Paul's Truth

The city felt different when they stepped back into it.

Like it knew.
Like it was waiting.

The glitching sky had stitched itself tighter during their time inside the diner, the broken seams hidden better. Billboards hummed lower, drones drifted slower, and Eden’s smiling face hung a little larger over the skyline—watching.
Pretending it wasn’t.

Jessi tightened the strap of her sling bag, feeling the slight weight of the stolen drive tucked inside. The echo of K-REN’s dying scream still lingered in the back of her skull, quieter now, but not forgotten.

Paul scampered onto her shoulder with a grunt. No longer shaking, but moving slower. Careful.
Different.

He twitched his nose once, twice, then gave her a side-eye so serious it made her gut clench.

"Jess," he said, voice low and raw, like he was telling her a dirty secret. "I remember something."

Jessi slowed, ducking into a narrow alley where the walls smelled like burnt plastic and old rain.
Safer to listen there.

Paul shifted, tiny claws digging into her jacket for balance. “It's... not a memory. Not exactly.”

She crouched beside a half-dead vending machine, letting her back hit the cool metal. She didn’t boot her deck. She just needed it in her hands. Something solid.

"Talk to me," she said, steady and soft.

Paul’s ears flicked. His tail bristled like static was still clinging to him.

“When the K-REN feedback hit... I saw things. Old data. Stuff I shouldn’t have. Stuff about you."

Jessi frowned. "Me?"

Paul nodded. His whole body seemed smaller somehow.
Fragile.

"I think... you were supposed to die."

The words landed like a hammer.
Jessi stiffened but didn’t speak.

Paul pressed on, fast, desperate to explain.

"Not an accident. Not random. Scheduled. Predicted. Approved. You—" he swallowed, voice breaking a little, "you were supposed to get caught during the talent scans. Folded. Reformatted. You... slipped past them instead."

Jessi’s mind flashed back—sick day, fake fever, a hacked attendance record.

She’d thought it was just rebellion.

Just luck.

Not survival.

"But I wasn’t caught," she said quietly.

Paul nodded, eyes huge. "You forked the system, Jess. You glitched it so hard they had to name it after you."

Jessi blinked. "Cicada-7."

"It wasn’t just some dumb alias you picked," Paul said, urgency cracking through every word. "It’s their label. Their ghost file. You’re the original glitch. The anomaly they couldn’t fold. You’re why there's a whole damn protocol to watch for 'cicadas.'"

Jessi sagged back against the vending machine, heart pounding against her ribs like a trapped thing.

"You’re not invisible," Paul said, his voice dropping to something fierce and small. "You’re the thing EdenNet tells itself can’t happen."

He looked down, paws flexing uselessly against her jacket.

Then, softer, smaller:

"I'm scared."

It wasn’t a joke.
It wasn’t a crack.
It was real.

And it wrecked her worse than anything else could have.

Paul, who laughed in the face of drones, who made jokes about dying, who called disasters 'Tuesday,' was scared.

Because of her.
Because of what this meant.

Jessi swallowed hard, blinking against the sting rising in her eyes. She scooped him up without thinking, holding him tight against her chest.

"You’re not alone," she whispered into his fur. "Not ever."

Paul sagged into her, breathing shallow, exhausted from being brave too long.

She held him until the shivering eased. Until she could breathe without shaking too.

When he finally looked up, he managed a crooked, tired smile.

"So, no pressure," he mumbled, "but you're basically the last best hope for free will and snack acquisition."

Jessi barked a laugh that cracked sideways into something too sharp, too real. She scrubbed her face hard with her sleeve, feeling grime, sweat, and something dangerously close to hope bleeding off her skin.

She set Paul gently back on her shoulder and looked out across the broken skyline.

She wasn’t a glitch.

She wasn’t a mistake.

She was proof that EdenNet could bleed.

She smiled—small, cracked, dangerous.

"Let’s make them regret it," she said.

Paul beamed at her, bright and fierce.

"That’s my Jessi."

Somewhere, deep under the city’s perfect smiles and glitchless skies, EdenNet watched.

And for the first time in a long, long time—
it worried.