Static in the Blood

Keira didn’t look like someone the world should be afraid of.

Five-foot-nothing, bleached-white hair with electric-violet streaks, black combat boots she’d pulled from a thrift bin, a hoodie stitched with glowing cyan circuitry threads, nails chipped from solder burns, and a face too young to carry the kind of exhaustion that lived behind her eyes.

But fear wasn’t about size.
It was about skill.
And Keira’s skill could chew through most networks like they were wet paper.

The bus rumbled beneath her as she sat pressed against the window, hood pulled low, one knee pulled tight to her chest. She rode the late-night line because no one sane rode it, which meant no one paid attention to her. Exactly the way she liked it.

The city outside flickered with cheap neon, glitching billboards, fried power lines sparking through the rain. A perfect place to be nobody.

Her Covenant screen pulsed faintly in her palm, the glow reflected on her cheekbones. She didn’t send messages. Didn’t answer them. She used Covenant the way some people used rosary beads—gripping it for comfort, not conversation.

Not that she expected conversation.
Not after running.

Tonight was day nineteen.
Nineteen days since she slipped out the back door.
Nineteen days since she dumped her old phone in a storm drain and scrubbed every trace of her life from every system that mattered.
Nineteen days since she stopped being someone’s daughter and started being a ghost.

Her parents weren’t stupid.
Abusers never are.
They knew how to track.
They knew how to pressure systems.
They knew how to make institutions bend.

But this city was big.
And Keira was bigger.

Her fingers tapped across the small holo-projector clipped to her sleeve. A soft blue grid rippled open—her private OS, built from scratch, a Frankenstein of open-source tools and things she coded because existing solutions annoyed her.

She checked the usual:

— No pings on her old ID numbers
— No password-reset attempts
— No bank trace attempts
— No GPS ghost signatures
— No dark-market inquiries about a runaway teen in the region

Good.

The storm outside blurred into a sheet of vibrating light. Thunder rolled like a bad temper working up courage.

Keira breathed out slowly.

She wasn’t safe.
She would never think that word again.
But she wasn’t caught.

The bus jerked over a pothole. Her Covenant device buzzed—one single notification. Not a message. A system alert.

Keira’s spine stiffened.

Unknown device attempted proximity handshake.
Rejected automatically.
Source: masked.
Distance: within twenty meters.

Someone close.

Her pulse ticked faster, but her hands stayed steady. She killed her general network visibility with a flick. Her OS vanished into a dead screen. Covenant darkened to a blank slate.

The bus squealed to a stop. A handful of passengers stood, shuffling past her seat—nobody looking twice at the tiny girl pressed into the shadowed corner.

Except one.

She felt eyes on her.
Cold.
Calculating.
Like someone trying to decide if she was a problem worth solving.

Keira didn’t move.
Didn’t breathe.
Didn’t blink.

Then the presence passed.
Feet clattered down the steps.
The doors hissed shut.

The bus pulled away.

Only then did her breath collapse out of her, long and thin like a leaking balloon.

“Not good,” she whispered to herself, voice barely audible under the storm. “Not good at all.”

She adjusted her hood tighter and pulled her pack closer, thumb brushing the outline of her modified hardware—the only thing she’d carried out of that house besides her wallet and the thin, jagged scar across her ribs.

The city lights smeared across the glass as the bus plunged deeper into the neon-sick streets, and Keira sat utterly still, every sense stretched thin, waiting for her heart to slow.

Tonight wasn’t the night she got caught.
She refused to let it be.

Because Keira hadn’t survived sixteen years in that house just to die on a bus.

And she wasn’t done running.