Eva awakened abruptly. Her entire body burned as she struggled to make sense of her surroundings. She was lying on a cold, hard, uncomfortable floor. A dull, distant whine trickled insistently through her ears. Cautiously, she pushed herself into a sitting position. Her arms and legs jumped rapidly between a physical and digital state. Her heart pounded. Her nerves crackled.

“She’s awake,” someone murmured nearby.

Eva turned, searching for the source of the voice. Her vision was blurry. Nonsensical strings of numbers seemed to dance through her eyes. She blinked, her face jolted, and her sight returned to normal. Her vision sharpened, honing in on the presence of three extremely strange-looking individuals. Each of them watched her closely, with a guarded, hostile gaze.

“Who are you?” the one standing closest to Eva snapped curtly. He seemed to be the leader of the pack. The other two hung back, practically hiding behind him. “What’s your name?”

He was a young man, dressed in dark clothes, as if perpetually ready for a midnight stealth mission. His hair was spiky and blue. One of his eyes was a pale shade of blue or green — Eva couldn’t quite determine which. His other eye was inhuman, a circular lens set into his face, surrounded by deep grooves and dark, strangely geometric scars. Eva studied him with wide eyes, as the skin of her hands twitched repeatedly into ones and zeroes.

“She’s definitely one of us,” the woman to his left muttered. She had short, messy, multicolored hair that shimmered green and yellow and blue in the dim lighting. The tips of her shaggy bangs were bloodred. Her eyes were like two bright lights, with no visible pupils. Her caramel skin was absolutely covered in intricate patterns of pixels. They continually etched and re-etched themselves across her body in an infinite stream. Whenever she moved, stray pixels leaped from her skin, and her outline wavered and shuddered. She looked like Eva did whenever she “pixelated,” or “harnessed the digital reality,” as the researchers had put it. But Eva’s digital form only arose in response to danger. This woman was constantly pixelating. 

Eva turned, staring at the third member of this digitalized trio. She looked younger than her two companions. Her hair was long and green. Her exposed shoulders were emblazoned with bright yellow star tattoos. Her one visible eye was a rich shade of brown. The other eye was hidden behind a curtain of hair. Her skin shimmered translucently, as if she wasn’t quite substantial. And perhaps she wasn’t. She was levitating several inches off the ground. Electricity flashed between her feet and the floor, shaped in impossibly geometric, circuitry-like patterns. Pixels rushed from her flexed hands, keeping her airborne.

Eva immediately knew that these three had been subjected to the cyber realm, and returned to the physical world not quite whole. She could sense their unstable energy humming within her, an energy much like her own.

Find the other Digitized, the mysterious stranger — the Shadow Virus — had instructed her. It appeared that the other Digitized had found her first.

“Who are you?” the blue-haired man demanded once more. Eva briefly pixelated, then licked her lips and attempted to speak.

“My name is Eva,” she said quietly. Her head still felt foggy. She blinked again. Pixels disconnected from her eyelashes in a series of little electric pops. “I can’t remember… what happened…” 

But the memories were quickly returning. Stepping into the colorful, chaotic City 75505. Searching for the Shadow Virus. Eva briefly recalled the first glimpse she’d gotten of him, a stranger, an intruder in the lab — his darkness, his quiet demeanor, his crackling aura of power. That purple-haired woman told Eva that the Shadow Virus terrorized the residents of 75505. But that couldn’t be right. To her, he was a hero.

Eva’s mind traveled back to the present. Where was she? How did she end up here? With a sudden jolt, she remembered that unexpected flash of electricity shocking her into oblivion, and three unfamiliar voices, discussing where to take her as she slipped out of consciousness.

The strangers who had incapacitated her were now standing around her, glowering down at her. Foreboding bled through Eva’s bones.

“You’ve been to the cyber dimension and back,” the man said. It wasn’t a question. The intensity of his gaze made her skin glitch. “My name is Ceno. On my left, that’s Iyanna, on my right is Zvezda. We thought, up till today, that there were only four surviving Digitized in the world. We were obviously mistaken.”

“Four Digitized…” It took Eva a moment to grasp the implications. “So that means I’m the fifth?”

“The fifth that we know of,” the perpetually pixelated one, Iyanna, said. Her voice was deep and abrasive, with a strange, almost mechanical rasp in its tones.

“Then… who’s the fourth?” Eva frowned. The trio exchanged cryptic, grim glances. A brittle sort of pain filled each of their eyes. Nobody wanted to be the one to answer.