Chapter 1

The rain tasted like ozone and cheap gin. I huddled against the rusted railing of our fifth-floor fire escape, the downpour soaking straight through my thin cotton t-shirt. Below us, the city was a smear of holographic neon—electric blues and harsh magentas bleeding into the puddles on the cracked pavement. But I wasn't looking at the city. My focus was locked on the glowing amber text hovering in my upper peripheral vision.

* Compatibility: 12%.*

The System’s crisp, sterile font felt like a physical weight pressing down on my chest. Twelve percent. I let out a harsh, jagged laugh that was immediately swallowed by the sound of the storm. God, what a fool. I was a massive, pathetic fool to think that a government-mandated neural algorithm would ever validate what I felt every time Julian walked into a room.

Julian was standing right beside me, leaning against the slick brick wall, a lit cigarette shielded from the rain in the cup of his hand. He was always so perfectly composed, tightly wound but flawlessly stoic. We had come out here to escape the suffocating silence of our cramped apartment, but the tension had only followed us out into the cold.

"What's funny?" Julian’s voice was a low rumble, cutting through the white noise of the rain.

I blinked, trying to clear the amber text from my vision. "Nothing," I lied, my voice sounding thin and scraped hollow. "Just... my System is being a piece of garbage again. You know how it is. It's probably waterlogged."

He didn't laugh. He didn't even smile. Instead, he flicked the half-smoked cigarette out into the dark. It hissed as it hit a puddle five stories down. Julian pushed off the wall and stepped into my space. The sudden proximity made my breath catch. The rain was matting his dark hair to his forehead, and the neon lights below cast sharp, uncompromising shadows across his jawline.

"Why do you do that?" he demanded, his tone sharper than the biting wind.

"Do what?" I shot back, instinctively crossing my arms to shield myself.

"Rely on a piece of silicon shoved into your optic nerve to tell you how to live. To tell you how to feel." He took another step forward. The fire escape was too cramped for this. His chest was mere inches from mine, radiating a frantic heat that the rain couldn't wash away.

My heart hammered aggressively against my ribs. "Because it works, Julian! It keeps people from making stupid mistakes. Not all of us are flawless. Not all of us can just breeze through life without getting our hearts kicked in. It's easy for you to judge when you're..." I swallowed hard, the words tasting like ash on my tongue. "When you're perfect."

Julian’s expression fractured. The stoic, unbothered facade he wore like titanium armor cracked wide open. For a second, I thought the rain was just catching in his eyelashes, but as the neon signage across the street flared a bright, violent pink, I saw the wet, glistening track sliding down his cheek. Julian was crying. Heavy, silent tears mingling with the storm.

"Perfect?" His voice broke. He reached out, his hands aggressively gripping my shoulders, pushing me back just enough that my shoulder blades hit the cold, wet brick. It wasn't to hurt me; it was to hold me in place, to keep me from bolting. "Leo, my System has been broken for six months."

I stared at him, my mind short-circuiting. "What?"

"Every time I look at you," Julian choked out, his grip tightening, his thumbs pressing into the hollows of my collarbones, "every damn time, it just flashes *Error*. It doesn't give me a number. It doesn't give me a warning. It just fails. And I don't care anymore."

The air left my lungs in a rush. The fear, the suffocating distance we had maintained for over a year—it wasn't just me. He was terrified, too. We had both been standing on the edge of the same cliff, playing the fool out of blind loyalty to a faulty algorithm, terrified of ruining the one thing that mattered most. The yearning was mutual. It had always been mutual.

"Julian..." I breathed, my hands slowly coming up to grip his wet wrists.

He didn't pull away. He leaned in, the distance between our mouths shrinking to a sliver. I could feel his ragged breath against my lips, warm and desperate. I let my eyes flutter shut, ready to finally cross the line, ready to let the world and its sterile machines burn down around us.

Then, the amber light in my vision flared into a blinding, violent crimson.

* SYSTEM UPDATE MANDATORY. INITIATING NEURAL REBOOT IN 3... 2... 1...*

My vision went entirely black.