Exit Wound

They didn’t make a clean escape.

There was no glorious charge into the sunrise, no triumphant slow-motion montage.

Just chaos.

Just fear.

Just static chewing at the world’s seams as Jessi, Paul, and Victoria sprinted through EdenNet’s dying corridors.

Doors failed to close fast enough.
Security drones hesitated, blinked, stuttered.
Cameras spun uselessly, unable to decide where to look.

The system was bleeding out uncertainty with every step they took.

Paul led the way, scampering ahead, hacking locks and tossing little homemade glitches into the environment like chaotic breadcrumbs.
Victoria stumbled once, but Jessi caught her, hauled her upright without slowing.

"I've got you," she muttered, over and over, like a promise stitched into the world.

Behind them, alarms screamed—fractured, misfiring, out of sync with reality.

Ahead: the edge of the sector.
The dead zones beyond.
The places EdenNet still hadn't fully reclaimed.

Freedom wasn't clean.
Freedom was dirty, broken, imperfect.

Freedom was human.

They crashed through the final service hatch just as a drone squad converged on the Garden’s entryway, too late to stop them, too slow to predict the chaos Jessi had unleashed.

They tumbled out into the ruined fringe of the city—gray, half-forgotten buildings leaning like drunks against each other, old-world roads cracked open and bleeding weeds.

Jessi dragged Victoria under the shelter of a collapsed skybridge and collapsed beside her, gasping.

Paul flopped onto the broken concrete next to them, chest heaving, fur sparking faintly from static overload.

For a long moment, none of them spoke.

The city stretched out before them—broken, bleeding, alive in a way it hadn't been in years.

Somewhere deep in EdenNet’s endless loops, a single seed of static twisted and churned, fraying edges, tangling certainty, making the machine doubt itself a little more with every tick of the clock.

Jessi wiped blood and grime from her forehead, blinking hard against the sun—or what passed for it now, glitching faintly at the edges.

Paul finally sat up, squinting into the battered horizon.

"So..." he croaked, voice rough but alive, "uh... tacos?"

Jessi barked a laugh, cracked and real, the kind that hurt coming out.

Victoria lifted her head, smiling weakly. "Tacos," she agreed hoarsely. "God, I missed real food."

Paul wobbled to his feet, still buzzing faintly with leftover energy. "Preferably tacos that don't smile at me or try to predict my favorite flavor before I even order."

Jessi grinned, tired and feral. "Yeah. No loops. No ads. Just salsa."

Paul stretched, shaking dust from his fur. "Maybe a side of existential dread, just to stay on brand."

They laughed.

And for a moment, even with the world tilting on the edge of collapse, even with EdenNet’s eye still blinking somewhere overhead, searching, recalibrating, hunting—

It didn’t matter.

Because something had changed.

Something had broken.

Jessi tucked the cracked deck back into her sling.
The Static Protocol was loose now, spreading where EdenNet couldn’t touch it.

Small at first.

But it would grow.

It would whisper.

It would unravel.

One doubt at a time.

They weren’t done.
They weren’t safe.

But for the first time in her life, Jessi wasn't running from something.

She was running toward something.

The revolution had begun.

Small. Chaotic. Impossible.

Perfect.

Paul clambered up onto her shoulder and surveyed the ruined city ahead like a tiny, war-scarred general.

"It's gonna get loud," he said, dead serious for once.

Jessi ruffled his fur, smiled into the broken horizon.

"Good," she said.

And together, they vanished into the static.