Neurostatic: The Ghost in Monte Cero - Chapter 1

Ghost Code

The rain hadn’t stopped in sixteen days.

It didn’t fall anymore—it hovered. Thick and sour, like the city itself was sweating out its sins. Every surface of Monte Cero dripped: neon gutters, rusted catwalks, corporate glass facades blinking with advertisements for curated dreams.

Yara moved fast, low to the metal. The old container stacks of Aguada Tier 7 creaked around her, strung together with power lines and torn prayer flags. She ducked under a flickering antenna arch and darted into a service alley, boots splashing through oil-slick water.

SynDyne drones were on her tail.

“They’re narrowing in,” said Ñandú.

His voice echoed from the back of her mind. Calm, analytical, with a faint Río accent. He’d been silent for the first half of the chase. Now he was back.

“They’ve been narrowing in since Tier 11,” Yara muttered.

“Their scan pattern just tightened. Eight-meter grid now. They’re prioritizing capture.”

“Fantastic.”

She turned sharply, scrambled up a drainage pipe, and threw herself onto a roof platform. A row of antennae buzzed overhead like angry hornets. The rain made the metal slippery. She skidded, caught herself, and kept running.

Somewhere below, a drone wailed—a piercing tone that shattered through the static-sick air like sirens in an old revolution.

Yara jumped.

Down one level. Rolled across a maintenance platform. Another jump.

She hit the catwalk hard and ducked into a cracked stairwell. Behind her, electric blue swept the darkness. The drones had eyes.

“You need a ghost path,” Ñandú said.

“I’m fresh out of tricks.”

“Not tricks. Instinct. Left. Now.”

She didn’t hesitate. Swerved left—straight into a maintenance chute barely wide enough to crawl through. The walls were covered in graffiti, most of it neural tags—cyber sigils from old gangs, warnings from deep-network prophets.

One read:
⚠ NO HAY DIOS EN LA RED ⚠

No god in the net.

She slid to the bottom. Hit wet concrete. Her boots landed in ankle-deep floodwater. This was lower ground. The Shallows.
From here, it was only a few blocks to Ciudad Vieja.

“You need to lose them before the next scan,” Ñandú said. “They’ll deploy scent drones.”

“Scent?” she spat. “I’m not a dog.”

“To them, you’re a leak.”

Yara laughed, once. Bitter and breathless. She staggered forward into the flooded streets, the lights of the upper tiers pulsing above like the eyes of indifferent gods. The buildings here were ancient—colonial bones wrapped in steel skin, half-drowned, rotting from the inside.

A broken mural peeked through moss-streaked walls. Artigas on horseback, overlaid with a bar code. Someone had painted “LIBERTAD = ERROR 404” across his face.

She turned down an alley flanked with cracked ceramic tiles and ducked into a hollowed-out storefront. The old pharmacy was dark inside, the kind of dark that felt like forgetting. She stepped lightly. Checked her six. Quiet.

Then the voice came.

Not Ñandú. Not hers.

A different voice. Real. Close.

“You shouldn’t be alive.”

Yara froze.

Then, slow and deliberate, she turned toward the speaker—
a figure in a patchwork poncho laced with fiber optic strands, face hidden behind a shifting static mask.

“I get that a lot,” she said.