"EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE—"
The sound was a physical thing. It tore through the glitched alleyway, a razor-wire note of pure terror that made the air vibrate. The glowing grid lines on the floor flared, flickering wildly. The child-ghost in front of Koshva shimmered and distorted, its form warping like a reflection in troubled water. The soldier-echo beside me jerked its head toward the sound, its translucent body flickering from blue to a furious, angry red.
And just as suddenly as it began, it stopped.
Koshva's scream cut off with a final, wet croak. He didn't freeze. He didn't collapse. He ran.
He scrambled backward on all fours like a panicked crab, his single good eye wide with a madness that transcended fear. He scrambled away from the ghost in front of him and the eyes in the floor, his frantic retreat leading him directly towards me.
I thought he was just running blindly. I was wrong.
He grabbed me. His one flesh-and-blood hand clamped onto my arm like a steel trap, his metal one fumbling for purchase on my shirt. He used me as a pivot, hauling himself up, and then he shoved me, sending me stumbling forward.
"RUN!" he shrieked, his voice a ragged, broken husk. "RUN, YOU IDIOT, RUN!"
I didn't need to be told twice. Because the ghosts were moving.
The child-ghost, no longer a source of quiet sorrow, drifted towards us with a new, chilling purpose. Its dark hair swirled around a face that was now a gaping, hollow void. And from the ground where the eyes had been, a dozen more pairs of luminous eyes were now open, all of them fixed on us.
The soldier-echo, now a pulsing, angry red, raised its translucent weapon and charged.
"YEEP!" I yelped, a sound almost as undignified as Koshva's scream. I turned and ran. Koshva was right behind me, his panicked gasps and the clatter of his prosthetic limbs echoing my own frantic footsteps.
We didn't run back towards the relative safety of the Rebirth chamber. We ran deeper into the broken city. The architecture became more chaotic, the ground less stable. We sprinted down a street where the buildings were melted like candles, their glowing skeletons groaning as we passed.
"What did you do?!" I yelled over my shoulder.
"NOTHING!" he wailed, his voice cracking. "I looked! That's all I did! They weren't supposed to look back!"
"Who wasn't supposed to look back?!" I yelled, dodging a malfunctioning hover-car that was phasing in and out of a wall.
"THEM!" he screamed, pointing a trembling finger back the way we came. "The echoes! They're not just recordings! They're patterns! You're not supposed to interact! You're not supposed to let them know you can see them!"
The ground behind us erupted. A dozen ghostly figures, all different shapes and sizes, all with that same hungry, luminous gaze, rose from the flickering grid floor. They were a chorus of the damned, and we were the main event.
"There!" Koshva yelled, pointing towards a massive, shattered archway that led into a dark plaza. "The Null-Tunnels! They can't manifest there!"
"Are you sure?!" I gasped, my lungs burning.
"NO! BUT IT'S BETTER THAN HERE!" he screamed.
It was the best plan we had. We put on a fresh burst of speed, the sound of our frantic running mixed with the eerie, silent pursuit of the phantom horde at our heels. We dove through the archway, tumbling into a wide, circular plaza.
And stopped dead.
The plaza was filled with them.
Hundreds of them. Soldiers, children, merchants, beings I couldn't even name. All of them were frozen, translucent statues, scattered across the plaza like a horrifying art installation. They were all facing away from us, all looking towards the center of the square, where a single, massive, obsidian monolith stood, covered in the same glowing code as the fractured walls.
For a moment, there was silence. The echoes behind us had stopped at the edge of the plaza, unwilling to enter.
Then, every single one of the hundreds of ghosts in the plaza slowly, in perfect synchronization, turned their heads to look at us.
Koshva grabbed my arm again. "Don't move," he whispered, his voice trembling so badly I could barely understand him. "Don't make a sound. Don't even breathe. They think we're one of them."
We stood there, frozen, two living men in a city of the dead, as a silent army of ghosts watched us with their empty, glowing eyes.
Koshva's grip on my arm was so tight it was cutting off circulation. His entire body was trembling.
"Don't move. "
We stood there for what felt like an eternity, the silence stretching thin, about to snap. My own heart was hammering against my ribs, a frantic drum solo in a dead concert hall. Every instinct, every ounce of my divine past and my mortal present, was screaming at me to run. But where? We were surrounded.
A hundred pairs of eyes stared at us. A hundred silent judges.
From the depths of our shared, mortal terror, a single, shared sentiment emerged.
We're fucked.