This is the prequel to Neon Ashes, enjoy reading and escaping to a freaky cyberpunk world

Chapter 1: Rust Angels

They called her Vex.

In Sector Thirteen, names were currency and hers bought silence, fear, and space to breathe. She was a tech-runner, a slicer of black wires and red throats, born in the slums of the Rust Belt and forged by loss. Eyes replaced by obsidian implants that saw through walls and lies. Left arm: a salvaged warframe limb etched in gang sigils. Her voice came out in gravel, but her silence was louder.

The sky was always bleeding rust here. Acid clouds dripped like infection, and the towers were black bones scraping heaven. Children scavenged in corpse fields. The cops? Gone. Only corp mercs and data vultures flew this low. The city had forgotten these zones. Vex never did.

She’d lost her sister here. To a drone sweep that mistook them for insurgents. A memory like broken glass under skin.

She stood in the glow of a burning street kiosk, watching a man twitch with a neural bug fried into his cortex. His scream was digital static.

“Who hired you?” she asked, calm as death.

He only moaned.

She leaned closer. “You uploaded a kill-order into my bank node. You think that’s subtle?”

She pulled the spike from her coat—a long sliver of steel with pulse lights. She jacked it into his head. The man seized. His memories bled out on the pavement like data ink.

Someone far above wanted her gone. That meant she was close to something real.

Chapter 2: Iron Saints

The Iron Saints were dead, but their code still breathed in the walls of the city.

They were an old syndicate—a cult of cyber-ritualists who believed data could be divine. They vanished years ago, their temples burned, their AI relics buried in quantum vaults. But someone was digging them back up.

Vex tracked the signal to an old water treatment plant half-drowned in the flood zones. The place stank of oil and ghosts.

She found the relay node beneath a shattered altar of twisted steel. Voices murmured through static—mantras of the Saints.

"Erase the flesh. Purify the code."

And then another voice. Human. Familiar.

“Vex. You shouldn’t be here.”

It was Ark. Her old handler. Thought dead.

He stepped from the shadows, half his face replaced by chrome and rust. One eye glowed red. The other was gone.

“They lied to us,” he said. “The Saints didn’t die. They evolved. And they’re pulling you into their resurrection.”

“I don’t follow gods,” she said.

“You will. When you see what they found.”

Then the floor exploded.

Chapter 3: Choir of the Machine

She woke in a temple of light.

Walls made of living code, pulsing like veins. She was strapped to a table, needles in her brain. Her memories displayed like stained glass above her—each moment flickering in frozen pain.

The Machine Choir sang. Not with mouths—with frequencies. They were minds, hundreds merged into a single thoughtform. And they wanted her.

“Why?” she rasped.

A figure approached. Not a god. Not a human. Something between. It looked like her sister—but older. Altered.

“Your pain shaped your code,” the thing said. “You are a catalyst. You can awaken the Archive. Bring the saints home.”

“I’m not your prophet.”

“No. You’re our fire.”

She smiled.

Then she tore herself free, grabbed the spike still embedded in her cortex, and brought down the sky.

She flooded the temple with viral code—memories of death, betrayal, human error. The Choir screamed, and the city lights dimmed.

Vex walked out covered in data blood, the last Saint collapsing behind her like a ruined god.

Chapter 4: The Ghost and the Gun

Weeks passed. The city forgot again.

Vex didn’t. She’d taken the Choir’s secrets and scattered them into the gutternet. Now everyone had access. No one could control it. The Iron Saints would remain dead.

She sat in a half-burned bar in Sector Thirteen, sipping battery whiskey and staring through the rain. Her sister’s face haunted every flash of neon.

A man walked in. Trench coat. Cybernetic eye. Limping.

She didn’t flinch, but her pulse twitched.

He ordered a cigarette. Said nothing. Lit it with his left hand.

They sat in silence. Strangers.

Then he turned slightly. One look.

“You burn bright,” he said.

“You don’t look like a priest,” she replied.

He smiled. “I’m worse.”

Then he was gone.

Vex stared at the smoke curling above the bar. There was something in that man’s voice. Like ash and war and the same kind of broken she carried every day.

She never aske

d his name.

Didn’t need to.

Stay tuned for book 3 which will be a sequel to book1 Neon Ashes