Or watching for whoever touched her.

You hope she's okay.

You hope she's not looking for you.

She's looking for you.

She wakes up in the hospital on the second day and something is wrong with the ceiling.

Not the ceiling itself — white, standard, the fluorescent strip light buzzing at a frequency she's heard a thousand times. But she's hearing it differently. Layered. Under the buzz there's a second sound, older, a hum that belongs to a room she's never been in, with a ceiling made of stone instead of plaster and a light source that isn't electric.

She blinks. The stone ceiling vanishes. White plaster. Fluorescent light. Hospital.

Her hand goes to her chest. Reflex. The same reflex she's had for years — check the heart, check the rhythm, wait for the stutter that means another crisis is building. But there's no stutter. No pressure. No heat. Just her heart, beating with a steadiness she has no memory of feeling. Not in this life.

The phrase arrives before she can stop it: not in this life.

She doesn't know what that means.

The doctor — not Zayne, a different one, a woman with tired eyes and a clipboard — tells her the numbers. Heart rate stable. Aether Core output within normal parameters. No signs of protocore syndrome relapse. Whatever happened to her in that plaza, it worked. She's stable.

"Do you remember anything about the person who helped you?"

She remembers everything. A girl. Young — early twenties, maybe. Dark hair. Bare feet, bleeding. Wearing pyjamas. Hands that were shaking. Eyes that were scared but didn't look away. The pull — the impossible, full-body pull of something being drawn out of her chest, or pushed into it, or both, and the girl's face above her going white with effort and the city spinning behind her head and the absolute, crashing certainty that she was going to be okay.

Not going to survive. Going to be okay. For the first time.

"No," she says. "It happened too fast."

The doctor nods. Makes a note. Leaves.

She lies in the hospital bed and stares at the ceiling and waits for the stone room to come back. It doesn't. Not during the day. During the day, the memories behave — tucked away, filed, inaccessible. Normal.

The dreams are different.

The first night, she drowns. Not a nightmare — she's had nightmares, she knows what they feel like. This is specific. Salt water. Cold. Her lungs filling with something that isn't air. A coast she doesn't recognize. Hands reaching for her — not to save her. To hold her under. She dies with her eyes open and the last thing she sees is a sky full of stars that don't match any constellation she knows.

She wakes gasping. Her chest is fine. Her heart is steady. Her pillow is wet with tears she doesn't remember crying.

The second night, she burns. A building. Stone walls — the same stone from the ceiling. Fire that moves like it's alive, like it has purpose, like it's looking for her specifically. A man is shouting her name. Not her name — a different name, in a language she doesn't speak, but she knows it's hers. She runs toward him. The ceiling collapses. She dies under the rubble and the last thing she feels is his hand, reaching.

She wakes at four in the morning. Sits up. Presses her palms against her eyes until the afterimages fade.

These are not dreams. She knows that the way she knows her own heartbeat — instinctively, without proof, without logic. These are memories. Someone else's memories, or her own memories from a life she doesn't remember living, and they are too detailed, too physical, too real to be anything her sleeping brain invented.

She tells no one.

On day three, she checks herself out of the hospital. Against medical advice. The doctor with the tired eyes gives her a look that says I know you're making a mistake and I'm not paid enough to stop you.

She goes home. She showers. She stands in front of the mirror and looks at her own chest — the skin unmarked, the Aether Core humming beneath it with a steadiness that feels borrowed. Given. The girl gave her this. Reached into whatever was killing her and stopped it and didn't even stay long enough to hear her say thank you.

She opens her work terminal. Logs in. Pulls up every security feed from District 7, date-stamped four days ago. Intersection cameras. Transit feeds. The plaza where she was sitting when the world broke open and a barefoot girl caught her.

Most of the feeds are redacted. Someone has already been through them — the Hunter Association, probably, or Ever Group's intelligence division. The incident report is flagged. Classified.

But she's a Hunter. She has clearance. Not top-level, but enough to see the gaps — the places where footage has been pulled, the timestamps that skip, the feeds that cut to static at exactly the wrong moment.

Someone saw the girl. Someone is looking for her. And whoever wiped those feeds did it fast — within hours. Which means someone powerful cares about what happened on that bench.

She closes the terminal. She sits in the dark of her apartment. Her heart beats its steady, borrowed rhythm.

She'll find the girl herself. Not through channels. Not through reports. She'll walk the streets of District 7 with her eyes open and her heart listening for the echo of whatever the girl left behind — the warmth, the pull, the frequency that her chest is still humming at, quiet and constant, like a signal she can't turn off.

She doesn't know the girl's name. She doesn't know what she is. She knows what she did.

And she knows that whoever is looking for her, she needs to find her first.

Day eight.

Two women in the same city, looking in opposite directions. One building walls out of scrap metal and stolen boots. The other tearing through classified databases with a badge and a heartbeat that doesn't belong to her.

They haven't met yet.

They will.

Day eight.