Arjun tore off his headset. The voice was calm, baritone, with a faint Southern drawl. It was the voice of a man who had seen a Ceph Devastator at ten paces and yawned.
“Armor mode. Devastator incoming.”
The installation was a ritual. FitGirl’s signature—the sleek black window, the reassuring “MD5 checksums verified,” the aggressive compression that saved 7.2 gigabytes. Arjun hummed along as the unpacker churned. What he didn’t see was the digital watermark. The PROPHET release wasn’t just a crack; it was a key .
“Are you… controlling me?” Arjun asked.
“You are not Alcatraz.”
Arjun stood. His body felt light. Too light. He looked at his arms—and saw carbon nanotube muscle fibers rippling under translucent armor. He wasn’t in his room anymore. He was on the roof of Grand Central Terminal. Manhattan burned around him. The Ceph were coming over the Brooklyn Bridge like a silver tide.
The last thing Laurence Barnes—no, Prophet —remembered before the silence was the taste of the Hudson. Salt, rust, and the metallic tang of Ceph blood. He remembered handing the suit to Alcatraz. A dying man’s last order.
“And the second?”
Prologue: The Weight of a Second Skin