“What note?” Jax croaked.

The Sawtooth lunged.

And Jax, a 27-year-old unemployed man who had never held anything heavier than a game controller, raised his lamp-spear and prayed that somewhere in the 43.7 gigabytes of stolen code, there was a patch for survival.

Jax snorted. “Funny, a glitch.” He pressed Esc. Nothing. Spacebar. Nothing. Then, the text changed.

And there, standing on the hood of a buried sedan, was a young woman with fiery braids and a Focus glowing at her temple. But her face wasn’t Aloy’s. It was his.