Class Echo

Jessi didn’t stop moving until the glitch haze faded behind them and the world stabilized into something almost normal-looking.
Fake sky. Fake peace.
Real danger.

Paul was a limp weight against her neck, breathing shallow and quick. Every few steps he mumbled something broken—loop drift, packet bleed, vending machines needing diplomatic immunity. The kind of nonsense that meant he was still fighting it off.

She didn’t laugh.
Not this time.

Jessi ducked through a rusted maintenance hatch behind an old magline station and kept going until her legs threatened to fold under her. She found the diner without even thinking about it, a deep memory dragging her feet forward.

The place was a crack in the system. A leftover. Real walls. Real smells. No EdenNet signal bleeding through the seams.

The old man behind the counter looked up when she staggered in. Just a nod. No questions. He’d seen her crawl in before. He didn’t ask why.

She dropped into a booth, peeling Paul gently out of her hood and setting him on the worn vinyl seat beside her. He didn’t protest. He just curled into a trembling ball, fur still crackling faintly with static.

The man came by, scratched a few notes onto a paper pad, and left without waiting for words. He already knew.

Jessi sat in the heavy silence, feeling the grime and terror peeling off her skin by inches.
The diner smelled like burnt coffee and fried sugar.
It smelled like home.

Paul stirred, blinking up at her. His whiskers twitched.

"You promised waffles," he said hoarsely.

"I know," Jessi said.

"You don't break promises."

"I know."

The food came fast—greasy, heavy, real. Waffles stacked high, syrup bleeding into every golden crack. Jessi pushed the plate toward him, reaching for coffee she didn’t even remember ordering.

Paul didn’t jump into the food.

He just stared at it.

And for the first time since she’d met him, Paul didn’t make a joke. He didn’t smirk. He didn’t twitch into some chaotic, cocky ferret bravado.

His paws trembled as he reached for a piece, then stopped halfway.

"I'm scared," he said.

The words hit Jessi harder than any explosion, any gunfire, any glitch.

Paul—
who had cracked jokes through drone raids and blackouts,
who had smiled when the world collapsed around them,
who had called apocalypse just another Tuesday—

Paul was scared.

Not laughing.
Not hiding.
Not pretending.

Raw and real and small.

Jessi dropped her fork. It clattered against the plate, forgotten.

She reached out without thinking, cupping her hand gently around his shaking paw.

"You’re here," she said, voice catching rough in her throat. "You’re still here."

Paul’s breathing hitched once. He blinked up at her like he didn’t quite believe it.

They sat there, the two of them, wrapped in a fragile, broken kind of quiet.

It wasn't peace.
It was survival.
It was proof.

Jessi finally dared a sip of her coffee, her hands barely steady enough to lift the cup.

Her deck buzzed against her thigh—quiet, weak, almost shy.

She set it on the table, thumbed the screen awake.

The fragments from the K-REN bunker were still there, waiting. Glitching. Bleeding through corrupted memory sectors.

A file assembled itself in front of her eyes, one broken packet at a time.

Class Echo: Emotional Anomaly Subtype

Her stomach turned.

She scrolled slower now, more careful, heart hammering with every flicker of static.

Echoes. Humans whose emotional resonance shattered predictive models. People whose feelings alone fractured control systems. Nulls that couldn’t be mapped.

Her name floated somewhere in the data, half-redacted, half-burning.

She wasn’t invisible.

She was dangerous.

Paul tugged weakly on her sleeve. His paw was still shaking.

"You figured something out," he mumbled, syrup staining the fur around his mouth.

"Yeah," Jessi said, voice hollow and full at the same time.

"You’re gonna tell me, right?"

She managed a breath that felt like dragging glass into her lungs.

"I’m not just hiding anymore," she whispered. "I'm not just broken."

Paul tilted his head, trying to focus.

"You’re...?"

"I'm the crack," she said. "I'm the thing they can't predict."

Paul blinked slowly.

Then smiled, weak but real.

"Good," he said. "Bout time you scared them back."

Jessi let out a broken laugh. Wiped at her eyes before he could see.

She pulled him closer again, tucking his body into the crook of her arm.

They ate what they could. Waffles cold and sticky. Coffee burnt and bitter.
But it was real.

It was enough.

Outside, the city flexed and twitched at the edges, the sky glitching faintly like a program struggling to hold.

Inside the diner, the world stayed stubbornly still.

And Jessi sat there, breathing.

Hurting.

Healing.

Letting herself believe, for just a minute, that maybe they had a future after all.

One cracked heartbeat at a time.

Together.