The city of Vireon didn't sleep.
It buzzed. Hummed. Watched.
From the moment you stepped out of your building, every step you took was traced. Every purchase, every blink, every sigh logged by the government's vast neural-net system called EYE. It saw all. It missed nothing.
Or so they believed.
Seventeen floors above ground level, in a cramped little flat squeezed between grey towers and floating ad drones, Lyra Elen sat by her dusty window, adjusting the glasses that forever slid down her nose. Thick, plain, unfashionable they made her look like a schoolteacher from another age. No one noticed her. And that's exactly how she liked it.
Her fingers moved quickly across a cracked tablet, lines of encrypted code spilling across the screen. She wasn't just browsing. She was building something. Something that wasn't supposed to exist anymore.
A private thought.
A space the system couldn't read.
"Lyra! You're going to be late for SchoolZone!" her aunt's voice echoed from the kitchen.
"I'm going!" she shouted back, slipping her tablet into the secret lining of her schoolbag. She looked in the mirror not at her face, but her eyes. Big, round, brown. Too soft, too innocent.
Perfect.
The streets below were filled with the same usual grey uniforms. Same polished boots. Same perfect robotic smiles. SchoolZone wasn't a place to learn anymore it was a place to be measured. Ranked. Watched.
And she knew how to play the game.
She walked the exact pace expected. She answered every test question precisely average. She never smiled too wide or frowned too deep. Lyra was invisible. And invisibility, in Vireon, was a superpower.
Until today.
The moment she stepped through the scanning gate at Zone-11, the sirens screamed. Red lights flashed.
Students froze. Guards moved in. And she was surrounded.
Her breath caught. But her expression didn't change.
She stayed innocent.
"Lyra Elen," said a voice calm, cold, synthetic. An android officer stepped forward, eyes glowing blue. "You have been selected for Random Intelligence Auditing."
This wasn't random.
She knew it. Someone had found something.
Two guards grabbed her arms. She didn't fight. She just adjusted her glasses.
"Understood," she said softly.
They took her not to a classroom, but to a tall black building with no windows. Inside, everything smelled like metal and fear. Her heart pounded, but her face was calm.
One small mistake, and she'd disappear. Like her brother did.
They pushed her into a room with a white chair and silver table. Across sat a man. Flesh and blood. Real. He smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes.
"Lyra," he said. "Do you know why you're here?"
She blinked once. "Because I'm smarter than I pretend to be."
That made him smile wider.
"We've been watching your scores. Quietly. You're not average, are you?"
She tilted her head. "Is that a trick question?"
He leaned in. "There was a murder last night. Top-level programmer. Locked room. No evidence. But someone accessed the EYE archives. Someone bypassed a firewall that shouldn't even exist."
She didn't flinch. "Sounds impressive."
"Sounds like you."
Silence.
Then she said, "If I could break into EYE, I wouldn't be here, would I?"
He stared at her. For too long.
Then he stood.
"We'll be watching you closely from now on, Miss Elen."
"Of course," she said, standing. "That's what you do, right?"
He paused. "We'll be seeing each other again."
Lyra nodded, already halfway out the door. As it closed behind her, her hands trembled but only for a second.
Because she'd just confirmed it.
Someone knew.
And worse someone else wanted her to know that they knew.
By the time she reached home, the sky had turned electric purple. Her aunt was watching the news, sipping slowbrew.
"School okay?" she asked.
Lyra nodded. "Normal."
She went to her room, locked the door, and pulled out the tablet.
The message blinked in green text:
YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE OPENED THAT DOOR, LYRA.
BUT NOW THAT YOU HAVE WELCOME TO THE GAME.
Her fingers hovered above the screen.
The game?
She wasn't here to play.
She was here to win…