He spotted emotional imprints. He handled the sensory data, finding more of the same. Sourceless. No who, what, when, where or why. And yet the amygdala was still active, still firing at intervals, like a signal that nobody was receiving.
Orwerethey?
He looked at the sensory fragments closer.
Cold stone.
Something burning that wasn't wood.
A sound — not quite a voice, maybe a frequency.
An impression without origin.
His pulse slowed at the next discovery. Loyalty. Fierce and furious. Also sourceless.
Next he found adevotion.
Bishop slowly moved over it, looking for afuckingnameor source.
His blood stirred as acid pooled in his stomach.Whatever he loved before… he still loved. But he couldn’t find it.
Beatrice cleared her throat loudly, announcing their handshake had entered overtime.
Hold your holy horses, sister. One more layer.
He located Sinrik’s adrenal axis and hit the mother of holy shits.
Whatthehellam I seeing?
It didn’t seem human, but it wasn’t corrupted. Parasitic? The cells wereorientedtoward something the way a compass is to north. And tuned to a frequency Bishop had no instrument for.
He quickly mapped everything and executed a script to locate the missing data.
Sinrik burst free of his prison and locked iron fingers to Bishop’s throat.
“Oh my God!” Beatrice shrieked.
Bishop slammed his hand on Sinrik’s neck, latching tight.
“Oh no! Stop that!” Beatrice ordered. “Release each other!”
A nameless power moved through Sinrik. Intelligent. Pissed.
Bishop flipped to defensive architecture, building a firewall of insulation around his own neural pathways.
“In the name of… of the Lord!” Beatrice yelled, grabbing their arms and yanking.
Two seconds and Sinrik identified gap junctions between Bishop’s cells and walked right through his defense.
Bishop zapped his own neural space with electrical static, distorting the landscape till it was unreadable. The migraine maneuver gained him a second to build a containment around the anomaly at Sinrik’s adrenal axis. Bishop used the samearchitecture design he had for Handy’s body—a living, adaptive maze that regenerated dead ends.
Two layers into the job, Sinrik pattern-matched the noise itself—finding the signal underneath the static. It reached the containment lattice Bishop had just built and tore through it like fucking paper.
Bishop threw a cellular shutdown code at Sinrik’s death grip, buying him enough seconds to work on the containment layers around that fucking anomaly. On the third layer, Sinrik blasted him with mimic-terror, flooding Bishop with adrenaline and forcing his system to re-route before he could finish.
Thismotherfucker!
Beatrice turned her tiny body into a battering ram to break the connection while Bishop redirected Sinrik’s power back through itself, forcing his system to receive its own input and output. The feedback staggered him.