Pain woke me up.
Not the slow, dull pain I'd gotten used to. Not the background hum of nerve damage crawling through dead tissue. This was sharp. Bright. Fresh. The kind of pain that grabs you by the throat and screams in your face — you're alive, you idiot, and something is very wrong.
I opened my eyes. The cargo bay ceiling stared back at me. Blue light from the screens. The hum of Jasmine's pod beside me. The smell of burned metal and antiseptic.
I looked to my right.
My arm was gone.
From the shoulder down — nothing. Just a bandaged stump wrapped in white gauze that was already turning red at the edges. Glitch's work. Clean. Tight. Professional. The kind of cut you'd expect from a surgeon, not a teenage hacker with a stolen toolkit.
The pain came from the stump. Phantom pain. My brain still thought the arm was there. Still sending signals to fingers that didn't exist anymore. Telling a hand to grip that had been dead for days and was now gone completely.
[STATUS UPDATE]
