Ghostlight

They say you can't smell the Barrens through a trid screen, but if you could, it'd hit you like burnt chrome, cheap synth-fuel, and the kind of fear that settles into your bones when the sun goes down and the streetlights don't come on. Out here, the city's rot doesn't hide behind mirrorshades and corporate logos. It bleeds.

You don’t see the Barrens. You inhale it. Burnt synth-oil, cordite, and the stink of too many bodies packed into too little space. Even the light here is tired—flickering fluorescents buzzing like flies over meat that’s just starting to turn. The Sprawl’s junkyard. The Corpse Garden. Home.

They call me Valkyrie. I’m not here to save you. I just show up when your time runs out.

The call came through a disposable commlink dumped onto my network like a hot brass shell casing. No ID, no signature, just a six-second burst of static and a voice: “He rides tonight.”

Cryptic? Sure. But I know a ghost-trace when I hear one. The air around that message tasted wrong. Old magic. Not the kind you learn from a talismonger or a back-alley mage. Older than the Matrix. Older than asphalt. The kind that walks on bone feet and carries your name in a jar.

The kid was in an alley behind a burned-out Stuffer Shack. Couldn’t have been more than ten. Pale, shaking, eyes gone wide like she’d seen a dragon. Or worse—someone who used to be a person. I knelt beside her, the shadows folding around us like a cloak. My magic runs quiet, cool, the way winter breathes just before it kills you.

“Who did this to you?”

Her voice came out cracked and soaked in terror. “He didn’t have a head. Just a helmet full of stars.”

I felt the chill crawl under my coat and coil at the base of my spine. Not from fear, but from recognition.

There’s a thousand ways to die in the Barrens. This one was new.

I laid two fingers on her forehead. Whispered a word. Power flowed like ink in water, and the spell took. Just enough to keep her tethered. The city would try to kill her again tomorrow. But not tonight.

Something moved at the far end of the alley. Not footsteps. No sound. Just the sense of absence where something should be. I looked up in time to see a shadow on two wheels glide past the mouth of the alley. No headlight. No helmet. No head.

The streetlight above me blinked out.

And somewhere deep in the grid, something old and hungry smiled.

—

I watched the girl sleep in the arms of a street nurse I trusted not to ask questions. My commlink buzzed again. A message from an old contact.

> You seeing this drek? Check the 162nd node. Grid is bleeding. —Lancer

Lancer always had a nose for rot. Used to be a Grid overwatch tech before she got burned in a Renraku data purge. Now she floats from node to node, trailing sarcasm and suspicion like gun smoke.

I checked. There it was—a digital smear like black mold, eating through the infrastructure like a curse. And buried in it, for half a second, a symbol I’d hoped to never see again:

Eight legs. Barbed edges. A fractured helm.

Selvetarm.

I hadn’t heard that name in years. Most people never did—not unless they’d pissed off something ancient, armed, and unmerciful. Once, I called him a god. Now, I call him a mistake. He wasn’t born in the Matrix or the metaplanes. He was something older. And for a while, I carried him in my blood like a virus with a voice.

He was supposed to be gone. Exiled into dead code and junkspace. But like all bad gods and worse ideas, he had a habit of crawling back.

I slipped my hand into my coat and closed it around the talisman I swore I’d never use again. The silver edge was warm. Too warm.

I wasn’t ready.

But the city was already bleeding, and ghosts never wait.