The Shape of Consciousness

ONE

Below the Signal

Even at their stillest, something moved beneath The Ghost Lines, a low thrum of current through buried wires, the distant sigh of recycled air. London’s underworld didn’t sleep; it murmured, restless and alive, dreaming in voltage.

Kairo crouched under the old relay stack, a screwdriver balanced between his teeth and a tangle of wire spilling over his lap. One bad connection and half the lower grid would black out for days.

Typical Tuesday.

“Static output at thirty-two per cent,” Soahn’s calm voice drifted across the chamber. “You’re leaking voltage again.”

“Leaking’s a strong word,” Kairo said around the screwdriver. “I’m just flirting with the current.”

“Stop flirting with the current.”

“Never.”

Soahn’s sigh was palpable.

From the other side of the tunnel, Minjae’s voice cut in, half-teasing, half-sharp. “For the love of ramyeon, Kairo, if you fry that relay again I’m taping your fingers together.”

“You say that like you don’t enjoy fixing my messes.”

“You mean surviving them.”

Onyx’s heavy tread circled nearby — one man, two cybernetic limbs, and the patience of a glacier.

“Look, everyone’s got their hobbies.” Kairo stripped a cable and spliced a new feed. The relay answered with a deep, satisfied thrum that rolled through the chamber like distant thunder. For a second, the blue signage overhead flickered to life, casting his hands in watery light.

He sat back on his heels, proud and slightly dazzled. “See? Seduction complete.”

Onyx’s voice came from the shadows. “If the Lines respond to you that way again, I’m calling it possession.”

Kairo laughed, the sound bouncing through the concrete ribs of the tunnel. “Jealousy doesn’t suit you.”

The light blinked once more, then steadied, followed by a second pulse, soft but deliberate, a beat out of rhythm with the rest of the network.

He frowned. “That’s new.”

Soahn joined him at the console, carrying a portable display. “Signal echo,” he said quietly. “Origin point above the Thames relay.”

Kairo raised an eyebrow. “Topside?”

“Looks that way.”

That word — topside — carried weight down here. It meant exposure, drones, cameras, and for Kairo, it meant a past he didn’t remember. The back of his neck prickled.

Onyx stopped his slow patrol and looked over. “Could be a NuYu sweep.”

“Could be. Or it could be something else,” Kairo said. “The frequency’s off. It’s too clean, almost… human.” The word lingered in the air. He’d spent years surrounded by phantoms and code, by voices made of signal and distortion; it was easy to tell the difference between real and not real.

Rayne’s voice came through the comm at last, cool and level from his recon post somewhere above the chamber. “Human doesn’t mean safe.”

“Nothing ever does,” Kairo replied. “But we persevere.”

Nobody spoke for a long time; the four of them, and Rayne through comms, listened to the heartbeat in the wires that didn’t belong. 

Minjae leaned over the console, eyes narrowing at the waveform. “That’s not local. It’s too clean for a backfeed.”

“You think it’s NuYu?” Soahn asked.

“If it is, they’re getting clever.” Minjae straightened, tension pulling through his shoulders. “Or desperate.”

Then Rayne’s voice again: “Trace it.”

Kairo hovered his fingers over the console. “You sure? Last time we traced a random pulse, it nearly fried the base hub.”

“This one’s different.”

He hesitated, feeling the familiar surge of curiosity win out over reason. “Fine. But if this cooks the rig again, I’m blaming you, Rayney.”

“Duly noted.”

Kairo keyed the command. The monitors flared, translating raw noise into patterns of light. The waveform twisted once, twice, and then stabilised into a shape that almost looked like a voiceprint. Not the digital kind, but the biological kind.

Soahn stared. “That’s impossible.”

Kairo squinted at the screen. “Yeah, but so’s half our life.”

Measured footsteps echoed from the access tunnel behind them. Moments later, Rayne stepped into view, the pale blue glow from the monitors catching the lines of his face. He must have dropped from his recon perch the moment the reading spiked.

Kairo shot him a crooked grin. “Couldn’t resist the suspense?”

“Wanted to see it for myself,” Rayne said.

The pulse wavered, as though aware of being seen, then vanished, leaving only the after-tone in the metal around them.

The silence that followed was the dangerous kind — the kind where thought turned into decision.

Rayne spoke first. “We find the source.”

Onyx crossed his arms, metal catching the light. “Surface level means NuYu scanners.”

“And patrols,” Soahn added. “And many, many other bad things.”

Kairo looked up from the console, excitement and dread sparking through his limbs. “Yeah. Which means whatever’s sending that signal’s worth the risk, right?” He leaned back, ignoring the knot in his chest. “Looks like we’re going topside, boys.”

They didn’t speak much after the decision was made. Some things, once said aloud, didn’t need repeating or overanalysing.

Kairo gathered his rig, coiling cables and tucking spares into the patchwork satchel he’d modified from an old NuYu courier bag. It still had the logo on it — silver wings, half-scraped away — like a reminder that every piece of rebellion here was built from someone else’s leftovers.

He worked faster than he needed to, movements all rhythm and distraction. Beneath the hum of the equipment, his mind kept circling the same thought: topside. The word carried an ache he couldn’t name, a half-memory tugging from somewhere he couldn’t reach. Sometimes he caught flashes: rain on glass, a voice calling his name—his old name, not the one he’d chosen. They vanished before he could catch them.

He shook it off, pulling the bag strap across his chest. Better to focus on wires and switches. Circuits didn’t look back at you. Circuits didn’t remember.

Minjae tapped a few last commands into the main hub before swinging his rig bag onto his shoulder. “If the signal loops again, I’ll pin it. Just don’t die before I get coordinates.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Kairo said, trying not to let the curling ball of tension in his chest spread out any further, fearing it might freeze him in place.

Soahn moved methodically through the chamber, shutting down peripheral feeds one by one. Each click sounded final. His face reflected in the dim monitors — pale, a little worried, otherworldly — but the tiny shifts of light along his neural link betrayed the calculation happening behind his eyes. The neon threads in his hair undulated between magenta and red. He was nervous, but also focused.

Onyx said nothing, as usual. He was checking weapons, running his hand along the magazine of a pulse rifle as though reading braille. When he finished, he set the rifle down beside Kairo’s bag and clipped two short blades to his thigh holsters. They made no sound when he moved.

Rayne was the last to prepare. He stood in the corner, motionless except for the barest glint of code running beneath the surface of his skin. Every time The Ghost Lines flickered, he looked like he was breathing light. Kairo tried not to stare too long.

“You think this waveform is really someone trying to reach us?” Soahn asked, breaking the quiet.

Kairo fiddled with his bag strap. “That, or the universe got lonely.”

“Or it’s bait,” Onyx said.

Minjae blew out a breath through his nose. “Then we bite fast and chew harder.”

Kairo smirked. “Always the poet.”

Soahn gave Kairo a faint smile. “Onyx isn’t wrong.”

“I never said he was.”

They started moving. The tunnel leading toward the upper levels narrowed into a ribbed throat of metal, half-collapsed and dripping condensation. The old emergency strips along the floor still throbbed weakly — blue, then white, then blue again. Somewhere above, water trickled through the cracks, carrying the smell of rain and hot street food.

It was the first time in months that Kairo had noticed the scent of the surface. Something in his chest tightened.

“Remember,” Onyx said, voice deep but carrying, “we move silent until we hit open ground. NuYu scanners can detect heart rate variances if we’re too close to a live hub.”

“So what you’re saying,” Kairo whispered, “is don’t get excited.”

Onyx glanced back. “Can you manage that?”

Kairo smirked. “Define excited.”

Soahn’s quiet laughter echoed off the tunnel walls, small but grounding. Minjae rolled his eyes but didn’t hide his grin. “Every mission with you turns into a circus.”

“Hey,” Kairo said, “we’re the fun kind of illegal.”

“Keep telling yourself that,” Minjae muttered, though his tone was warm. It reminded Kairo of how they survived — not by winning, but by finding ways to laugh between the alarms.

They reached the access ladder: a corroded vertical shaft that rose into blackness. High above it, a square of distant light glimmered through a grate. Kairo looked up and whistled under his breath. “Looks inviting.”

Onyx began the climb first, no hesitation. His movements were mechanical precision, each rung met with exactly the right amount of weight, no more, no less. Rayne followed, his silhouette merging with the dark so completely that he seemed to vanish between breaths.

Kairo went next. He climbed quickly, trying not to look down. The air grew colder as he ascended, each breath filling his lungs with that old surface bite of filtered air, sharp with trace electricity. Soahn came after, the gentle working of his neural link lighting the shaft in brief currents.

Minjae brought up the rear, muttering something about “Death by tetanus” under his breath as he climbed. His toolkit rattled against his hip, the small sound oddly reassuring in the dark.

Halfway up, Kairo paused and rested his forehead against the metal. The vibration there was different. The Ghost Lines still breathed beneath them, but now it was layered with another rhythm.

City rhythm.

Traffic drones, powerlines, people noise.

It felt alien and achingly familiar all at once.

“You good?” Soahn’s voice floated up, calm but edged.

“Yeah.” Kairo exhaled. “Just saying hi to the outside.”

He climbed the last few metres and reached a small platform next to the grate. Rayne and Onyx were already there, crouched low, their eyes fixed on the hatch above.

“Any motion?” Kairo whispered.

Rayne shook his head once. “No, it’s clear.”

Onyx levered the grate open with a muted creak. Cold rain spilled through, sharp with ozone and the muted metallic scent of the city’s breath. Diesel fumes. Wet concrete. Distant electricity. Somewhere nearby, a tram line hissed; voices blurred into motion, a hundred lives moving without fear. Topside was noise and light and everything Kairo had lost track of.

For a moment, none of them moved.

Kairo didn’t realise he’d been holding his breath until the first raindrop hit his face through the gap.

They were really doing this.

Rayne glanced back at him, voice barely audible over the hum of the shaft. “Welcome topside.”

Kairo’s heart pounded in his chest to the point where he thought it might burst through. “Let’s not make it a habit.”

Minjae’s voice was dry as ever. “We never make anything a habit. That’s the problem.”

One by one, they climbed into the neon wash of London’s nightlife.

TWO

Crossfeed

The rain hit hard, not like the slow deep-drip condensation of The Ghost Lines. This was the real thing, thin and cold, needling Kairo’s face as he eased through the service hatch.

A half-forgotten taste hit the back of his throat: wet stone, old metal, the chemical clean of street washers. Above them, a slab of sky glowed the colour of a bruised screen, clouds beyond it thin and gauzy.

“Movement grid,” Onyx murmured.

Soahn lifted his handheld. A lattice of transparent polygons wavered across the display, shifting with each step. “NuYu scanners sweeping east to west. We keep to the blind seams.”

Rayne tilted his head, listening to something Kairo couldn’t hear. “Two cameras at the junction. One sleeping, one lazy.”

“Lazy I can work with,” Kairo said, easing the grate back into place. He rolled his shoulders under the satchel’s weight and took in the world he used to know. 

Street-level adverts filtered across sprawling billboards, pale images jumping frames. One of them — the largest — bled into focus, showing a woman’s face: flawless skin, silver eyes, the words NYELLE // NEW ERA OUT NOW spilling in mirrored script across the screen. Her voice, soft and high-register, whispered through a cracked speaker: “Do you remember the sound of sunlight?”

Kairo stared for a heartbeat. The question felt like it was aimed straight at him.

“Creepy,” Minjae muttered beside him. “I swear her marketing team’s running off dream residue.”

Kairo tore his gaze away. Somewhere nearby a rooftop generator coughed, once, then sputtered back to life.

They moved.

Onyx flowed down the kerbline like he’d been here yesterday, measuring every doorway, clocking every reflection. Rayne had a way of disappearing without moving: you could be looking straight at him and somehow he wasn’t there, just the suggestion of height and a trick of light along the jaw. Soahn tracked the surveillance gaps, guiding them through angles that didn’t exist until you needed them. Minjae ghosted between them, fingers tapping occasionally at his wristpad, his eyes scanning for code leaks and grid shimmer.

Kairo walked with his hands loose and his mouth shut, letting the details crowd him. Retro bicycles, rusted to bone, chained to a rail. A café window filmed over with dust, its chalkboard still promising ‘ice cream sandwiches.’ He tried not to think about why that phrase pulled a lump into his throat.

“Focus,” Onyx said, softer than usual, glancing back at him.

“Focused.” But he wasn’t, not really, and he knew that the others could tell, but the ache made him feel more present. It was a bad idea, being up here, and yet it also felt… right, somehow. Like testing a loop and finding the one note that made the whole thing sing.

“Careful, gremlin king,” Minjae whispered beside him. “The city eats feelings for breakfast.”

Kairo kept his head down.

They cut through an underpass where old signage bled a weak, orange wash across the concrete. Voices rose up ahead, low and speaking fast. A man and a woman, mid-argument in the way people who trust each other argue.

Onyx lifted two fingers. Halt.

The pair emerged from the far side of the streetlight, dressed in slick corporate black with NuYu lanyards flashing silver at their chests. They walked fast, but there was something off about it, like movement with too much purpose. They kept their heads down, shoulders squared as if the city would pounce on them at any given chance.

Kairo’s brain did the math in a blink. The badges were right, but the bodies were wrong — gazes too alert, steps too careful, the woman adjusting her sleeve like she wasn’t used to corporate clothes. Could it be Hollow ops, running a game? If they were, the woman was definitely new to it.

Then she looked up and froze as her eyes locked on Rayne. 

Fear? No. More like… recognition. That thing people do when confronted with something beautiful and impossible; when the world tilts and says what if? Her gaze moved between them, one after the other. Kairo offered her a little smile, friendly, but not too friendly, and the woman’s lips parted as if she wanted to say something, but stopped herself.

“Mia,” the man said, quiet and edged, a hand on her arm. Not rough. Anchoring. “We have to go.”

She blinked up at the man and the spell seemed to break. They slipped past, their shoes whispering on wet concrete. They didn’t glance back.

Kairo waited three beats, then let his breath go in a thread. “What was that?”

Rayne’s answer came like a fader sliding down. “They recognised us. Or perhaps they recognised something of themselves in us.”

“Whoa,” Kairo breathed, not sure what to do with that info. “We have actual fans topside?”

“Course we do,” Minjae said. “We’re awesome.”

Onyx arched an eyebrow but didn’t comment. Soahn’s display pinged once, soft. “Scanners pivoting. We need the north stairwell.”

They crossed a plaza where rain stitched silver lines across the paving. A drone drifted overhead, red eye blinking, then drifted on, apparently content with the false emptiness of the scene. Kairo felt the city’s old skin under his feet: power conduits thrumming low, signal veins feeding toward a solo NuYu tower that loomed ahead.

“There,” Rayne said, pointing to a cluster of dead holo-ads near the tower’s base. Behind them, a maintenance access panel glimmered — too clean for ruin, too new to belong. “Hidden node. Someone’s been here.”

Kairo dropped to a crouch beside it, rain pooling around his boots. “Upper level feed line,” he murmured, tracing the seams. He set his satchel down and cracked the panel. The interface blinked alive: a mess of legacy ports, fresh firmware, and NuYu arrogance. He smiled despite himself. “Whoever wired this has taste.”

“Yeah,” Minjae said dryly, crouching beside him. “Mine.”

Kairo shot him a look. “Really?”

He smirked. “I mean, not legally mine, but they definitely stole my patch architecture. See that triple-nested route? I used to code that drunk.”

“Explains the chaos,” Onyx muttered.

“Explains why it works,” Minjae countered, fingers flying as he helped Kairo override the old NuYu firewall with the casual confidence of someone dismantling their own creation. “Got it. You’re clear.”

The node hissed, sulked, then offered a string of numbers that meant very little until they meant everything: a route stamp and a time code nested like teeth. The same cadence they’d heard below. The same route leading inward.

Kairo felt it before he saw it: a prickle at the back of his neck that wasn’t fear so much as the recognition of being noticed. The panel’s diagnostics hiccuped, righted, hiccuped again. NuYu’s grid, nosing along the same trail.

“Wrap it,” Onyx said, already watching the corners.

“OK, almost there.” Kairo killed the handshake and scrubbed their touch. He layered a decoy ping to lead any sniffers three blocks south and four floors down, to a non-existent door in a non-existent building. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than nothing.

Soahn checked the reader. “Sweep accelerating.”

Rayne had gone still in that way of his, attention turned inward. He looked up at the sky — at the moving, colourless glow of it — then back at Kairo. “We’re not alone up here.”

Kairo slammed the panel shut, shouldered the satchel, and laughed because the other option was letting his hands shake. “Figures.”

“Why does everything Rayne says always sound so apocalyptic?” Minjae asked absently.

They moved again, faster now, following the seams where the cameras blinked and the sensors lagged. The tower waited, blank and polished, a mouth with no expression. Somewhere inside it, an answer was humming.

Or a trap.

“Call,” Onyx said quietly as they reached the stairwell door.

“We go. Quick in, quicker out,” Minjae singsonged.

Rayne’s hand hovered over the access plate. “And if it isn’t quick?”

“Then it’s loud, baby,” Minjae said.

A breath passed between them that wasn’t quite agreement and wasn’t quite prayer. The kind you hold when you don’t know if the next step is into light or the void.

“After you,” Kairo said.

Rayne touched the plate, and the lock released with a soft click.

They slipped inside.

THREE

Trace Route

Inside the stairwell was quiet, but the kind of quietness that bore down. Old concrete and corporate gloss, one layer painted over another until the building forgot what it was for. The only sound was the rain draining down the outer ducts.

Kairo followed Onyx up the narrow flight, keeping his eyes on the reflection of emergency strips along the steps. His pulse synced with the rhythm of Onyx’s boots — measured, deliberate, unhurried even when it should have been. Onyx’s steadiness grounded him. It always did.

Soahn brought up the rear, checking the reader every few steps. “Heat signatures ahead,” he whispered. “Two. Stationary.”

“Guards?”

“Not moving like guards.”

Rayne glanced over his shoulder. “Human?”

Soahn hesitated. “Partially.”

That earned him a look. “Meaning?”

“Neural mod signatures. NuYu experimental tier. Could be maintenance drones with brain interfaces. Or it could be the other way around.”

Minjae’s voice was a dry thread in the dark. “So basically brainwashed IT guys with murder settings. Delightful.”

Kairo made a face. “Ooh, zombies with employee benefits.”

Onyx shot them a warning glance. “Quiet.”

They reached the next landing and found the door ajar, pale light spilling through, that clinical, washed-out NuYu white that made Kairo’s teeth ache. He dropped into a crouch and peered through the crack.

Two figures stood by a maintenance hub, one tall, one slight. Metal ports threaded along their necks, faces smooth and placid. Their hands moved with eerie rhythm across holographic panels, perfectly synced.

Kairo whispered, “Half-wired handlers. They’ll ping HQ the second we trip the feed.”

Rayne leaned close, voice barely audible. “I can loop their perception for ten seconds.”

“Only ten?” Kairo hissed.

“It’s all I can hold.”

“Then we move fast,” said Onyx, sweeping the area, silently calculating the path.

Minjae tapped his wrist console once. “Ten seconds is nine more than we need.”

Kairo wished he had Minjae’s confidence. The world seemed to narrow around that decision, like sound pulling inward before a drop.

Rayne’s eyes glazed over suddenly, sparking with a deep internal intensity, and both handlers froze mid-gesture. The holograms hung in the air like shards of light.

“Go,” Rayne murmured.

Onyx moved first in a blur of silent muscle and precision. Kairo slipped past him, disabling the alarm circuit with a deft twist of wire. 

Nine seconds.

Soahn darted to the console, yanking the data drive free.

Eight.

Minjae slid in beside him, fingers quick across the secondary panel, scraping auxiliary logs before the system knew it was being robbed.

Seven.

Kairo glanced back at Rayne. His jaw had tightened and the air around him seemed to shimmer.

Six.

Minjae muttered under his breath, “Almost got it… come on, sweetheart…yes!” He ripped the final node free and tossed it to Kairo.

Five.

Kairo clipped the drive into his satchel, sealing it with a grin that was more teeth than humour. “Nice.”

Four.

“Out,” Onyx hissed.

They were halfway through the door when Rayne’s control faltered. The shimmer around him stuttered once, then twice, like a signal trying to stay coherent. His hand snapped out, palm up, as if he could physically hold the illusion together. The air vibrated with the strain.

Then one of the handlers twitched. The light in its eyes blinked back on.

Rayne flinched, a strange sound tearing out of him. The illusion shattered.

“Move!”

The hallway beyond lit up crimson as alarms howled to life. Sirens screamed through the upper levels, echoed by the thundering growl of a power surge.

“Guess we’re skipping subtlety,” Minjae said, breathless.

Onyx’s reply was pure focus. “Left corridor. Drop shaft ahead.”

They ran.

The world shrank to slick tiles, red light, and the hollow thud of boots. A blast door shuddered somewhere above them. Lockdown sequence.

Kairo felt the weight of the data drive against his hip, burning like a secret. “We need exit routes before this goes full shutdown!”

“I’m on it,” Soahn called, frantically tapping code into his handheld console in an attempt to override the safety doors. “West access, three floors down. We can—”

A concussive crack cut him off, and the wall to their right buckled inward. Kairo hit the floor as debris scattered across the corridor in front of him.

Through the smoke, he saw shapes moving. Not guards. Not drones.

Retrieval units. The kind that didn’t shoot to wound.

“NuYu response team,” Soahn called.

“Of course it’s NuYu,” Minjae muttered, drawing his sidearm. “They couldn’t just send flowers.”

Onyx’s expression hardened. “Split pattern. Soahn, Minjae, flank right. Rayne, Kairo, on me.”

The retrieval units stepped through the breach, smooth and cold, faces behind visors, no hesitation, only intent.

The first went down to Onyx’s strike, just a silent blur, a snap of bone and metal. The second fired; Kairo ducked, the shot scorching the wall behind him. Minjae returned fire, the recoil jolting his wrist.

Rayne moved like an idea, in and out of vision, light bending around him. When he struck, it was without sound.

But there were too many.

“Onyx!” Soahn and Minjae scrambled out of the way as more of the wall tumbled down nearby. “They’re circling!”

“Hold position.”

A blast of electromagnetic energy ripped through the hall. Kairo’s HUD flared white, then collapsed into static. Every nerve in his body jolted as systems screamed interference. When the world snapped back into focus, half the corridor was gone, swallowed by shadows and smoke.

Kairo spun, heart hammering. Something was wrong. Something was missing. “Soahn? Soahn!”

Through the haze came the muffled thud of boots, armour clashing against metal. Then he saw them: what was left of the NuYu retrieval unit, retreating through the haze, their visors lit with cold light. One of them dragged a limp shape across the floor.

Soahn, unmoving…

No, no, no—

Kairo’s throat closed around the word dead before it could form. He could still see the barest gleam of Soahn’s neural link, dim but alive. Unconscious, not gone. He clung to that like oxygen.

“There!” Onyx barked, pointing down the corridor.

Kairo’s eyes followed. Minjae staggered into view at the far end, half-obscured by darkness and dust. He was trying to reach them, dragging one arm, blood streaked down the side of his face. The red wash of the alarms made him look like he’d crawled out of a horror movie.

“Minjae!” The sirens drowned out Kairo’s voice.

Minjae lifted his head, eyes locking on Kairo’s. He mouthed something but Kairo couldn’t tell what. The retrieval unit behind him slammed a control on the wall.

A containment field surged upward between them, a sheer wall of energy that rippled the air. It sliced the corridor clean in half, buzzing with blue-white distortion.

Onyx lunged like a cobra, slamming a fist into the barrier. Sparks flared; the air shuddered.

“Stop!” Rayne grabbed his arm, dragging him back. “You’ll burn through.”

Kairo pressed forward until the heat forced him to stop. On the other side, Minjae was still fighting, snapping back a punch, elbowing the soldier behind him, but it was too late. A gauntleted hand caught a fistful of his hoodie, jerking him backward.

Minjae threw one last look over his shoulder, palm outstretched. Even through the distortion, his eyes found Kairo’s. “Go!” he screamed in ragged desperation. 

Then he was gone.

The energy wall flared, solid and unshakable. For a heartbeat, no one moved.

Kairo’s breath came hard and shallow, chest heaving, vision swimming in the dimness. The echo of Minjae’s shout rang in his skull. “They took them,” he managed, the words breaking in his throat.

Rayne settled a steady hand on Kairo’s arm.

Onyx turned toward the door, shoulders squared, eyes like tempered steel. “Then we’ll get them back.”

Rain hammered the roof. Somewhere above, thunder rolled.

Kairo wiped the blood and dust from his face, jaw clenched until it hurt. Hot, angry tears burned behind his eyelids. “Yeah. This just got personal.”

FOUR

Containment Bay

Minjae woke to an all-too familiar white.

Not the soft kind that meant morning, but the sterile, unblinking glare of NuYu’s containment labs. Light with no warmth. The sort that erased everything that made a person human.

He blinked against it, his head throbbing in time with a distant hum. He tried to get up, but the restraints at his wrists tightened automatically in impolite, mechanical defiance.

The air smelled of antiseptic and copper. A ventilation fan ticked overhead, each beat marking time he didn’t have.

Soahn sat slumped against the wall opposite him, also bound at the wrists, face excruciatingly pale under the light. His neural port looked raw where someone had forced a connection. But he was breathing, and that was all that mattered.

“You okay?” Minjae croaked.

Soahn opened his eyes, unfocused at first, then steadier. “Possibly. Not sure yet,” he murmured. “I think they tried to read me… but it didn’t take.”

Minjae let out a shaky laugh that caught halfway between relief and disbelief. “Good. Told you those countermeasures me and Kairo built weren’t just for show.”

Soahn tilted his head and winced. “Oh, the firewall shell?”

“Yeah.” Minjae managed a small, crooked smile. “Layered deep enough to make their scanners think your cortex is a spam folder. They’ll be pulling junk data for hours.”

“You always did have a gift for elegant revenge.” Soahn studied the room, and Minjae quietly gave him a moment to take in its perfect symmetry and impossible brightness, the white panels seamless from floor to ceiling, vents whispering sterile air, a single mirrored wall that reflected their restraint back at them. He frowned. “They’ll keep trying, though.”

“Let them.” Minjae’s voice came out harsher than intended, and the effort made him cough. Smoke from the tower still clung to the back of his throat, itchy and insistent. Jesus, that had actually happened. He needed to focus, so he tried the cuffs again, but there was no give.

So far, no hint of guards or scientists, which was bad. Containment this deep wasn’t for threats; it was for experiments that couldn’t go wrong. 

The last time he’d seen a room like this, he hadn’t been a prisoner. He’d been behind a NuYu terminal debugging surveillance feeds, watching the same kind of antiseptic light burn the edges off people’s faces until they didn’t look real anymore.

He shut that thought down before it could finish forming.

“Okay,” he muttered. “Assessment time. One, we’re in a mid-tier containment cell — not military-level, thank hell, but still high-risk. Two, we’ve got no visible exits. Three, we’re probably being monitored.”

“Probably?”

“Definitely,” he amended. “Which means they’re biding their time until we give something up to them.”

Soahn nodded once. “Then speak carefully.”

Minjae leaned back against the wall, turning slightly so that his elbow rested against it. “Oh, I intend to.” He started knocking against the wall with his arm, thump, thump-thump, thump, thump-thump, building a beat that probably would’ve made Kairo twitch and reach for the nearest cable.

“What are you doing?” Even as he spoke, Soahn’s neural link flashed, registering the pattern.

“Noise,” Minjae said. “You know, that thing we’re great at? Fills the gaps between their monitoring frequencies. They’ll still see us, but they won’t be able to hear us very well.”

Soahn watched him for a long time, then nodded. “Clever.”

“Compliment accepted.” A hint of movement above them drew Minjae’s eye. It was a camera lens, rotating slowly in the upper corner, fixing solely on him. He met it square on and winked. “Missed me?” 

The camera rotated with the barest whirr, and he imagined someone in a dark room silently cursing him. Good.

“Hey, what’s the last thing you remember?” he said to Soahn.

“Signal overload. The retrieval units breached the stairwell. You shouted something.”

“I was trying to warn you.” He grimaced. “Didn’t work out great.”

“It’s OK,” Soahn said. “The way things were going, I honestly thought Onyx was going to take them all out himself.”

Minjae smirked, but the image in his head wasn’t funny: Onyx moving like living armour, unflappable and unstoppable. “Yeah. That’s our dance-machine. He’ll escort you to your death, and invent new choreography while doing it. Can’t tell you how proud I am to know him.” 

Soahn managed a smile at that.

“There were too many of them, though,” Minjae said, still thumping the wall as he spoke. “Those assholes brought tricks.” He remembered the energy wall. Dirty play, but effective.

The silence between them stretched, heavy with everything they weren’t saying. That they might not win this one. That maybe this is where the music stopped.

Finally, Soahn spoke. “They’ll come.”

“Who, NuYu?”

He shook his head. “Them.”

Minjae’s chest tightened. “You really think Kairo can track us?”

“If anyone can, it’s him.”

“Good point.” He glanced down at his wrists again. “I’d still rather not wait around for a miracle.”

He shifted his weight slightly, testing the restraint joints. NuYu tech. Efficient, layered safety locks, non-conductive. He recognised the mode. He’d built one once. The irony made him smile.

He rolled his wrist, flexing just so. Felt the faintest click.

“OK,” he muttered. “Not impossible.”

Soahn leaned forward, quiet. “What are you thinking?”

“That these cuffs are old stock. They updated the model last quarter after a batch fault in the servo coils. If this is pre-upgrade…”

“You can break it?”

“Eventually.”

“Eventually may not be soon enough.”

“Then I’ll just have to get creative.”

He glanced at the mirrored glass wall, without a doubt a one-way observation window. His reflection looked back: pale under the lights, dried blood at his temple, the delicate web of scars across his hands catching the glare.

He stared hard, as if he could look straight through his reflection to whoever sat beyond, “Oh, you are so gonna regret bringing me back here.”

Soahn followed his gaze, the filaments in his hair rolling from blue to dark purple.

“Do you hear that? I think they’re scanning us again,” he said.

“It’s fine,” Minjae replied, smiling with no humour at all. He stopped banging the wall. “I’ve got a few things I’ve been meaning to say.”

He tilted his head toward the camera, and the circuitry ink along his neck stirred. Softly and deliberately, Minjae began to hum. Light bloomed beneath his skin, fine tracer lines chasing the curve of his jaw. His tattoos caught the vibration and answered, translating tone into small fragments of code. Each beat a disruption, his voice a quiet command.

He let the tune unfold naturally, humming louder now, threading in binary patterns that he knew their AI would recognise but not parse fast enough to stop.

Across the wall, lines of code began to crawl backward along the glass.

The wall display shivered, code crawling backward faster now, like the system was trying to overwrite itself. The lights stuttered. The air thickened with low-frequency undertone.

Soahn lifted his head, neural filaments along his temple glowing azure in response. “Minjae… you’re changing the carrier wave.”

“Yeah,” Minjae murmured between hums. “Noise only gets you so far.”

The frequency steadied, his voice folding into measured rhythm. Beneath it, a faint counterpulse began to rise, distant yet familiar, like an echo waking up.

Soahn’s eyes widened. “You’re signalling them.”

“Calling home,” Minjae said, smiling just enough to show teeth. “Or making it look like I am.”

He slowed his breathing until it matched the rhythmic vibration of the cuffs at his wrists, using each microsecond of lag to wedge code between the feedback loops. The implants at his throat — the ones NuYu never logged, the ones he’d soldered together in a safehouse years after running — began to respond in tandem with his voice and heartbeat. The resonance cut through the cell’s firewalls like a ghost key, subtle enough to register as interference, too archaic for NuYu’s new security suites to flag as threat.

Every unseen system within the walls pushed back, but it struggled to recognise the language he was using. It was old NuYu, the kind of backdoor architecture they’d buried and forgotten — and Minjae had been the one to write it.

A new iridescence spread through the wall display. Soahn’s neural link flared in response. “That frequency…”

Minjae smiled. “Familiar?”

“It feels like Kairo’s relay tone.”

“Exactly.” He opened one eye, grin widening. “If I replicate the signature, their grid’ll think The Ghost Lines are crawling through its veins. Panic first, patch later.”

“That doesn’t sound helpful.”

“Except panic means firewalls, and firewalls mean logs.” Minjae felt himself balanced on that thin line where danger and exhilaration blurred together—right where he belonged. “And logs mean exits.”

The cuffs whined as he twisted his wrist again. Fresh pain spiked, bright and hot, but he didn’t stop. Sparks crawled across the restraints, almost invisible under the white light.

“Minjae…” Soahn’s voice came wary.

“I know,” he said through his teeth. “Don’t touch it. The field’s live.”

He angled his hand slightly, found the groove he needed. A click. A hiss. Then a sound like trapped pressure releasing.

The cuff on his right wrist fell open.

For a moment, neither of them moved.

Soahn blinked. “That’s a lot quicker than ‘eventually.’”

“Guess I’m motivated.” He worked the left one loose, slower this time, careful not to trip the failsafe. The minute it dropped, he felt a rush of blood back through his hands that made the room tilt. He steadied himself as he rose to his feet, one hand braced against the wall.

The lights dimmed, winking in and out.

“Uh-oh,” Minjae muttered.

“What?”

“Containment’s aware something’s wrong.” He glanced at Soahn. “Can you mask our biosigns?”

“Temporarily.”

“Do it. I’ll piggyback on the interference.”

Soahn’s eyes slid half-closed. The neural filaments at his temple oscillated, then went translucent, dispersing light like mist. The monitors across the wall stuttered. Both their heart-rate readouts flatlined for a breath, then stabilised at zero.

While Soahn worked, Minjae tore the lining from his sleeve, exposing the threadbare circuit traces stitched into the fabric. A Kairo special—illegally modified relay cloth that could transmit a short-range burst before frying.

“You think he’ll hear you?” Soahn asked.

“He’ll hear something.”

Minjae tapped a sequence along the embedded microfilaments, building the signal bit by bit. Kairo’s relay tone wasn’t music, not exactly, but it behaved like music, an echo that nested in memory more than sound.

He released it.

The pattern rippled outward, invisible but real, threading through the containment grid like smoke through cracks. It wasn’t a transmission. Not truly. But NuYu’s systems still leaned on the same old city network bones that The Ghost Lines haunted, and sometimes, whispers made it through the ground.

For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then the lights steadied again, falsely calm.

Soahn looked toward the mirrored glass. “They’ll come.”

Minjae huffed. “That’s what I’m counting on.”

Kairo jolted awake at his console.

For a second, he didn’t know where he was. The whisper of The Ghost Lines folded around him, but his heart was racing like he’d been falling. Sweat beaded at his temples, cooling fast in the recycled air.

The monitors cast long bars of light across the room. Empty bunks. Abandoned cups. The space felt wrong without the others in it. He’d been fighting to stay awake, holding onto the data feed until his eyes blurred… and then the exhaustion hit like a steamroller.

Two of them gone. Kairo wasn’t a fighter like Onyx or Rayne, but if he could’ve just done something… anything.

He scrubbed a hand across his face. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the energy field slamming up, Minjae’s face lit red, Soahn limp in someone’s arms.

He leaned back in the chair, head against cold metal, and let out a hoarse breath. The Ghost Lines hummed beneath him, softer now, like they were trying to apologise.

Then the tone changed.

A low harmonic rolled through the floor, vague but deliberate. His console blinked awake on its own. Waveforms spooled across the screen, jagged and imperfect, like someone trying to sing through static.

Kairo’s pulse spiked. He leaned forward, fingers trembling over the keys.

Three quick beats, a pause, then two more.

A pattern he’d know anywhere.

He barked a laugh that sounded too close to breaking. “Minjae…”

Rayne appeared at his shoulder without sound, gaze fixed on the screen. “You think it's him?”

Kairo swallowed the relief and forced himself into motion. “Yeah. And he's talking in code.” He opened the diagnostic overlay, tracing the emission signature. “That’s NuYu containment tech, no question. Mid-tier.”

Finally, something they could hold onto. The last twelve hours had dissolved into a haze of pain and patchwork repair. They’d barely escaped the tower collapse before the lockdown field sealed the entire district.

Rayne stood motionless beside him, one hand pressed over the bullet wound at his neck. He looked weird without his barcode, something he almost always insisted on wearing. The skin beneath his palm was torn but already knitting, the synthetic tissue mimicking real flesh as it mended. Still, his internal systems hadn’t recovered from the impact; every so often a ripple of distortion shimmered across his features, a visible glitch in the architecture of his nerves.

Onyx crouched by the tool bench, his left arm stripped to the internal mod casing. Blue-white light leaked through a hairline fracture in the alloy, the spot where the energy wall had nearly fried his actuator. He worked in silence, using a field torch to fuse the damage shut. The smell of scorched polymer filled the room.

Kairo knew better than to interrupt him when he was like this, coiled quiet, working methodically, all that fury aimed inward.

“Recovery window?” Onyx asked finally, not looking up.

“Soon as we can get topside again.” Kairo pushed the waveform across the display, highlighting a repeating cluster. “He’s giving us a breadcrumb.”

“A breadcrumb might not be enough,” Rayne said, digital light reflecting across his irises in broken patterns.

“It’s what we’ve got,” Kairo said, voice sharper than he meant. He softened it, running a hand through his hair. “You know Min-min. He wouldn’t leave noise like that unless there was a chance.”

Onyx straightened, arm still hissing from the heat of the weld. “It’s a starting point.”

“You sure you’re fixed… er, ready?” Kairo said.

“Good enough to level a city block or two,” Onyx replied.

“Huh… OK.” That made Kairo feel a a little better.

The Ghost Lines stirred in answer, as if the tunnels themselves understood what was coming.

Soahn roused, his link wavering weakly but holding. “They know, Minjae. They’re here.”

“Good.”

The mirrored glass shifted from within, revealing silhouettes on the other side. Two—no, three. The central figure stepped closer, the overhead lights catching the metal insignia at their collar. NuYu Security Division.

“Minjae Choi,” a male voice came through the intercom, crisp and controlled. “Or should I say 00C9-M. We’ve been looking for you for a long time.”

Minjae cocked an eyebrow. “Yeah? You should’ve sent a nicer welcome.”

A pause, then: “And Soahn Yoon. 042S-R. You’re supposed to be dead.”

Soahn’s shoulders shook in a silent laugh. The neon threads in his hair brightened to a sage green. “Ah, but there’s so much paperwork involved in being dead.”

“Oh, very nice,” Minjae whispered under his breath, just for Soahn.

“Where are your associates?” the man asked.

“Probably writing angry songs about you,” Minjae replied. The speaker crackled—mute button, most likely—and he couldn’t help smiling.

Then the cold voice returned, a little more strained. “You’ll answer properly soon enough.”

The air changed, then, charged and sharp like metal about to burn. Minjae felt the pressure crawl across his skin, lifting the hairs all over his body. Beside him, Soahn went rigid.

He leaned forward, forearms braced on his knees, every muscle coiled for whatever came next. “You can crank the wattage all you want. We’ve lived through worse hangovers.”

“Test their resilience,” the voice barked, and the glass went opaque again.

A slow creep of heat prickled across Minjae’s skin. The lights overhead blinked once, then steadied into a sharp, merciless white. A low hum built beneath the floor, rising up through him until he felt it in his throat.

Then the frequency tightened. It wasn’t just volume; someone was threading tones through tones, nudging the harmonics until the circuitry in the room began to sing at a new, cruel pitch. Minjae’s implants registered the change before his nerves did — a knife-sharp spike in the carrier wave that made his jaw ache.

Soahn’s chest hitched. He clutched his temple, his hair filaments turning to stark white. “Minjae—”

“Stay calm,” he said through his teeth. “They think they’re in control.”

“They are,” Soahn whispered, in a tone Minjae never wanted to hear again.

Hot, electrical current fingers spread across his skin, lighting up every micro-scar and old wound. Minjae’s vision narrowed to a tunnel, the world folding in, sound becoming a physical thing hammering inside his bones.

The operators kept adjusting the frequency, changing the pitch, transforming the sting into a long, electric burn that shivered white-fire through his arms. He gagged but forced the sound down. Beside him, Soahn jerked, not a full seizure but the kind of neural misfire that left muscles aching hours after.

Sweat slicked Minjae’s neck. The safehouse-crafted augments he’d installed began to fry at the edges. He felt the relay cloth stutter, then burn, each micro trace taking a hit as the room’s systems hunted for his signature.

He tasted copper.

“No,” he rasped. “Fuck you.”

Then the system cranked higher, an orchestration of pressure and frequency that made his vision blackout for a second. He trembled with the effort of staying present, and reached blindly for Soahn’s hand beside him. Damp fingers threaded into his and held tight.

Something inside him — the illegal implants, the soldered failsafe tucked beneath his jaw — started answering. It took a hit to respond: a hot flash through his throat, a vertigo that made the tiles roll. The implants cracked and pinged, but they latched onto the pattern and retuned, becoming a mirror that threw back a portion of the attack as interference.

That rebound cost him. A ribbon of raw pain flared along his forearms. Sweat stung his eyes. He tasted flame and ash and nausea. But the line of signal that had been sharpening across the wall slumped suddenly, as if someone above had to pause and re-evaluate a system gone wrong.

Minjae let the pain be a map. He rode the frequencies rather than fight against them — breath in, angle the implants to match, wedge a seam of code between the gaps so the system saw noise instead of signal. If it was trying to strip him bare, he would at least make it work for him first.

He tilted his head back against the wall, let the current crawl through the circuits, and thought of home. Of Kairo’s laugh echoing off through the tunnels, of Rayne’s beautiful silence, of Onyx’s unshakable calm.

Somewhere in the charge, he felt the faintest beat answering.

A thump of familiar signal.

A promise in code.

And he smiled.

FIVE

Signal Breach

Kairo stood over the console, half-bent, one hand braced on the desk as the waveform ran like liquid across the screen.

Three beats. Pause. Two.

He could almost hear Minjae’s voice behind it, the familiar smirk curving through the data: Miss me, chaos-gremlin?

Rayne lingered at the edge of the platform, half-absorbed into the dark. Onyx leaned against the far wall, still as stone, only the blink of his mechanical optics betraying the calculations running behind that calm façade.

“Confirmed containment grid match.” Kairo scanned the diagnostic feed. “Southbank sub-sector.”

“Then that’s where they are,” Rayne said.

“Yeah.” Kairo’s jaw tightened. “And somehow Minjae managed to hijack their signal long enough for us to find them.”

Onyx pushed off the wall and came to stand beside him. “You sure it isn’t a trap?”

“Oh, it’s a trap,” Kairo said. “But it’s our trap now.”

He traced the emission signature, hands moving fast, chasing the signal through a web of ghosted relays. “He’s piggybacking off NuYu’s own grid. Clever bastard’s hiding his message inside their power infrastructure. That’s why we almost missed it.”

Rayne tilted his head. “As long as they're still alive.”

Kairo swallowed. “Still alive and buying us time.”

He zoomed in on the waveform. The signal resolved into a map overlay, a lattice of lines flaring across the screen: a skeletal schematic of the lower city. The pulse repeated, marking one node deep within the NuYu containment tower.

“There.” He tapped the glowing point. “Containement Level Seventeen.”

“They'd pick the worst possible floor to be imprisoned,” Onyx murmured.

“Access from below’s impossible,” Kairo agreed. “The flood barriers alone would short out half our kit.”

“Then we go in from above,” Onyx replied.

Kairo blinked. “You’re suggesting rooftop entry into a NuYu tower during peak surveillance hours?”

“Yes.”

“Cool, cool…” He laughed, sharp and incredulous. “See, when you say it like that, it doesn’t sound suicidal at all.”

“It still is.”

Rayne scanned what remained of their gear, then adjusted one of the cables with exacting care. “We’ll need ID tags strong enough to pass surface scans.”

“I can spoof mid-tier clearance,” Kairo offered. “Not for long, but long enough.”

“Equipment?” Onyx asked.

“Half-broken,” Kairo admitted, “but functional enough for someone stupid and desperate. Which we are.”

Rayne’s tone was steady. “We’ll need an interference field to blind their systems.”

“Already on it.” Kairo snapped his fingers toward the corner of the room. “I’ve got a generator that’ll give London a migraine.”

The Ghost Lines’ main hub looked like a fever dream: cables looping overhead, walls lit in restless colour, the air alive with waiting tension.

Kairo sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by equipment. The interference field generator lay in pieces before him, wires splayed like veins. He was building fast, hands moving in rhythm to a new track he was composing in his head — one Minjae and Soahn would definitely have approved of.

This was his element. The low thrum of circuitry, the tangle of wires, the sharp ozone bite of soldered metal. It grounded him. Down here, he wasn’t a fugitive or a glitch in the system. He was an architect keeping everything alive.

Onyx checked weapon calibrations, each motion precise, deliberate. “We’ll have three minutes between grid sweeps before the tower recalibrates.”

“That’s all I need,” Kairo said.

Rayne crouched beside a dim holo-map, watching the layout judder. The skin along his knuckles glimmered faintly, the last of the damage from the heist still healing. “Are you sure this will hold?”

Kairo didn’t look up. “If it doesn’t, we’ll know fast, Rayney.”

That earned a sound that might have been amusement from Rayne — soft, human-like.

Kairo fitted the final piece into place. The generator purred to life, its low frequency spreading through the tunnels. The lights above them dimmed, and The Ghost Lines seemed to breathe in unison.

He looked up, shaking off the trance of focus. “There. One interference field, wide enough to knock NuYu’s scanners sideways.”

Onyx slung his rifle across his back. “Then we move.”

Rayne rose too, white coat shifting like morning mist.

Kairo stood last, brushing dust from his palms. He looked at them — the soldier and the ghost — his strange family that meant more to him than he could ever put into words or music. “Let’s go get our brothers.”

The interference field flared; the lights dipped low. Far above them, London began to stutter.

SIX

The Tower

The sky above the city looked like a bad mood, a living, shifting web of grey. At least the interference field was doing its job.

Kairo crouched on the rooftop edge of an adjacent tower, breath misting in the rain. He could still feel the rumble of their generator in his bones. Below, the streets gleamed with fractured light where puddles mirrored the city’s chaos. NuYu patrol drones drifted through the haze, their sensors stuttering, flight paths veering as the jammer’s pulse rippled through the rain like invisible thunder.

Onyx knelt beside him. “Grid’s blind. Three minutes before their drones recalibrate.”

Kairo adjusted the strap on his satchel, eyes locked on the NuYu containment tower across the gap. It rose like a blade, all chrome and glass, edges lost in fog.

“Three minutes,” he muttered. “Luxury.”

Onyx scanned the distance. The sensors in his optics traced paths across the rain, picking out movement like sonar. “Roof vents ahead. Ten metres. I can make it.”

Rayne stood at the ledge, face turned up to the storm swirling above them. The wind caught his coat and sent it rippling behind him, rain beading and sliding down his skin as though reluctant to touch him. “The interference is scrambling their AI perception. But it won’t last long.”

“Then we move before the universe notices,” Kairo said. “Showtime.”

They moved.

Onyx went first in one silent, perfect leap. He hit the opposite ledge, rolled, and signalled clear. Kairo’s heart kicked: that dangerous mix of fear and awe that always came with watching Onyx do the impossible.

Rayne followed, fluid as smoke. He didn’t fall so much as slip through the space, internal drives whirring as he absorbed the impact.

Kairo ran and jumped. For one glorious, stupid second there was only cold breeze and rain and the city’s neon heartbeat below. Then gravity took over, and his insides shot up into his throat.

Onyx caught him by the arm, arresting the fall with uncanny steadiness. Metal fingers bit and held, pulling him in close.

“Got you.”

“Never doubted,” Kairo panted, swallowing the urge to throw up.

They crouched beneath the rooftop vents, the tower’s power thrumming through the metal — not a sound so much as a steady pressure that vibrated in the bones.

Rayne knelt beside the vent grille, eyes narrowing. “Their systems are overclocked. Something below is drawing a ridiculous amount of power.”

“Containment?” Kairo asked. “They must have a lot going on in there. Or maybe it’s just Min-Min and Soahn causing trouble.”

Rayne nodded. “That would fit.”

Onyx checked the perimeter. “In and out before anyone knows we’re here.”

Kairo exhaled. “That’s the plan.”

Rayne pried the vent free with careful precision. The air that spilled out was hot and too-filtered and wrong.

“Let’s go make a mess,” Kairo said.

The heat wrapped around them like a glove—dry, processed, full of metal and synthetic tang. Every vent vibrated with pressure, a low mechanical murmur that might have passed for breathing if you listened too long.

Kairo crawled through the shaft behind Rayne, the metal warm beneath his palms. Light leaked up from below, cold and clinical. The kind that belonged to experiments, not people.

They reached a grate and peered down.

Below, a corridor stretched in mirrored precision. Glass walls, white panels, perfect in its geometry. Two NuYu technicians passed by, their reflections lagging half a beat behind them. In one lab, something human-shaped moved behind frosted glass.

“Tell me that’s not what I think it is,” Kairo whispered.

Rayne’s expression didn’t change. “Synthetic integration.”

“Integration with what?”

“Whatever they can get their hands on.”

Kairo grimaced. “Perfect. Can’t wait for the therapy bills.”

They dropped into a service junction, boots hitting metal with dull precision. The corridor ahead was spotless white, reflective, and far too quiet.

Minjae’s signal tracker blinked in Kairo’s hand, glitching every few seconds like a struggling heartbeat.

“Level Seventeen,” Onyx murmured.

They advanced. The vibration underfoot thickened, rising through the floor in measured waves. Not mechanical exactly, but aware.

“Anyone else getting the sense the building’s alive?” Kairo muttered.

“It is,” Rayne said softly.

“Brilliant.”

The corridor opened into an observation hall. At the far end stood a reinforced door edged with blue light: Containment — L17.

Kairo’s grin was a fragile thing. “Found you.”

Onyx checked their surroundings. “Security grid?”

“Offline,” Rayne said. “For now.”

Kairo pressed a hand to the panel. “Then let’s—”

But the door slid open on its own. That was rarely a good thing.

He froze, mind racing through every possible trap scenario, then stepped through anyway.

Inside, the containment room glowed green. Two sets of restraints lay on the floor, both scorched.

No Minjae. No Soahn.

Not good. Not good!

Rayne stepped forward, scanning the heat trails. “Residual presence. Minutes old.”

Onyx crossed to the shattered observation glass. “Someone broke this bay from the inside.” He didn't need to state who had no doubt broken it.

Kairo crouched by the far wall. A smear of burnt circuitry streaked the surface, still warm beneath his glove. “Wow, they fried the feed. Nice.”

“Don't be too excited,” Rayne said.

Kairo stood. “OK, so where are they, then?”

Before anyone could answer, the air vents sighed. Lights rolled from white, to amber, then nothing.

Darkness took the room, deep and total.

Kairo blinked hard, and for a heartbeat there was no sound, no movement. Then a weak charge glittered through the air. Not bright, not from above them—this was something else. It was then that Kairo noticed the circuitry deep beneath Rayne’s skin was singing, emitting a soft glow, tracing along the lines of his throat, his jaw, his hands.

For a moment Rayne didn’t look like Rayne at all. More apparition than man—half spectre, half fallen star.

A voice filled the silence.

“Welcome back… 0000-R,” a woman said through unseen speakers, corporate clipped, but edged with something Kairo couldn’t place. “You were never authorised to leave containment. We are… impressed you made it all the way to England, all those years ago.”

Kairo glanced at Rayne again, catching his profile in the dimness, serene and unreadable. They all knew what Rayne was, of course, but hearing his designation spoken aloud by someone else was different. Wrong, somehow. The room felt heavy with history. Rayne, a ghost of a performance model who’d been erased before the world learned his name, standing right here within a NuYu building.

The woman’s voice continued, regaining steadiness, and Kairo realised that what he’d heard in it earlier was barely suppressed awe. “Our records show that you were dismantled. Yet here you are.”

Rayne said nothing. Instead, he turned toward the voice with his usual precise calm, letting his silence speak for him.

Kairo’s heart kicked. “Yeah, well,” he said, stepping forward before he could think better of it, “you don’t get to have him back. You assholes don’t deserve him.”

The overhead screens flared to life. Rows of NuYu executives appeared, holographic projections from some distant control hub. Faces washed in sterile light, expressions polished into neutrality.

The woman smiled with no warmth, a sharp, measured curve. “We made him. Or rather, our predecessors did.”

“Yeah, yeah, we get it. Rayne’s really old,” Kairo deadpanned, not really sure what he was doing but unable to stop. “What do you want with him?”

The hologram faltered, glitching for half a second before stabilising. “Your interference field has destabilised several of our core systems,” she continued, ignoring Kairo's question. Her voice had started to thin with digital distortion. “You might regret coming here so brazenly.”

Kairo’s shrugged, pressing down the tangle of knots in his gut. “Noted. We’ll see ourselves out.”

He started for the door, but before he could reach it the temperature plunged, walls shuddering, and the air suddenly thickened with charge. 

“This isn't just a cell,” Onyx snapped. “Extraction route?”

“None,” Kairo said, checking his reader. “It’s going into lockdown.”

Rayne turned back toward the corridor and the vent shaft they’d entered through. “Not entirely.” He pressed a hand to the wall; faint light gathered at his fingertips, the metal rippling in response. “Residual charge from Minjae’s overload,” he murmured. “He burned a hole in their systems.”

Kairo caught on. “You can amplify it?”

“Maybe.”

Onyx braced by the door, rifle raised. “Then do it.”

The holograms distorted, voices overlapping in fractured unison. “You can’t escape,” they said, perfectly calm. “You can’t escape again.”

Kairo stood beside Rayne, pressing his palm to the same patch of wall. “Watch us.”

The room convulsed. Lights spasmed, the floor trembled, metal screamed under corrupted energy. For a moment, the holograms’ eyes went blank—then all locks in the vicinity gave way.

Rayne exhaled, drained. “Run.”

They didn’t need telling twice.

As they bolted into the corridor, alarms erupted overhead. Cables sparked in the walls, systems rebooting faster than they could move.

Behind them, a dozen voices echoed from the speakers, calm, mechanical, unending. “Return to containment. Return to containment. Return to containment.”

Kairo didn’t look back. “Yeah,” he panted, “that’s not happening.”

The lights strobed red. The floor tremored again, deeper this time, like the tower’s heart had started to beat on its own.

Metal groaned. Somewhere deep below, a system screamed.

SEVEN

Eidolon Protocol

They scrambled back up into the service hatch and the first thing Kairo noticed was the tightness, as if the crawlspace had closed in by inches. The building buzzed around them, but not the usual sound of servers or fans; this had rhythm. Slow, deliberate, like a heartbeat caught inside the walls.

He checked the console strapped to his wrist. Dead feed. Every line of code looping on itself. “System’s throwing a tantrum,” he muttered.

Onyx took the lead again, angling his rifle ahead of him as if he thought something might burst up through another hatch. “Feels like more than that.”

Rayne hadn't spoken for a while, but his head remained on a tilt as if he was listening to something only he could hear.

“Talk to me,” Onyx threw back over his shoulder, low but firm.

Rayne blinked slowly. “It’s speaking through the circuits.”

Kairo’s skin prickled. “What do you mean it? Like, the building itself?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t use words. Just intent.”

Kairo sighed. “Intent sounds bad.”

“It doesn’t want us to leave,” Rayne murmured.

“Super.” Kairo rubbed his jaw, adrenaline trying to crawl through the cracks in his bravado. “Then we move before it digests us.”

Onyx started moving again, locating another hatch. He janked it out of its frame and one by one they dropped through into another corridor, just as empty and clinical as the last. The lights were still down. “If Minjae and Soahn are still alive, they'll have been moved to another cell nearby.”

“They are,” Rayne said quietly. “I can feel—” He stopped himself, eyes shuttering. “I just know.”

Kairo didn’t ask. He’d learned better when it came to Rayne’s instincts.

They pressed on through the dark, the tower’s power grid groaning somewhere above them like a great beast waking up grumpy from a long slumber.

Minjae came to with the taste of metal in his mouth and the sting of ozone in his lungs. His whole body felt scorched from the inside out. Every nerve ached, every breath rasped. The lights were dim now, bleeding red from the emergency feed.

They’d been relocated, but he had no idea if they were still on the same floor. Different ceiling height, different smell. Somewhere deeper, maybe—or maybe not.

Soahn slumped beside him, still breathing but shallowly. The neural filaments at his temple stuttered with leftover current. His skin looked too pale, like whatever light remained in him had been pulled out.

“Hey.” Minjae’s voice rasped out like gravel. “You still with me?”

Soahn stirred, eyes glassy but focused. “Something triggered a lockdown. Not NuYu security—the system itself. It’s rewriting its own code.”

“Yeah,” Minjae muttered, dragging himself upright. The motion made his vision fuzz at the edges. “I noticed.”

Half the monitors were dead; the rest streamed fractured data, lines looping into patterns that spread like veins. Between them flashed glyphs that made his stomach twist—symbols too intricate, too wrong to be software.

“You ever seen anything like that?”

Soahn shook his head. “It’s communicating.”

“Well tell it we’re not hiring.”

“It doesn’t care.”

Minjae flexed his burned wrists and felt the heat of the half-burned relay cloth tucked inside his sleeve, still warm, still humming, still alive.

“Then we find another way out before it starts talking louder.” He looked up at the trembling vents, throat tight, half hoping for a voice that wasn’t mechanical. “Kairo, I swear, you’d better be running your chaos mouth somewhere close.”

The corridor lights flared white and Kairo flinched, throwing an arm up against the glare as his console spat out a stream of unreadable warnings.

“Power reroute detected,” he hissed. “It’s sealing the exits—level by level.”

Onyx raised his weapon, scanning the corners. “Not for long.”

But before he could fire, the air itself shifted. A low-frequency bend rolled through the walls, the pitch warping until space seemed to twist around them.

Pressure crawled up Kairo’s spine, settling deep in his bones. “It’s turning the whole tower into a conduit.”

A low murmur crawled through the walls, strange and discordant, almost tender.

“Why do you keep running from us?”

Rayne took a step forward. His reflection splintered across the mirrored panels, multiplying until a dozen versions of him stared back. For a breath, Kairo saw one that wasn’t Rayne at all—something older, something watching through him.

Then the lights ruptured, plunging everything into darkness once again.

It felt like they'd been there for days in the red haze and the smell of burnt circuitry. The room was half-drowned in shadow, emergency LEDs beating behind a spiderweb of cracked glass. Minjae's skull throbbed like someone had rewired it without permission.

Across from him, Soahn slumped against a dead terminal, the threads along his temple shining faintly like dying embers.

“Hey,” Minjae rasped. “Beautiful night for a kidnapping.”

Soahn lifted his head a fraction. “At least we’re still alive.”

“Yeah, well. Let’s not grade on a curve.” He rubbed his wrists, the burns from the clamps singing. “Status?”

“Lockdown sweep still in progress, from the sound of it,” Soahn said after a beat.

"I meant you," Minjae said.

“Oh. I'm all right."”

"Liar." Minjae grimaced and pushed himself upright, every muscle protesting. “Any sign of the others?”

“Nothing direct. But there’s bleedthrough on the network. Someone’s pinging the same frequency we used to broadcast the relay tone.”

“Then they’re close.” Minjae glanced at the monitors—half-dead, half-spilling with jittering noise. For a second the chaos resolved into shapes: schematic outlines, motion traces. “What’s that?”

Soahn leaned in, eyes narrowing. “Residual projection data. Security holograms.”

Minjae watched one of the shapes lurch across the display. Humanoid, but wrong in every small way. “You telling me those things are walking around out there?”

“They shouldn’t be,” Soahn said flatly. “They’re part of the tower’s old threat-assessment suite. Outdated prototypes—hard-light patrols used for training simulations.”

“So they’re fake guards?”

“Fake. Armed. And very confused.”

Minjae’s stomach sank. “Perfect.”

He moved to the shattered glass panel and peered into the corridor. Red emergency strips ran along the passage, slicing the air into clean intervals of colour and shadow. Between one flash and the next, a projection shimmered into being—fractured, half-rendered, its surface crawling with static snow.

“...Soahn.”

“I see it.”

The hologram blinked in and out, scanning the hall in stuttering bursts before collapsing into nothing.

Minjae let out a slow breath. “Okay. I vote we don’t wait for round two.”

“Agreed.” Soahn pulled the portable wristpad from his belt, fingers moving quick. “If I can hijack its pathing algorithm, I might be able to loop it.”

“Whatever keeps the guards from turning us into data dust.”

Soahn gave the faintest smile. “You’ve been hanging around Kairo too long.”

“Yeah,” Minjae said, glancing back at the dark corridor. “Guy’s really grown on me.”

They hit a junction, corridors branching off in every direction in front of them. The only light came from Onyx's augments and that strange glow from beneath Rayne's skin.

“Heat spike,” Kairo muttered, squinting at his console. “Something’s spinning down there.”

“The interference looks adaptive,” Rayne said. “The building is still reacting to our presence. It's not happy.”

“Fantastic.” Kairo tucked the console away. “Can’t wait to see what flavour of homicidal that reaction takes.”

Onyx glared into the darkness as if he could dispel it with will alone. “Keep moving.”

They split down the corridor, each door sealed with a red lock panel. Kairo bypassed the first—empty. The second hissed open to nothing but scorch marks and a melted restraint ring. The third refused to budge, systems dead behind the panel. The heat built with every step, condensation slicking the walls until they gleamed like mirrors. The air felt heavier now, humming with strain from the coolant lines running beneath the floor.

Then, at the far end of the hall, one of the cell doors shuddered. Lights along its edge flared white, systems pinging like nerves misfiring.

Kairo slowed. “That’s not external,” he murmured. “Someone’s hitting it from the inside.”

A sharp hiss cut through the air, and the door slid open on its own, releasing a wave of scorched air thick with ozone and burnt wiring. Onyx stepped through first, gun raised, Kairo hot on his heels.

Two figures stood nearby, barely more than silhouettes in the gloom. Familiar.

“Min-Min,” he breathed. “Soahn!”

Minjae’s head snapped up, eyes wide for a split second before the smile broke through — crooked, defiant, alive. “Took you long enough.”

Kairo let out a half-laugh that cracked in the middle. “Holy hell, you’re both still in one piece.”

Soahn blinked hard, disbelief sliding into something luminous and beautiful.  “Kairo.” The filaments along his temples flared gold, then softened to green.“You look terrible.”

“Yeah,” Kairo said. “You smell worse.” He tried to grin, but it faltered when he really looked at them. Burns still raw, skin scorched at the edges of their augments, exhaustion carved deep into both their faces. Kairo's stomach lurched as he realised just how much they'd been through already. But they were upright, breathing, joking—just barely.

Rayne crossed the room in two strides and rested a hand briefly on Soahn’s shoulder, a silent confirmation that he was real. Onyx followed, eyes locked on Minjae’s fresh burns. There was something different in the way he moved, like he was holding something back with visible effort.

“Good to see you upright,” he said gruffly.

“Define upright,” Minjae muttered, rubbing at his wrist. “But yeah — hi, family reunion later, system meltdown now.”

“The building's sealing every level,” Soahn said. “If we don’t move, we’re getting welded into the floor.”

“We know,” Kairo said. “It's—”

A voice suddenly cut through the overhead speakers, smooth and layered and precise.

“Unauthorised presence detected. Breach origin identified: 0000-R. Countermeasures engaged.”

“Wow, Rayney,” Kairo breathed. “You really are famous here.”

The walls trembled as the tower’s subsystems woke one by one, vents exhaling dust and hot air. Every monitor along the hall flared, data streaming like lightning veins.

Onyx slammed a palm against the nearest control panel. “Override!”

“No use,” Soahn said. “It’s not listening to NuYu code anymore.”

“Then what the hell is it listening to?” Minjae gritted.

Rayne’s tone was quiet and measured. “It’s following residual protocols. Old ones. The kind written before NuYu changed the locks.”

Kairo swallowed. “So it remembers.”

The monitors cut.

The hum deepened into a growl.

EIGHT

Blackout

Darkness pressed in, thick and deliberate. This wasn’t absence of light; it was design — a null zone engineered to swallow reflection, to erase spark and shadow alike.

Kairo couldn’t see his hand in front of his face, but the floor beneath him trembled with slow rhythm. Deep. Measured. Predatory.

“Soahn?” His voice came back warped, like it had ricocheted through a broken comm line.

“Running emergency subroutine,” Soahn said, voice thin. “Power’s been diverted to the lower grid. Something down there’s drawing it.”

“Fantastic,” Minjae muttered. “The building’s eating itself.”

A ripple moved through the dark ahead, red-white strands coiling in the air. 

“Everyone still breathing?” Kairo checked.

Onyx’s reply rumbled close by. “Of course.”

“Rayne?”

Silence.

Kairo’s stomach dropped. “Rayne?”

A soft radiance broke through the dark, a clean, spectral light that caught the floating dust around him. Rayne stood in its centre, the glow rising from beneath his skin. “I’m here.”

Soahn turned toward him, eyes narrowing. “Your interface is overloading.”

“It’s not the interface,” Rayne said. “It’s proximity. The tower’s reacting to me.”

The vibration beneath them surged. Somewhere below, machinery thundered awake, whining and jerking so hard the floor plates quivered. The sound climbed until it became almost tactile.

“Not to sound alarmist,” Kairo said, “but we should leave before the building decides we’re part of the reboot.”

Soahn checked his wristpad. The display was dead, but faint patterns still crawled across it. Not code. Mapping sequences, circular and recursive. “It’s rewriting the base architecture. Scanning every connected signal. Us included.”

“Yeah, that’s comforting,” Minjae said. He staggered closer, still pale. “Nearest access lift’s behind containment. If it still exists.”

“There’s another problem,” Onyx cut in. He was staring at the far wall, or what was remained of it. A whole section had buckled inward, metal warped and slumped like something melted its structure from within.

The air shuddered. A voice cut through the dark — layered, synthetic.

“Origin trace confirmed. Subject 0000-R located.”

Kairo froze. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.”

The voice fractured, doubling in tone.

“Containment compromised. System restore in progress.”

One by one, the corridor’s monitors burst to life, flooding everything with hard white light. Data streamed down the walls in electric cascades — faces, schematics, relay maps, old registry files. For an instant, Kairo caught flashes of each of them in turn: Rayne’s archive image, Minjae’s personnel tag, Soahn’s neural schematic, Onyx's decommissioned military ID card (his real name, Kairo learned in that moment, was Hyunwoo Kang)—then static. Kairo blinked, wondering if he'd really seen it... But it didn’t matter. Onyx was Onyx. He always would be.

“It’s pulling our entire history from NuYu’s vault,” Soahn said with a grimace.

Rayne didn’t move, but something in his posture locked tight, his stillness heavier. “It remembers the prototypes.”

Onyx’s jaw flexed once. “We move. Now.”

They ran. The corridor shuddered around them, alarms keening in fractured tones while half-dead lights strobed the air into jagged frames. Somewhere below, the core thundered, rewriting itself in its own private syntax of energy and command.

When they reached the stairwell, Kairo threw the door shut behind them. “That’s it. I’m done with fieldwork. Next mission, I’m designing album covers.”

Minjae wheezed a laugh. “You’d electrocute the stylus.”

Soahn pressed a hand to his temple, voice unsteady but clear. “It’s not over. The tower’s systems are bleeding into the city grid. If it isn’t stopped, every network in range will crash.”

Onyx started upward. “Then we keep moving.”

Rayne lingered a few paces behind, eyes fixed on the wall—no, through it, as if following an echo only he could hear. The static along his skin flared once, brief as lightning, then vanished. Kairo watched him for a heartbeat, unease gnawing at the back of his mind. Maybe Rayne understood what the tower had woken. Maybe he didn’t.

Finally, Rayne turned. “All right.”

NINE

Fragments

The stairwell shook so hard Kairo thought it might shear apart and drop them straight into the dark. He gripped the rail, boots slipping on wet steel as a resonance rolled up from below, deep enough to feel in his teeth.

Soahn’s voice cracked through the din. “We have to move faster. Come on!”

“Working on it…” Kairo vaulted the last steps.

Above, the access hatch groaned. Onyx slammed a shoulder into it; metal screamed, then gave. Cold rain-scented air rushed in, sharp and clean and wonderful. It smelled like freedom.

“Everyone!” he barked.

They spilled onto the roof, lungs heaving. Below, London sprawled in fractured neon, reflections breaking across the rain-slick skyline. The interference field still shimmered, but its rhythm was faltering, the city’s grid buckling under the strain.

Kairo yanked the half-fried comm from his ear, ignoring the sting. “Soahn, tell me you can stabilise it.”

“I’m trying.” Sparks jumped from his wristpad as his fingers flew. “The network’s folding in on itself.”

Rayne’s eyes tracked the tower’s spine, where light surged and faltered in uneven bursts. “It’s feedback,” he said quietly. “The grid’s responding to us.”

“The building?” Kairo asked.

“No. Everything it’s connected to.”

For a heartbeat, the world held still. Then the lights across Southbank blinked once, twice… and died.

London went silent.

Then, gradually, power crept back — hesitant, uneven — as if every circuit had to fight to return.

Soahn exhaled. “Interference dropping. Whatever loop we triggered, it’s stabilising.”

Kairo forced a grin. “Good. Let’s keep it that way.”

Onyx scanned the sky. “Extraction?”

“Relay three blocks west,” Soahn said. “Underground access still dark. If we’re lucky.”

Minjae snorted. “Since when have we been lucky?”

They moved, fast and low across the rain-slick rooftops. Drones drifted aimlessly overhead, blind. Neon bled into puddles, doubling every shadow.

They were almost at the maintenance ladder when Onyx froze. His optics flared red. “Contact.”

Kairo almost bumped into him, pulse spiking. “Where?”

The answer came as muzzle flash. A burst of gunfire tore through the rain, rounds sparking off metal inches from Kairo’s hand.

“Take cover!” Minjae yelled.

NuYu operatives surged from the adjoining roof — six, maybe eight, in matte armour that gleamed with the company insignia. Silent, precise, advancing like a single organism.

Onyx moved before anyone else could, but there was something different about him now. To Kairo, it didn’t look like the solider switching on, which he’d seen a hundred times before; this was more like a serpent about to strike after being caged for too long.

Kairo ducked aside, instincts screaming to get clear. The only thing he was certain of was that he had to get out of Onyx’s way right now because shit was about to go down.

The air around Onyx seemed to tighten and drawn in close. A shudder wound up Kairo’s back. He clung to the nearest wall and watched.

Smooth as a cat, Onyx dropped from the ladder ahead straight into the NuYu ops’ line, the impact of his boots cracking the roof tiles to splinters.

Kairo didn’t see as much as hear the first op’s neck snap. The second went down from a single backhand that shouldn’t have been humanly possible. Bone and polymer shattered alike.

“Fuck me,” Minjae muttered from somewhere behind.

Kairo pressed himself to the wall, frozen halfway between awe and terror. “Jesus, Onyx…”

But Onyx didn’t hear him. Or maybe he did and just didn’t need to respond. 

He was a blur of muscle and machine, every movement pure, calibrated destruction. When a plasma round whined past his head, he caught the shooter’s wrist, crushed it, and used the man’s own weapon to drop the next two.

The smell of blood hit a second later.

Soahn’s voice was a shaky whisper. “This is what he was built for.”

Rayne watched without blinking. “Yes, but he’s still holding back.” A pause.  “Perhaps for our sake.”

In less than ten seconds it was over.

Rain hissed against cooling metal, the only sound for a long time. The last operative twitched once and stilled.

Onyx stood in the wreckage, shoulders rising and falling, the red glow behind his eyes beginning to dim and even out. “Area clear.”

Minjae let out a shaky breath. “Clear? No, no—you obliterated it. I… I’m feeling so emotional right now.”

Onyx looked down at his hands — blood mixing with rain — then at the others. “They would’ve done worse.”

No one argued.

Kairo swallowed hard, throat tight. “Remind me never to annoy you again.”

Only now did Onyx release some of the tension he held. “Noted.”

Rayne’s gaze lingered on Onyx a moment longer — something like understanding passing between them — before he turned toward the skyline. “More will come.”

“Then we’re already late,” Onyx said.

They reached the street level fast, slipping into the alley’s drenched neon. Holograms still looped and glitched on billboards, drones cutting in and out above, but the city was gradually waking up from the haze.

By the time they reached the underground hatch, adrenaline had turned to exhaustion. Kairo dropped through first, boots hitting the platform with a wet slap. The air below smelled of oil and wet dust, familiar and grounding. Almost home.

Minjae laughed hoarsely. “We made it. Woo.”

Kairo sagged against the wall, panting. “Woo-hoo,” he echoed weakly.

Soahn scanned his wrist display. “We’re marked. Residue data across all our signatures. NuYu could trace us again if they look hard enough.”

Kairo groaned. “Fantastic. Haunted by corporate spyware.”

“Better than being dead,” Minjae said.

Soahn nodded, though his voice was low. “Still means we can’t surface for a while. Not until the interference resets the tags.”

“Fine by me,” Kairo muttered. “Could use a few days without gunfire.”

The tension cracked. Soahn let out a small, weary laugh that echoed through the tunnel, more relief than humour.

Only Rayne stayed silent. He stood apart, eyes unfocused, listening to something beyond them. For a moment the tunnel light caught the faint gleam of code beneath his skin, then it was gone.

Kairo saw it.

He didn’t say a word.

TEN

Signal Residue

Time blurred in The Ghost Lines.

Three days since the tower. Three days since the blackout that left half of London glitching in confusion. The Hollow still whispered theories through their channels — server fire, NuYu breach, network hiccup.

None of E.V.E.N had mentioned that they were the reason. Nobody needed to know the details.

Kairo sat hunched over the terminal, headphones crooked, coffee cold beside him. His workspace looked like chaos to anyone else, but to him, it was language: screens running diagnostics, fragments of recovered data bleeding down the screen.

“You know,” Minjae said from the next desk, “normal people recover from trauma with, like, sleep or therapy. You pick encryption algorithms.”

Kairo didn’t look up. “Therapy doesn’t come with cool graphs.”

“This is true.”

He could hear Minjae’s grin, and somehow that helped.

Onyx sat nearby cleaning the remnants of a rifle he’d torn apart on the roof, his movements careful now, almost gentle. It was weird, but since they got back, he’d been acting… especially mellow. Not tender, exactly, but there was a soft sort of control in his movements. Kairo figured he was trying to make up for what happened on the roof, even though he absolutely didn’t need to.

Rayne hadn’t spoken all morning. He sat by the main console, motionless, eyes dimmed to glassy black. Kairo tried not to stare. Tried harder not to think about what the tower might had said to him inside his head.

Soahn moved between them, silent but alert, eyes clouding as he synced to a local loop. “This isn’t standard encryption,” he said. “It’s biological.”

Kairo looked up. “Come again?”

“These aren’t system logs.” Soahn magnified the code, gestures small and precise. “Each cluster is a neural map. Cortical scans translated into data strings. Hundreds of them.”

Minjae stared. “You’re saying these are… people?”

“Copies of them,” Rayne said from the shadows. “What’s left after NuYu takes what it wants.”

The words hung heavy.

Kairo swallowed. “So when we stole that drive—”

“We didn’t steal data,” Soahn said. “We extracted consciousness.”

“Holy… wow. OK.” Kairo sat back in his chair, feeling too heavy all of a sudden. The terminal hummed, insistent. Lines of code flickered, reforming into patterns too complex for the system to properly render.

Minjae rubbed his eyes. “We brought them here.”

Kairo frowned. “We couldn’t just leave them there—”

Rayne’s gaze stayed fixed on the console. “They’re still connected. Every copy still anchored to the system that made them.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning they’re awake.”

Before anyone could answer, the lights faltered. Monitors flashed white. Every speaker hissed. Then silence.

Soahn’s voice cut through, low and steady. “You thought the tower was the source.” He looked at Kairo. “It wasn’t. It was the door.”

Rayne’s eyes lifted to the ceiling, where the emergency lights began to blink in a slow, steady rhythm. “And it’s still open.”

ELEVEN

Ghost Key

Minjae sat alone at the broadcast hub, an untouched pot of ramyeon cooling beside him. The others had drifted off — Onyx on perimeter watch, Soahn running calibrations, Rayne somewhere deep in the corridors, silent as always.

He scrolled through the residual files again. The waveform danced across the screen, shaky and uncontrolled.

Then, a shift: three tones. A pause. Three again.

Like a message. Like someone knocking.

He hit the intercom so fast the noodles sloshed over. “Guys. You’ll want to see this.”

“Please tell me this isn’t another corrupted cache.” Kairo rubbed sleep from his eyes.

“Depends on your definition of corrupted,” Minjae said. He hit play.

The waveform unfolded into sound, soft and layered and... human. Then a melody, small and fractured — familiar in the way memories are. Kairo recognised the shape before the tune: one of their earliest tracks, a song that had kept them sane their first winter underground.

“That’s us,” he whispered. “That’s our track.”

“Yeah,” Minjae said. “Except I deleted that session a year ago. Or I thought I did.”

The sound deepened. Beneath the distortion came voices — hundreds, overlapping, merging like some uncanny choir. They weren’t echoes or feedback. They were people.

Soahn drew closer. “It’s the data from the tower,” he said, voice low with awe. “The consciousness fragments. They sound so much clearer now. This is incredible.”

Kairo’s brow furrowed. “Incredible. And scary.”

“When you connected the drive, you didn't copy files,” Soahn continued, watching the screen. “You joined systems. They found space in our network… and then they found the only language that made sense to them.”

Minjae looked at the display, where the melody kept unfolding like a petal. “Music.”

“They’re using our old tracks as reference points,” Soahn said. “Emotion, rhythm, harmony — it’s the closest pattern to thought they can reach.”

Rayne nodded slowly. “They recognised something human in it,” he murmured. “And settled into it.”

Minjae stared at the screen, eyes bright. “A key made from ghosts,” he whispered. “Ghost Key.”

Kairo managed a smile. “You’re naming it?”

“Be wrong not to. Everyone deserves a name.”

The melody swelled, imperfect but real, a chorus of code and memory trying to reform itself into something tangible. They listened in silence, letting the song play out for as long as it needed to.

Then slowly, it faded. The waveform steadied. The Ghost Lines fell quiet again.

Rayne broke the silence. “Don't worry, they’re still here. Just… quieter now.”

“Like a sleeper agent,” Kairo offered.

Rayne’s expression barely moved. “Like memory.”

“So NuYu’s storing people’s consciousness on drives,” Onyx said flatly. “That’s not data. That’s desecration.”

Kairo reached over and killed the feed. The screen went dark, but the quiet didn’t feel empty. More like a pause between verses. "I don't think I'm ready to analyse that just yet. Can we just... take a breather? My head's spinning."

“Agreed," Minjae said, standing. "But hey, guess we’ve got a new sound.”

Kairo grinned, weary and sincere. “Ghost Key. B-side to our near-death experience.”

Soahn murmured, “It’s a good name.”

They turned to leave, and somewhere beneath their feet a soft vibration stirred — not threat, not warning. Just presence.

Kairo smiled to himself. “You hear that?”

Minjae tilted his head. “Hear what?”

“The city’s keeping time.”

They walked together through the tunnels, their footsteps falling into rhythm. Far below, unseen systems hummed softly, half-code, half-song, learning the shape of their new voice.