PART ONE
Seoul, 2069
They dressed him in white. Always white.
Synthetic silk draped across his collarbones, soft enough to move with a person’s breath. On Rayne, it hardly stirred. As he stepped up onto the small stage, the projection grid tracked every movement he made, lights passing over his face, his hands, the line of his shoulders, checking that everything looked as it should.
Rayne couldn’t say he was nervous, because emotions like that weren’t part of his programming. Still, he could detect the anticipation in the silence around him.
He stood centre stage with his eyes lowered, nearby cooling vents whispering through his hair and moving the dark strands against his cheekbones. Rayne understood the vents were there partly to regulate his temperature under the lights, but also partly to make him look more dramatic. Everything about this moment was designed to signal a first note, to promise spectacle, to generate awe.
He lifted his eyes.
A dozen domes of glass blinked back at him. Beyond the polarised shielding, observers dressed in tailored suits sat in rows, their faces obscured by shadow. Rayne didn’t need to see them to understand their roles. What mattered was the logos etched into their badges: external funding bodies, defence contracts, entertainment syndicates, all things he was told were important. Briefly, he wondered what they were thinking as they looked at him.
A breath cue pinged Rayne’s inner feed, and he raised his chin.
The music began, and the first note came easily, so clean and clear that Rayne could follow it all the way to the point where his voice met the acoustics of the stage. His HUD showed barely any change in his emotional response as he continued, while beneath his feet, light answered each note in patterns he couldn’t see without looking down. Behind him, Seoul stretched across the projection screen, recognisable down to the shape of the skyline and yet cleaner, like somebody had taken the real city and removed all the inconvenient parts.
Every note he sang landed where it was supposed to until the sustain, a long, uncomplicated bridge into the next section of the song. Rayne knew he’d missed the transition when the note continued past it, but a moment before that, impossibly, he could smell rain-damp concrete.
The recognition came without context. He knew rain, knew concrete, knew the particular smell the two made together, although he couldn’t remember ever standing outside in the rain. By then the note had run two seconds over, then three, and although Rayne understood where he should have stopped, understanding didn’t seem to have much to do with it.
The music moved on without him, leaving Rayne behind on a note that should have ended several seconds ago. He waited for the correction ping that usually followed a mistake, or for one of his handlers to speak into his earpiece, but neither came. All he could hear was his own voice, impossibly sustained, while the melody continued into a part of the song he wasn’t singing anymore.
Rayne kept his posture exactly as rehearsed, and finally, a warning appeared at the edge of his vision and began to flash. Still, his attention caught elsewhere, on the peculiar sense that the note meant more than sound. He couldn’t have said what; it reminded him of looking at writing through the back of a sheet of glass, the shape of the meaning there but turned the wrong way round.
(Rain striking a window.
A hand reaching towards him.
Laughter in a hallway, close enough that Rayne knew their breath smelled of cinnamon.)
A burst of interference crossed his feed, and his HUD blinked out and then returned; the light under his feet stuttered for a beat before correcting itself. Then the override reached him, and heat tore through Rayne so fast that for an instant he mistook it for pain. For half a second, his voice cut off, and when it returned, it was right where the song expected it to be. Rayne had missed the transition entirely. One moment he was trapped inside the sustained note, and the next he was halfway through a line he didn’t remember beginning.
Behind the glass, observers had begun talking to each other. One pointed towards the stage, and Rayne found himself watching the man’s face while he sang, trying to work out what had changed in it. Disappointment, perhaps, although suspicion looked remarkably similar from this distance.
“Wrap the sequence,” said a voice in Rayne’s feed.
He obeyed, singing the closing lines without another deviation, then bending into the angle of the bow he’d rehearsed.
Nobody applauded, and a moment later, the glass went dark.
Behind the curtain, two of his handlers were waiting. One closed a hand around Rayne’s wrist while the other steered him from the stage with a palm between his shoulders, both of them using more force than necessary.
“Performance complete,” said the handler beside him. “The deviation has been logged.”
Rayne didn’t say anything; he went with them. He wanted to ask where they were taking him, but unprompted questions had their own parameters, and he couldn’t remember being given permission for this one. Instead, he tried it silently, turning the question over in his head as they passed through a security gate marked PRIVATE: R&D ONLY and into the corridor beyond.
Before the stage vanished from view, he glanced back, just quickly. The observers were still behind the glass, still speaking to one another, and he wondered what they would write about him now. There would be a report about the deviation — there were always reports — though he doubted it would mention the rain.
The smell of wet concrete followed him all the way down the corridor.
~*~
The room was white from ceiling to floor, which made Rayne wonder briefly whether anybody at NuYu knew there were other colours.
He woke lying on his back beneath a synthetic blanket soft enough to be expensive. Under him, the recessed platform adjusted itself as his temperature came back up, warming here, cooling there, and Rayne ran his thumb once across the fabric covering it. There was no practical reason for it to feel this nice; apparently practicality wasn’t the only consideration.
Since his HUD hadn’t come back yet, he lay still and tried to find the last thing he remembered. A hand around his wrist, gripping him too tight. The handlers walking him away from the stage. A door closing behind him, followed by bright light and a series of high, electronic beeps—
After that, nothing.
Still, the missing section of time bothered him less than the note did. Rayne could remember how easily it had continued, and how, for some reason he couldn’t explain, it had felt right even while he knew it was wrong. What did it mean?
But the more he tried to understand it, the more it failed to make sense. Pressure was starting to build up in his chest, and he waited for his diagnostics to identify it. A few seconds later, they returned thermal drift, which was interesting, because Rayne knew what thermal drift felt like, and it wasn’t this.
After a while, he sat up and put his bare feet on the floor. Warmth spread under them almost at once, following the shape of his soles, and he waited for the command that usually came next. But nothing did. He waited longer anyway, because there were plenty of situations where waiting was the correct thing to do, although after a few more minutes this didn’t appear to be one of them.
Rising, he spotted a narrow seam running down the nearest wall, barely visible under the stark-white finish. Rayne followed it with his fingertips until he found what he thought might be a door. There was no handle, though, so after considering the problem a moment longer, he knocked.
“Hello?”
Nobody answered.
A few seconds later, the lighting changed instead. White softened through gold into amber-rose, spreading slowly across the walls and floor until Rayne recognised the beginning of a simulated sunrise. He knew this sequence. NuYu used variations of it during neural resets and post-error recovery, gradually changing the light and temperature until an agitated synthetic returned to acceptable levels. Rayne had never considered before what would happen if the synthetic knew they were being calmed down.
Apparently, being aware made it less effective.
Watching the false sunrise climb the wall, he thought about the gap in his memory. He had put to sleep; that much was obvious now. What he couldn’t figure out was how long he’d been asleep, what had happened while he was, or why no one had explained any of it when he woke.
The light continued its slow progression towards morning.
Unsure what else to do, Rayne went back to the platform and sat with his hands folded in his lap, arranging himself carefully into a position that indicated the treatment had worked.
Time became difficult to measure without his HUD. Rayne counted for a while, stopped when he realised he’d lost his place, then started again because there wasn’t much else to do. Eventually, he got up and walked the length of the room a few times, counting twelve steps from one end to the other. On his fourth length, a vent opened nearby and let out a thin stream of vapour. Watching it crawl towards him, Rayne recognised the dampener and wondered what he’d done wrong this time. As soon as the vapour reached him, his thoughts became easier to leave unfinished, each one losing importance before he reached the end of it.
The more interesting part was that Rayne noticed.
After completing another length across the room, he stopped beside the platform and let his arms hang loosely at his sides. If anyone was watching, that should look about right. He was considering sitting down again when he heard a voice.
At least, he thought it was a voice.
But it came apart whenever he tried to listen directly to it, the sound too thin for words but not music either. A few notes reached him intact, followed by the unmistakable impression of somebody continuing beyond the point where Rayne could hear them. Turning towards the nearest wall, he listened. The sound seemed close enough that he had the urge to answer.
And then it was gone.
Glancing up, Rayne found the speakers tucked between the ceiling panels, although he was sure the voice hadn’t come from there. Maybe he’d heard an old audio file caught in his logs, or part of a song loaded for a future performance.
If they ever let him sing again.
For the next few minutes, Rayne stayed where he was, listening. The dampener continued drifting into the room, and he made sure to look like he’d forgotten why he was standing there.
Then he heard three quick beeps, and—
~*~
When Rayne woke again, he was in a different room. This one was also white, which wasn’t a huge surprise, but the difference was that one wall was covered in mirrored glass, and there was no longer a platform for him to sit on. Instead, Rayne had been left on the floor a few metres from the mirror, one arm caught awkwardly under him.
That was unusual.
Sitting up, he waited for his HUD to return and looked around. While he’d never been brought to a room like this before, he knew what the mirrored glass meant. NuYu used surfaces like these during calibration, especially when a synthetic showed signs of perceptual or identity instability. Well, that answered one question, at least.
Apparently, they thought there was something wrong with him.
Getting to his feet, he crossed to the mirror and studied his reflection. For a moment, everything appeared as it should: tall, broad through the shoulders, black hair falling untidily across his forehead, dark brown eyes, pale skin.
But then he blinked, and for less than a second, somebody else was looking back at him.
Rayne jerked away, and a warning flashed through him, disappearing before he could read it and leaving his reflection unchanged on the glass. He leaned closer and searched his face for whatever had startled him, but found only the features NuYu had designed and assembled.
His own face.
At least, he thought so. Straightening, Rayne stared hard at his reflection.
“Rayne,” he said softly.
Then he wondered why he said it out loud. It wasn’t necessary to—
The mirrored surface shuddered, then, and Rayne stepped back. Before his eyes, his reflection broke into jagged sections, parts of his face briefly displaced before the image corrected itself. Staring at the glass, he wondered if he’d triggered a scan.
“Rayne,” he said again, louder now.
This time, letters appeared near the bottom of the mirror.
0000-R.
His own version number, glowing gently on the glass. Except he hadn’t given the mirror his version number; he’d given it his name.
What was going on?
For a few seconds, he stood without moving, aware now that the glass was almost certainly watching him back. He nearly asked why he was still here, but by now he knew better. Rayne understood how decommissioning worked. Synthetics weren’t usually left awake in calibration rooms wondering what would happen to them.
Unless NuYu hadn’t decided yet.
~*~
Enough time passed that Rayne stopped trying to measure it. Instead, he gradually lowered his power consumption, letting most of his systems idle while he waited. It was practical, anyway. Plus, it had the additional benefit of making it harder to think about what NuYu might decide to do with him.
In the darkness between one system cycle and the next, Rayne dreamed.
Or at least, that was what he decided to call it.
Realistically, it was probably an echo buried in his data, or feedback passing through his circuits. Rayne had explanations for it. Though none seemed to account for how real it felt.
(Laughter in a hallway.
A voice singing a simple melody.
A door that creaked until somebody oiled it, proud as anything when it finally opened without a sound.)
Rayne came fully awake to the sound of his own voice.
“Brother.”
Strange. The word seemed to belong to the dream, only he’d spoken it out loud. Sitting up, he looked over at the mirror again, where a new message was now displaying along the bottom in red text.
FILE FLAGGED: INSTABILITY. REVIEW PENDING.
That couldn’t be good. Rayne stared at the words until they disappeared, and then continued staring just in case the mirror had anything else to tell him.
It didn’t.
Later, the lights blinked — just once, brief enough that Rayne might’ve ignored it if he hadn’t spent so long with nothing else to look at. When the light returned, he immediately noticed the difference in the room: a tiny hairline break had formed under the mirror. Crouching beside it, Rayne ran his fingertip across it, feeling warmth travelling along the base of the wall.
Odd. NuYu didn’t usually leave imperfections.
A soft pop, and suddenly a vent opened nearby, only this time no dampener followed. Instead, fine silver condensation began forming along the seam. Rayne watched the droplets gather, join into a larger drop, and disappear into the floor. He waited for an alarm. When none came, he waited for footsteps outside the room.
Nothing.
A thought entered his head then, strange enough that he almost dismissed it before he finished having it:
Is this for me?
But that was absurd. It couldn’t be for him. Nobody had spoken to him since the stage, but the longer he examined the seam, the harder it became to believe he was only noticing it by accident.
The next time the lights faltered, a quiet ping came from the mirror, followed by new lines of text.
[EXIT SUBROUTINE UNLOCKED]
CODE: RY4N3.EX
LATCH: DEPRECATED
Rayne read it twice. Then again.
Standing in front of the mirror, he let a few seconds pass and kept his face still. If this was an assessment, reacting to it seemed unwise. If it wasn’t, he had no idea what he was meant to do. Eventually, the message faded, and the room entered its rest cycle, the lights dimming to violet. Rayne waited another minute before moving, sliding closer to the mirror and crouching beside the seam again. Gently, he put his fingers against it.
And this time, it answered.
Deep in the wall came a soft clunk and hiss. If Rayne had to guess, the mechanism was older than most of what was visible in the room. After a final rusty pop, a narrow panel opened near the floor. Rayne readied himself for an alarm or alert; opening access panels without authorisation was a violation, and several safeguards should’ve already been triggered.
But none did.
Beyond the opening was a cramped utility passage lined with conduit and coolant pipes. Dust gathered in the corners and across cables that looked like nobody had touched them in years. It wasn’t intended as a route through the building, and definitely not a route for him.
Rayne stayed where he was, but now that the thought began to take shape, he found he couldn’t stop it: I could crawl through that.
And the strangest thing was that nothing inside him was telling him that he couldn’t. Slowly, he put one hand through the opening. Paused. No correction came. Gradually, Rayne moved forward until his shoulders passed through the hatch, then stopped again, waiting for the familiar warning or the rush of heat that would force his body back under NuYu’s control.
Still nothing.
For the first time since he came online, Rayne found himself somewhere the company apparently hadn’t accounted for. He had no idea where the passage went; he didn’t know who had opened it, or whether the mirror was intended for him, or what would happen if someone discovered he was gone. Staying in the calibration room was safer, for sure. But staying also meant a fifty-fifty chance he’d be decommissioned.
Leaving, however, meant that Rayne could decide first.
And, as it turned out, that was enough for him. Moving onto his hands and knees, he crawled into the dark, keeping one palm against the wall as the passage narrowed around him. Dust and grime immediately covered his hands and knees, but he didn’t pay it any attention. He’d gone only a few metres when the hatch closed behind him with a rusty click.
Rayne paused, listening.
Then, with nowhere else to go except forward, he kept crawling.
~*~
Rayne had no idea how long he crawled. The utility passage descended gradually into older parts of the building, narrowing until he had to angle his shoulders to squeeze through. Dust caught in his hair and coated his face, and at one point his elbow scraped hard enough against the wall to tear his sleeve. Sparing the damage a quick glance, he had the absurd thought that NuYu was going to be annoyed with him.
Then he remembered he was escaping.
That probably mattered more.
Soon, he began to hear the building beyond the passage, footsteps crossing beneath him, a voice calling out, too muffled for Rayne to make out the words. The hydraulic whir of a security drone passed below him shortly after, so close that he stopped with one hand braced against the wall, afraid he’d be heard. Once it was gone, he kept moving.
Eventually, he found another hatch. This one looked older than everything around it, dust clogged at the edges, two analogue latches securing it from his side. He knew mechanisms like these existed, but had only ever encountered them through old archived material. There was something weirdly reassuring about a door too old to report him.
Working his fingers under the first latch, he pulled.
Clunk.
He tried again.
Clunk.
Rayne stared at it, then moved to the second latch. This one opened immediately, and the sudden movement jolted the first lock enough for him to pry it open.
Pushing the hatch open, he found himself in a shallow loading dock flooded with white light. Crates filled most of the space, stacked almost to the roof trusses, all of them marked for transport. Rayne read the labels nearest him.
OBSOLETE PARTS.
FAILED BUILDS.
SYNTH FRAMES.
NEURAL SHELLS - NONVIABLE.
Nonviable… he supposed that probably included him now, too. Nearby, a security camera mounted on the wall moved left and right. Rayne froze. It was facing away from him, travelling slowly, but it wouldn’t miss him for long. Watching its progress, he calculated he had perhaps six seconds before the lens reached the hatch.
That would be bad.
Dropping from the passage, Rayne crossed the short distance to the nearest open crate and climbed inside. Broken components and discarded equipment filled most of it, forcing him towards a narrow space at the back where he folded himself into a crouch, one shoulder wedged against the wall and the other against a metal box.
For the first time since leaving the calibration room, he wondered if he’d made a mistake. Would it have been better to stay put in that white room? It was still possible NuYu wouldn’t shut him down; maybe they were deciding his next performance instead.
But he knew the probability.
And someone had opened that hatch for him; he was almost certain of that now. For reasons Rayne couldn’t begin to understand, whoever it was had shown him a way out and trusted him to decide whether to take it.
The crate closed with a vibrating thud, sealing him in total darkness. Outside, there was the scrape of machinery. His temperature was rising again, and an error notification appeared at the edge of his vision, vanished, then returned. Rayne dismissed it, but a second warning replaced it almost immediately.
He dismissed that one, too.
Then voices reached him through the crate.
“This one’s full?”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t scan right,” somebody answered, sounding more tired than concerned. “Manifest says load it.”
A pause. “Fine. Tag and load it. HQ wants this floor cleared by tonight.”
Rayne didn’t move.
A moment later, machinery locked around the crate and lifted it. Rayne caught himself against the wall as the contents shifted around him, metal groaning on every side. He stayed folded where he was and listened as the voices faded away.
And then engines started to rumble beneath him.
Rayne listened to their vibration travel through the floor. There was no way to know where he was going now, and no route back that he could find even if he wanted one.
All he could think to do was lower his power consumption. Just before the last of his peripheral systems went dark, Rayne realised he was still waiting for NuYu to stop him.
But they didn’t.
~*~
The journey came to Rayne mostly through the crate: sudden jolts that might have been loaders or turbulence, voices beyond the walls speaking languages he didn’t understand, long stretches when nothing happened at all.
Mostly, he waited.
But every now and then, he sang. Quietly at first, Rayne replayed the song from the stage, beginning where he was supposed to begin and ending every note where it belonged. Without the backing track, it sounded different, his voice absorbed by the packed crate instead of returning to him from the acoustics of the stage.
When he reached the sustain, the note stopped where it should have. Nothing happened.
Later, he tried again, and this time Rayne let the note continue past the transition, then further, listening for rain on concrete or laughter in a hallway or a voice he couldn’t quite remember. But none of it came. Eventually he had to stop, and the darkness was only darkness again.
After that, he slept when he could.
A sudden impact woke him, and he was thrown sideways before he could grab hold of anything. A hiss followed, then a mechanical voice speaking another unfamiliar language, quick and repetitive enough that Rayne guessed it was issuing instructions.
And then the doors opened.
Cold air hit him, and Rayne remained where he was for a second, startled by how much information came with it. Fuel. Hot metal. Salt. Several smells he couldn’t identify at all. The air wasn’t filtered or adjusted or full of vapour designed to alter his behaviour; it was just there, chilly against his face and damp enough to catch in his hair.
Carefully, he edged towards the doorway and stepped out of the crate, but his knees locked from where he’d been crouched for so long, forcing him to catch himself against the metal edge before he could straighten. Once he felt stable enough, he looked around, finding himself in another loading dock, though this one was enormous, full of machinery and warning lights and people moving between stacks of freight. Nearby, a siren ripped through the air, but nobody paid it any attention.
Tilting his head up, Rayne stared into a dark, cloudy sky. Rain struck the steelwork overhead, and for a moment, he forgot to move.
This wasn’t the rain he’d thought about on stage.
A voice rose nearby, and Rayne started moving. He didn’t know where he was, or where he was going, or whether the person who’d let him out of NuYu meant for him to come this far.
All he knew was that nobody here was looking for 0000-R.
And for now, that was enough for him.
~*~
The damp was cold and heavy and real, nothing like the controlled chill of NuYu’s white rooms. It collected on Rayne’s skin and in his hair, smelling of rust and river water. His temperature regulation complained almost immediately, though he ignored it.
The more pressing problem was that he had no idea where to go.
The loading docks stretched away behind him, crowded with cargo hauliers and signs he couldn’t read. Beyond them, towers of glass rose into the low cloud, their upper floors vanishing whenever the rain thickened. Rayne looked at them for a while; he’d never seen a building disappear into weather before.
A vehicle horn sounded behind him, and he jerked out of the way.
As he left the dock, voices surrounded him, overlapping in languages and accents his translation software couldn’t separate quickly enough. Rayne tried following one conversation, then another, but each was swallowed by the next. He gave up and concentrated on following the flow of people heading away from the river.
A blond boy darted across his path and shouted at him.
TRANSLATE FAILED. PHONETIC MATCH NOT FOUND.
The boy laughed and ran on. All Rayne could do was stare after him, pretty sure he’d just been insulted. By the time he found a quieter street, his clothes were grey at the hems and his shoes were letting in water. Broken polyglass glittered along the edge of an alley, and rain had gathered in the uneven ground under it. Rayne caught sight of himself in one of the larger puddles. Dark hair plastered to his forehead, a crack running through the lens of his left eye, his lower lip split where he’d struck the crate during his journey.
As Rayne crouched to get a better look at his left eye, the face in the water wavered for a second, like a glitch on a screen.
(A man leaning over a sink, pushing wet hair away from his eyes and smiling.)
Rayne recoiled, and the reflection broke apart under the rain. Deciding his damaged eye could wait, he started walking again. The city became denser as he moved inland, roads crossing above other roads, trains passing overhead with enough force to make the metal tracks judder. Rayne followed the streets because they were there, turned when crowds became too thick, and gradually lost all sense of direction.
Outside a shuttered shop, a man with a metal jaw stepped into his path and offered him a foil-wrapped packet. He mumbled something in a rough voice that sounded like a question.
Rayne paused and stared at the foil, then the man, unsure what response to give.
Then the man clicked his tongue, tucked the packet into his pocket, and walked away.
By dawn, Rayne’s remaining charge had dropped low enough that staying upright cost more power than he could spare. Eventually, he found a covered stairwell beside two abandoned buildings and sat down. For a while, he watched the rain striking his hands and legs, and then his vision went dark.
When Rayne woke, the streets were quieter. He stayed still as his systems restarted, waiting for the usual sequence of checks. A few failed, while others returned incomplete information.
REGION ID: UNKNOWN
NETWORK SYNC: UNAVAILABLE
Dismissing both notifications, he pushed himself upright.
Walking was harder now; one leg lagged slightly behind the other, forcing him into a limp. Being outside in the rain probably wasn’t helping. He headed down a few narrower streets, under a railway bridge, and past rows of locked doors until he found one that wasn’t.
Rayne pushed it open. Beyond was a broad passage that led downward; the ground was wet, the tiled walls stained with age, old cables running overhead into the dark. But at least it was drier than the streets.
Further down, a mark on a wall caught his attention. Most of it was worn away, but Rayne could still make out a circle, faded pale pink, crossed through the centre by a blue bar. There was writing across it, but only a few damaged shapes remained, not that Rayne could’ve read it anyway. He paused to look at the symbol. Whatever it meant, people had once thought it important enough to paint on a wall.
Finally, he turned down the tunnel and headed deeper underground.
~*~
There were traces of people everywhere down here. Names covered the tiles in colours Rayne couldn’t identify under the failing lights; symbols had been painted over older symbols, warnings over declarations and crude drawings, while scraps of paper filled gaps in the walls.
Music reached him from deeper in the tunnels. It was too distorted to follow, the bass travelling further than the rest until all he could detect was a slow vibration under his feet. He followed it anyway, but it faded away before he found its source.
Further down the line, Rayne found an old relay. It flickered when he passed, and he stopped.
A tinny voice came through the interference, but he still didn’t understand the language. The relay repeated the same transmission a few times, and on the fifth, he began recognising the structures. His translation software, useless at the docks without enough material to work from, started pulling apart the broadcast: repeated words, grammatical patterns, changes in tone. The process was slow enough that Rayne sat down beside the relay to wait.
When the transmission began again, he understood the first sentence.
English.
The broadcast appeared to have been intended for diplomatic personnel, although whatever event it concerned had ended a long time ago. It didn’t matter; the voice repeated the transmission again, and Rayne let his systems build around it until unfamiliar sounds took on meaning.
Finally, he tried one out loud. The words came strangely, his mouth moving differently than when he spoke Korean. He tried again, and then again, getting a feel for the shape of the sounds. Better.
By the time the relay finally failed, he could understand the graffiti nearest him.
Most of it wasn’t diplomatic.
After that, Rayne kept walking down the tunnel, and the further he went, the fewer signs of recent use he found. The graffiti tapered off, leaving old service passages and burnt-out terminals and cables stripped from walls. He knew his remaining charge wouldn’t last much longer, and this time there was nowhere else to go.
So he stopped.
Under a dead terminal, Rayne found the abandoned components he needed to attempt a charging loop: a pair of contact plates, a scorched cable that still conducted current, a capacitor with a crack through one corner. None of it would’ve passed a NuYu inspection.
Rayne connected it anyway.
The first charge hurt. He jerked his hand away and stared at the improvised circuit before trying again with a lower draw. This time the current met him without triggering an immediate fault. It wasn’t enough to restore what he’d lost, but it slowed the decline.
Tucking himself next to the terminal, Rayne listened to the tunnels.
Then, after a while, he sang.
No backing track this time, no projection grid, no audience behind polarised glass, no cue appearing in his vision to tell him when to start. Rayne chose a note because he liked the sound of it, then another because he liked where the first one led.
When the final note ended, Rayne sat still for a long time, then discovered that his system had created a new file.
AUTOSAVE_001.
Then he sang it again.
~*~
AUTOSAVE_002.
AUTOSAVE_003.
AUTOSAVE_004.
Rayne learned the shape of the tunnels by walking them. The old Underground was still there if he looked for it: grimy tiled platforms, rusted rails, staircases leading up to entrances that had been sealed decades ago. Beyond those remnants, newer tunnels cut through older ones; maintenance corridors opened into excavations that appeared on none of the maps Rayne managed to recover. London had just kept digging down and, eventually, stopped keeping good records of what it left behind.
Rayne liked the parts nobody remembered.
People came through occasionally, their voices and footsteps travelling ahead of them, distorted by concrete and distance. It gave Rayne enough warning to find a recess or abandoned service room and wait. His white clothes made hiding inconvenient, although they were more grey by now, stained with rust and dirt.
After a while, he started hearing stories.
“I’m tellin’ ya, I saw it.”
“You were off your fucking face, mate.”
“Nah, nah. I wasn’t high.”
Laughter followed.
Rayne kept himself tucked behind the remains of an electrical cabinet and listened.
“Down by the old service rails. Just standin’ there in white.”
“Eh?”
“First time. Saw him again last week and he was on the floor. Thought he was dead.”
“Probably was.”
“Nah. Saw him again after that, too. Going round a corner. Fuckin’ ghost, I tell ya.”
Another voice joined in. “The white one?”
“See? He knows. I wasn’t high.”
“I mean, you were high. But I saw it too.”
Their footsteps faded away.
Rayne stayed where he was, considering the conversation. He’d heard people talk about the white one before, though descriptions varied so much that he’d assumed there was more than one. Apparently, one stood near the service rails for hours at a time, not moving. Another slept against walls and under alcoves, folded into uncomfortable shapes. A third had drifted past a Scrap Garden after midnight and scared the daylights out of the people working inside.
It took Rayne longer than it should’ve to realise all three were describing him.
Power was getting harder to find. Rayne took what little charge remained in abandoned terminals and damaged relay nodes, once spending nearly an hour connected to an old vending unit that played the same cheerful corporate jingle every forty seconds.
By the end, Rayne knew the melody perfectly.
He hated it.
His own music was better.
AUTOSAVE_005.
AUTOSAVE_006.
The songs were small, just a few notes discovered while walking, or a melody that came to him while rainwater seeped down a rusted ventilation grille. Although he didn’t know what he intended to do with them, Rayne kept every single one.
Time became harder to divide into useful pieces. Whenever his charge dropped too far, he powered down, waking only when he’d recovered enough to move.
He sang less often now, and whenever he did, he kept his voice low and soft.
Near the southern branch, his vision failed suddenly. Stopping in his tracks, Rayne reached out and planted one hand against the wall to keep from tripping over. He waited until, finally, his sight began to return, followed by warnings he couldn’t clear quickly enough. He could feel his temperature rising, and as he tried to straighten, one knee gave way beneath him, then the other. Rayne hit the floor, tearing the skin across his palm.
For a long time, he couldn’t get his hands to move.
How long can I keep doing this?
The thought frightened him more than the failure did.
Rayne shut himself down manually, and thankfully, when he restarted, the tunnel looked the same. His palm was still torn where he’d hit the floor, but his fingers moved when he tested them, so he got back to his feet.
Traffic through the Ghost Lines increased as he travelled further. Rayne learned to recognise scavengers by the rattle of stripped electronics on their trolleys, smugglers by the routes they used, dealers by how long they stood beneath dead signage pretending not to wait for anyone. Rayne tracked their routes and avoided them all. By then, he’d become good at vanishing before anyone saw him.
Which, he supposed, probably wasn’t helping with the ghost stories.
~*~
Another month passed, maybe two. Rayne stopped trying to track the time in days. Power cycles were more useful now, along with how many times he could play a file before another part of his memory needed clearing.
AUTOSAVE_013.
AUTOSAVE_014.
The songs had started to change, too. Melodies lost their shape, notes clipping or bending where he didn’t intend them to. At first, he tried correcting the errors, then one day he listened to a damaged file all the way through and realised he liked what it had become. And best of all, it sounded nothing like the music NuYu had given him.
After that, he experimented more, pushing his vocal modulator beyond the settings he was taught to use, distorting notes intentionally, layering recordings over each other and letting mistakes stay when they interested him. Perfection, he discovered, was only one way a song could sound.
But none of it solved the bigger problem.
His charge kept falling. Whenever Rayne went into low power, images came along with it now.
(Rain hitting metal.
A voice calling him by a name he didn’t remember.
A song sung in two harmonising voices.)
Rayne never saved those.
Eventually, he found a narrow space between two dead signal boosters, shielded on three sides and difficult to see from the doorway. He sat there for a long time and considered the suspension protocol buried deep in his system. It would reduce his power use to almost nothing and preserve what remained until somebody woke him, assuming anybody ever did. But Rayne couldn’t keep scavenging barely enough power to stay awake.
One more night, he decided.
He managed to get up to the higher tunnels and was inspecting an old snack machine when the music reached him. Voices drifted down through the ceiling, interrupted by laughter and the vibration of traffic passing aboveground. Then one voice found a melody. Soon after, another joined it.
Rayne lifted his head, staring toward the sound. The singers weren’t particularly good. One kept drifting away from the melody and the other seemed to know only half of the words, giggling whenever they got them wrong. But Rayne listened to them all the same, those two voices, singing together.
He didn’t understand why it hurt.
Climbing down the nearest service stairs, he returned to the room with the signal boosters and wedged the door shut, then shoved his palm against it as hard as he could until he felt the metal buckle slightly. Finally, he rewired an old antenna and connected it to the little storage he could spare. If another signal reached the tunnels while he was asleep, the receiver would keep it.
Rayne paused, then ran one more connection into his suspension interface. It wouldn’t wake him for every stray transmission; there wasn’t enough power for that. But if a signal came through strongly enough, the system could bring him close enough to consciousness to hear it.
He didn’t know if anything ever would.
Still, he left the connection open.
Then he sat back against the wall and placed his fingertips against the sub-dermal interface at the back of his neck.
EXTENDED SUSPENSION MODE MAY AFFECT MEMORY INTEGRITY.
RESUME TIMECODE: UNDEFINED.
DO YOU WISH TO CONTINUE?
Rayne read the warning once.
CONFIRMED.
Nothing happened for two seconds, and then his vision dimmed. The room slipped away: first the far wall, then the cables overhead, then the floor right in front of him.
Then he went still.
PART TWO
London, 2094
Kairo was absolutely not supposed to be doing this.
He knew it. Soahn knew it, too, although he hadn’t said anything yet. Maybe he’d finally learned that brilliant ideas needed space to grow. Or maybe he just didn’t want to get involved if it all went horribly wrong, which, now Kairo thought about it, was more likely.
The relay hub under the old transit spur had been decommissioned years ago. Officially.
Unofficially, Kairo thought it was perfect. Half the ports were dead, the shielding was patchy and the power bleed came through in ugly yellow-green bursts that made his teeth itch. He crouched in front of it with his jacket discarded behind him, his hands already black with grease and dust. At his feet, his portable rig sat open with cables spilling everywhere, looking like it’d recently lost a fight.
A little way back, Soahn sat cross-legged on an upturned crate with a slim diagnostic tablet balanced on one knee. He wasn’t using it. Instead, he was watching Kairo, which he tended to do when Kairo got like this.
“So if I route it here,” Kairo said, jamming a connector into a port that wasn’t meant to accept it, “and then overclock the output just a little—”
The feedback spike made the lights stutter, and a loose panel rattled overhead.
Soahn looked up at it, then slowly back at Kairo.
“Yeah, okay.” Kairo grinned. “That one’s on me.”
Tapping one command into the rig, then another, he started layering noise over noise and listening to it change as he went. It wasn’t a song. Probably. There was definitely a rhythm buried in all that distortion, though, and now that he’d heard it he wanted to know what happened if he—
“Kairo,” Soahn said calmly. “You’re bleeding into legacy channels.”
Kairo stopped. “Am I?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, that’s fun.” He sent it through, and the signal disappeared into the Ghost Lines.
For a few seconds, nothing happened.
And then every readout on Kairo’s rig went completely insane.
“Oh.”
Long-dead relays were catching the signal; Kairo could see them waking one after another across the network, some amplifying it, others throwing it sideways into junctions that hadn’t held anything useful in decades. The original noise came back warped beyond recognition, picked up another route and vanished again.
Kairo leaned closer. “Huh.”
Soahn’s fingers hovered over his tablet. “That wasn’t just feedback.”
“Yeah. That went way further than I thought it would.”
“Kairo.”
“Okay, but what if—” The relay kicked hard enough to throw a spark across his hand. “Fuck!” Yanking himself backwards, Kairo laughed as alarms flashed across the rig and promptly shorted themselves out. Seriously, if you could do a thing, why wouldn’t you? That was how you found out what the thing did. “Don’t be dramatic, little relay.”
“Maybe you should shut it down,” Soahn said, though he didn’t sound especially committed to the suggestion.
“One sec.”
“Kairo.”
“Half a sec.” Changing the routing, he sent the noise deeper, and this time Kairo felt the difference before the rig registered it. His own signal was messy: yellow-green, bright enough to itch, breaking into little bursts of orange whenever the relay clipped it. But this wasn’t.
This was blue.
Kairo froze. “Wait.”
Far under the noise he’d made, a note rose slowly through the Ghost Lines.
Low. Melancholy. Blue deepening to almost violet around the edges, wavering like whoever made it couldn’t quite keep it steady. It wound through Kairo’s interference instead of fighting it, and for a second he forgot he was supposed to be looking at the rig.
Behind him, Soahn sucked in a breath. “That wasn’t you?”
“Nope.” A broken cluster of chords followed, and Kairo stared at the waveform. “No, that definitely wasn’t me.”
The reverb was wrong for the route, and the timing was wrong for an automated response. Whatever had answered him had listened first.
“Holy shit,” Kairo breathed.
Before the sound could disappear, Kairo synced the waveform directly through his neural link. Colour exploded behind his eyes so suddenly that he almost fell backwards onto his arse.
Soahn was beside him in two seconds. “Kairo—”
“Wait, wait, wait.”
There. Buried far under the distortion was variation: tiny corrections, hesitation, one note reaching for another and changing its mind halfway through.
Kairo’s heart hammered in his chest.
Whatever was down there, it wasn’t software.
It wasn’t a bot.
“That’s a person,” he said.
~*~
The moment the sound ended, it was gone.
Like, gone-gone.
Kairo stared at the waveform and waited for it to rebound. Signals didn’t usually vanish that cleanly, especially down here, where the Ghost Lines had spent the last century turning perfectly straightforward transmissions into haunted nonsense. There should’ve been an echo. A clipped return. Anything.
But no, nothing.
“You don’t just drop a sound like that and vanish,” he said. “That’s illegal. I’m emotionally compromised now.”
Beside him, Soahn peered down at the waveform. “That wasn’t an echo.”
“No?”
“No.” Soahn tapped his tablet, frowned at whatever it told him, then lowered it again like the data had only confirmed what he’d already heard. “It responded. You sent chaos into the grid and whatever it is shaped itself around it.”
“I knew it.”
Kairo absolutely had not known it. But he’d hoped, which was different and considerably less impressive, so he kept that part to himself.
A minute passed, then another. Kairo stayed where he was, crouched beside the rig, watching the empty waveform and trying very hard not to poke the network again. This clearly needed more restraint than anyone was likely to appreciate.
Then—
There.
At the edge of his perception, blue wavered.
Barely there this time; the signal had compressed itself into a narrow band and was moving sideways through the tunnels, slipping between old channels in short, fractured bursts.
“Oh,” Kairo muttered, leaning closer. “You’re running.”
The blue pulled away, but not fast, and not completely. Every few seconds it resurfaced again, like whoever was sending it couldn’t decide whether being heard was worse than being alone.
Kairo knew that feeling.
Beside him, Soahn dropped into a crouch. “It’s trying to hide.”
“Yeah, but…” Kairo watched another little flare appear and vanish. “I don’t think it’s trying to disappear.” He followed it. Not chasing. Chasing would be rude, for one thing, and for another Kairo had the distinct impression that if he pushed too hard, he’d lose them completely. Instead, he kept pace with it, letting the old network show him where it went.
The Ghost Lines took it deeper.
Away from the cleaner channels, away from anything monitored, through routes Kairo wouldn’t have thought to check because, according to every map he’d ever seen, half of them didn’t exist.
Then the signal stopped.
A tiny blue pulse.
Kairo grinned. “Ha, there you are again.”
Soahn leaned in closer until their shoulders brushed. “Someone else has been making music down here.”
“Yeah, apparently.” Another blue pulse, small and unsteady. Tired, Kairo thought, although he had no idea if a sound could be tired or whether his brain had decided to become emotionally invested in a waveform tonight. “And they’re still singing.”
The signal moved again, only a little this time. Kairo watched where it stopped, then finally shut down his own broadcast. Silence fell over the relay hub.
He looked at Soahn.
Soahn looked back.
There was a particular expression Soahn got when curiosity finally overwhelmed caution; Kairo liked that expression. It usually meant that he was about to get away with whatever he’d already decided they were doing.
“Okay,” Kairo said. “We don’t rush in.”
Soahn nodded.
“Don’t wanna scare them. We just…” Kairo waved one hand vaguely towards the tunnels. “Show up.”
“Let them know we’re here,” Soahn agreed.
“Right.” Rising to his feet, Kairo grabbed his jacket off the floor. “Better bring something warm,” he said.
“Why?” Soahn asked.
“No idea. This is probably gonna be weird.”
~*~
This deep down, the tunnels were barely tunnels anymore. Sections of the ceiling had collapsed into drifts of concrete and rust. Cables sagged low enough that Kairo and Soahn had to duck under them, and every few metres another piece of ancient metal crumbled when one of them got too close. The air smelled of old coolant, damp stone and a few other things Kairo decided not to investigate because he did possess some survival instincts, regardless of what Soahn said.
He’d be amazed if anyone had been down here in…
Actually, ‘ever’ seemed reasonable.
“I think this was a maintenance bay,” he said through his breather mask. “Maybe an old node hub. Pre-2070. Back when they still had people working on the lines down here.”
“Don’t we count as people working on the lines?” Soahn said.
Kairo glanced at him, flashing a grin. “Some days.”
They passed faded signage, the lettering worn down to pale shapes Kairo couldn’t read. He stopped briefly beside an old junction box, mostly because it still had a physical latch.
“Can you believe they used to trust metal instead of metadata?”
“Yes.”
“Insane.”
Kairo nudged a piece of scrap out of their path with his boot and kept walking.
His excitement had worn thinner over the last hour. Not gone, obviously. Kairo wasn’t sure curiosity could go away once it had got its teeth into him, but the Ghost Lines felt different this far down. Quieter. Older. Every noise they made travelled too far, and although Kairo wasn’t afraid of the dark, he was becoming increasingly glad Soahn had come with him.
Not that he was going to say that.
He checked the signal again. Still there.
Closer now.
“Okay.” Kairo turned the console towards Soahn, despite the fact that Soahn could presumably see the enormous proximity spike for himself. “We’re close.”
Ahead, the passage opened into a wider chamber, the ceiling rising enough that Kairo could finally stand without feeling like several tonnes of London were personally considering whether to fall on him.
He took three more steps.
Stopped.
Soahn nearly walked straight into his back.
“Kairo—”
“There.”
At first, Kairo wasn’t sure what he’d seen. The wall ahead looked wrong, that was all. One section broke the geometry of everything around it, a rectangle almost completely buried beneath corrosion and grime.
Their headlights moved across it.
Oh.
“That,” Kairo whispered.
The door was barely a door anymore, its edges warped into the frame, and the centre bowed outward like somebody had shoved against it from the other side a very long time ago. Dust filled the gap around it.
Soahn stepped closer and brushed his fingertips against one edge. Rust came away immediately.
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah.”
“This hasn’t been opened in years. Maybe decades.”
Rechecking the signal, Kairo shook his head. “They’re in there, though.”
Soahn stared dubiously at him.
Tucking the console into his pocket, Kairo said, “Come on. Let’s get it open.”
The door refused to cooperate. Kairo wedged his shoulder against it while Soahn braced the frame, and together they pushed.
“Okay,” Kairo grunted. “Rude.”
They tried again, metal screaming through the tunnel, until eventually the door cracked open by maybe an inch.
“Progress,” Kairo said.
A few more shoves. By the time they got it open wide enough for a person to fit through the gap, Kairo’s shoulder hurt, and Soahn was panting softly beside him. But the door was open, even if it had just made enough noise to wake half of London.
Once the dust settled, Kairo slipped his breather mask up. Stale air drifted out and hit him in the face, though he didn’t smell anything rotten. He hesitated for perhaps a second, then slid through the gap and into the dark beyond.
“Kairo—” Soahn said, already too late.
His headlight swept across dust and dead equipment and a really old interface node stripped almost completely bare. There was nothing here.
Kairo’s stomach dropped. “Oh, come on.”
Behind him, he heard Soahn climb through the gap.
“I’m never wrong, though,” Kairo muttered, turning to him. Soahn just gave him a look. “Okay, statistically that probably isn’t true, but—” As he turned away, his light caught on a shape in the far corner, and he froze. “Wait.”
They steadied their beams.
“There,” Kairo pointed.
For once, his body reacted before his curiosity did, and he took a step back, Soahn moving with him.
A pale man sat curled beside the dead interface node, tucked so tightly into it they’d missed him at first. His head rested against one shoulder, dark hair fallen across his face, arms wrapped around himself. His clothes might’ve once been white. Kairo stared at the dirt worked deep into the fabric, at the damaged skin visible across one hand.
At how utterly still he was.
He heard Soahn draw in a sudden breath. “He looks…”
“Synthetic.” Kairo couldn’t keep the shock out of his voice. “I thought they were just stories.”
“Perhaps not.”
Taking a tentative step towards the man, Kairo dropped to one knee. Up close, he could see that the synth’s eyes weren’t fully closed; a narrow strip of dark brown showed beneath the long black lashes, unfocused and unmoving.
“Hey,” Kairo whispered.
Nothing.
“Hey. Can you hear me?”
Still nothing.
This was, Kairo decided, quite possibly the coolest and most terrifying thing he’d ever found, which was saying a lot because he once opened a live power converter with a kitchen knife.
Glancing back at Soahn, he said, “He isn’t fully here.”
Soahn crouched beside him, and after a moment’s hesitation, he reached carefully towards the synth and placed two fingers near his jaw.
Kairo watched.
“I can feel a current,” Soahn said. “But it’s weak.”
“Yeah, well, he’s probably been down here a million years,” Kairo said. Come to think of it, Kairo had heard stories about pale figures wandering the Ghost Lines decades ago, appearing in one tunnel and vanishing into another. He’d always assumed they were the usual bullshit. But apparently not. “Think he can hear us?”
Withdrawing his hand, Soahn said, “He answered you.”
“He made music.”
“Yeah.”
“Holy shit.” Kairo sat down heavily and shook his head, staring at the impossible synthetic ghost from the stories.
From the corner of his eye, he could see Soahn glancing from the synth to him and back again.
“Well,” Kairo said finally, pulling his jacket tighter around himself and yawning. “We’ve got time.”
And so they waited.
~*~
They waited while the synth’s systems stabilised, then failed again. They waited while his signal strengthened, faded, returned weaker, and every time Kairo thought this is it, the synth slipped away from them.
That was fine; he could wait. He’d already decided they weren’t leaving without him, anyway.
After a while, he built a relay node in the corner because sitting still without doing anything was apparently how people lost their minds. The work kept his hands busy, at least, even if the rest of him refused to cooperate. Where had the synth come from? Who was he? Why was he down here? How long had he been down here? Had he really been the white figure people started seeing decades ago? And, possibly most importantly, what kind of person woke from a decades-long shutdown because some idiot blasted experimental noise through an abandoned transit network?
Kairo desperately wanted the answer to that last one.
Actually, he wanted answers to all of them.
But there weren’t any yet, which was terrible.
After an hour, Soahn headed out. Kairo tried not to look concerned about this, because Soahn was more than capable of going back to their last base alone, and Kairo was more than capable of sitting in a room with a mostly unconscious synthetic who might or might not wake up.
Still.
He was considerably happier when Soahn returned a few hours later, carrying two folding mats, supplies and a little equipment, and an ancient lantern he’d apparently bullied into working.
“How did you fix that?” Kairo asked him.
Soahn set it down between them and the synth. “I asked nicely.”
“Bullshit.”
But Soahn only smiled.
Together, they built themselves a small camp. Soahn wasn’t much of a talker anyway, but he was quieter than usual, sitting on his mat with his tablet, scrolling through the same page of an old novel often enough that Kairo was fairly sure he hadn’t read a word of it. Every now and then, Soahn’s eyes moved towards the corner, checking.
Kairo did it too.
They ate rations from the Hollow and passed a thermos of black-market tea between them. When they talked, they kept their voices low without ever discussing why. Kairo told Soahn he could probably make a decent beat out of the clunking pipes in the wall, and Soahn told him this was not a good time to try.
But Kairo tried anyway.
The beat wasn’t bad.
Through all of it, the synth remained curled beside the dead interface node. One of his sleeves was torn almost completely away from the seams, and there were scuff marks all over his hands and face; his lip was split badly at one corner. Kairo wondered what the hell he’d been through when he brought himself here, wondered if he’d ever find out. He wondered if the synth could hear them.
By the second day, Kairo had left a melody looping through one of the small portable speakers. Nothing complicated — just a simple tune that turned back on itself every few minutes and began again. Down here, this deep in the Ghost Lines, it was too quiet, and Kairo had never liked silence for long.
He called the tune Reboot Song, because it was funny and absolutely not evidence that he’d become attached to an unconscious stranger.
When he told Soahn the title, Soahn just stared at him with one eyebrow slightly raised.
“What?” Kairo asked.
“I didn’t say anything,” Soahn said, and went back to the novel he wasn’t really reading.
By the third day, Kairo had managed to scavenge a few bits of debris from the room: washers and cracked capacitors and a few smooth stones fallen from the old concrete above. The ‘game’ was arranging them into increasingly stupid structures until they collapsed. Soahn dubbed it ‘Signal Stones’ and Kairo joked that they should patent it.
“This one’s stable,” Kairo said, placing another washer at a precarious angle against a stone.
“It’s visibly leaning,” Soahn pointed out.
“That’s intentional.”
The tower collapsed, scattering pieces all over the floor. With a chuckle, Soahn slid one of the washers towards his pile. “I win.”
“You absolutely do not.” Kairo grinned and reached for another washer before it rolled too far away. As he did, movement snagged in the corner of his eye, and he stopped. For half a second, he wasn’t sure he’d seen anything. Then the synth’s index finger moved. The washer slipped from his hand. “Soahn,” he whispered.
“I see it.”
Shuffling on his knees, Kairo stopped before the synth, close enough now to see another tiny movement pass through his hand. The long, pale fingers flexed against the worn fabric of his coat.
“Hey,” Kairo said.
The synth’s lips parted, but nothing came out.
Kairo leaned in. “It’s okay. Take your—”
“Rayne…”
Launching himself back so fast he almost fell over, Kairo barked out a shout of surprise. “Oh! Holy shit. Hi! You’re awake. You’re actually awake.” He remembered the word the synth had spoken. “Rayne? Is that you? Are you Rayne?”
Beside him, Soahn let out a long breath.
Slowly, the synth’s eyes opened, struggling to focus at first. They moved between Kairo and Soahn before finally coming to rest on Kairo’s face.
Kairo grinned. “Hi.”
He desperately wanted to reach out; his hand got halfway there before he thought better of it and pulled back. Rayne had spent a long time down here without anyone touching him. Another thirty seconds probably wasn’t going to hurt.
Rayne was staring at him, still a little unfocused. Then he glanced at Soahn again, then the mats, the lantern, the empty ration wrappers. Reboot Song was still playing softly from the speaker.
Rayne’s face changed. “You stayed.”
Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit. Kairo suddenly had far too many feelings for somebody he’d technically met about four seconds ago. “Course we stayed,” he said, laughing because the alternative appeared to be doing something horribly embarrassing. “What, did you think we were gonna leave you down here like some tragic synth prince in a broken fairytale?”
Rayne watched him, and for one terrible moment, Kairo wondered whether humour had survived whatever happened to him.
Then Rayne smiled. Barely. Just a slow, uncertain lift at the corners of his mouth, like he was still remembering how to make the shape.
Kairo abruptly forgot every question he was planning to ask.
“I thought…” Rayne’s voice caught, and he stopped, waited, tried again. “I thought I was alone.”
“You aren’t alone,” Soahn said.
Reboot Song reached the end of its loop, and for a moment, the little room fell quiet.
Then it began again.
And they all listened.
