The outer districts of Busan are ash and silence.
It was a thriving tech city once, bright with neural signage, busy commerce and student noise. Now it’s barely more than rubble and rerouted power grids. The air is dense with smoke and residue and burnt ozone. Old banners flap like ghosts from shattered lampposts. Half a school lies collapsed in the street. The broken shells of servers spark against the curb, their cables tangled like ivy through a dead garden.
Onyx moves through it like a shadow.
TARGETING SYSTEMS ONLINE
THERMAL LOCK ENGAGED
ECHO MODE: ACTIVE
He steps around debris with precision drilled into bone, every motion smooth and silent, his augmented tendons adjusting tension automatically.
Muscle thread tension: 72%.
Targeting matrix: stable.
Pulse: 41 bpm.
System log: installed age 15.
They called it conditioning—re-coded pain, erased emotion, obedience wired through muscle and bone. But that wasn’t where it started. Not really.
It started with hunger. With winter nights where the wind crawled through broken window frames and the electricity cut out by dinnertime, hands too cold to hold a pen and a stomach that learned how to ignore itself.
He said yes because ‘yes’ meant a roof that didn’t leak, a heater that stayed on past curfew, and doors that locked from the inside instead of keeping him out.
In Daegu’s south end, becoming a weapon wasn’t betrayal. It was survival. Because softness was a weakness the streets learned how to punish.
Onyx’s right arm recalibrates with a faint hum, microservos responding to elevation change. HUD readouts flicker across his vision: status reports, field instructions, squad vitals.
“Area Z-3 is unsecured. Maintain sweep pattern.Clear suspected broadcast nodes. No local comms. No hesitation.”
His optics flash once, adjusting for movement, but there’s nothing. Just static behind the walls and the eerie residue of lives once lived.
He’s not sure what this place used to be. Maybe a coding academy, or even a music school. The Dominion’s history scrubbers had already rewritten it before he got here.
Behind him, two other soldiers fan out. He doesn’t know their names, only their designations. They are trained, quiet, and efficient. Like him.
But also not like him. Not anymore. Not since the last mission.
Silently they breach the old admin building, but the doors open too easily. Something in Onyx’s stomach shifts—instinct or memory, he can’t tell.
Up ahead, a wall has been knocked through, revealing a once-hidden stairwell descending underground. Signal intel marks it as a rebel node. A possible comms relay or transmitter. Could be tech. Could be people.
Could be both.
“Move in. No warnings. Clear the relay.”
He descends without a word.
The stairwell is narrow and dust-choked, with broken light panels flickering weakly overhead. Graffiti trails the walls, strange runes and sigils, words in marker and blood. He spots a child’s handprint and looks away.
When they reach the bottom, they stop, their boots landing soft on cracked concrete.
And that’s when Onyx hears it—faint, but unmistakable.
A rhythm.
Soft and syncopated, threading through the static hum of the dead server stacks, barely audible but real. He shifts into echo mode, his audio implants crackling and recalibrating, narrowing in.
There it is, tucked under the interference. Alive in the hush.
A beat.
One. Two. Tap-tap. Tap. Tap-tap.
And he can tell it’s not a recording or some ghost file trapped on loop. This is live. This is now.
Onyx raises a fist, signalling hold without a word, and moves forward, every step drawn tight, every sense honed to the rhythm rising just beyond the next doorway.
He steps through, into the low-lit hush of a server room long since given over to rot, where half the racks have melted into slag and the leftover cables sprawl across the floor like the bones of something forgotten.
In the far corner, crouched in a pocket of half-shadow, is a kid—small, maybe twelve, maybe younger, his small limbs drawn in tight. Cross-legged on the floor, he’s hunched over a rusted portable interface balanced against one knee, a speaker cobbled from scrap wired to a scavenged coil battery that hums faintly, off-pitch and fractured.
And even in the ruin, even in the static, the kid moves, tapping out the beat against his thigh, whispering half-formed lyrics beneath his breath like it’s the only thing holding him together.
“Signal’s dead, but I still spit fire.
They took our mic, not our choir.
Glitch in the grid, we wire it back—
I’m just a kid, but I’ve got the track.”
He doesn’t see Onyx or the others. He’s far too lost in his art.
Onyx lifts his arm, motion fluid and automatic, the targeting system already locking into place, precision honed by years of mechanical correction. The HUD blinks alive, clinical and detached, casting verdicts in clean white text.
SUSPECTED SYMPATHISER
BROADCAST IN PROGRESS
PERMISSION: GRANTED
His finger hovers over the trigger, the final link in the chain.
But something shifts in him. Not on the screen or in the readings. In him.
A quiet stutter in his pulse, a breath that feels out of step, a single thread of static curling down his spine like the system skipped a line of code and forgot how to steady itself.
His hand twitches, just enough for the microservos to kick in, recalibrating, smoothing the motion.
But it doesn’t help, because the rhythm isn’t syncing to the mission clock anymore.
It’s syncing to the beat.
To the soft, stubborn percussion of a child making music in the rubble.
Onyx’s breathing tightens, sharp and too human. Heat blooms behind his eyes, unwelcome and unfamiliar, not the product of faulty machinery but of something raw, something tangled in the ribs he’d nearly forgotten were his own.
He doesn’t pull the trigger.
He doesn’t move at all.
He just stands there, caught in the quiet gravity of a song that shouldn’t exist, a life that shouldn’t matter, and something small inside him—something he thought they’d coded out—fractures.
It doesn’t crack like a gunshot, doesn’t shatter like broken steel. It fractures softly, a hairline break in the careful veneer of obedience, a ripple in the programmed silence behind his eyes.
And it isn’t a mission he remembers.
It’s before.
The world shifts again, and footsteps sound behind him—measured, certain, untouched by hesitation.
Another soldier steps into the room, lifts their weapon, and fires without pause.
The shot cuts through the rhythm like a blade through fabric.
The song dies mid-line.
The boy’s body folds forward, small hands falling limp beside the battered speaker, which whines once in protest before collapsing into a broken loop.
Onyx doesn’t lower his weapon, only stares numbly at the body, his chest suddenly tight. Smoke drifts from the other soldier’s rifle as silence sprawls around them.
No words are spoken. No confirmation is needed. The other soldier leaves, boots crunching on fallen plaster, focus already shifted to the next objective.
But Onyx can’t move. His targeting overlay resets, status reports refreshing across his vision.
FUNCTION: STABLE
MISSION: SUCCESSFUL
EMOTION: UNREGISTERED
The system hums, efficient and undisturbed, but his muscles feel slow, limbs weighted by something the diagnostics can’t measure.
He turns at last, stepping back through the broken doorway and into the hollow corridor, pulse flat, expression blank.
No report filed. No mission summary transmitted. No justification whispered into the comms channel.
Just one unshakable thought looping behind his ribs, heavy and undeniable.
This isn’t malfunction.
It’s memory.
And without realising it, with nothing more than a hesitation and a skipped command, Onyx has taken the first step toward losing everything they built him to be.
The soldiers don’t speak on the return transport, which isn’t unusual, but tonight the silence scratches at Onyx’s senses louder than any debrief could be. The recycled air hums through decades-old vents, filtered but never clean, carrying the faint tang of oil and old circuits. Nobody removes their visors. Nobody talks about the logged kill count or the updated metrics pinging across their HUDs.
Onyx keeps his eyes on the floor, on the subtle vibration beneath his boots, the steady drone of the engines rolling beneath his feet. Rhythmic. Precise. Comforting in its predictability. Not like him—not anymore.
He expects it to come in the debrief: a reprimand, a flagged report, a red mark logged neatly against his file. But it doesn’t. There’s nothing. He’s processed, scanned, filtered through the cold indifference of Dominion diagnostics, and every system reads clean. Function: intact. Emotion: baseline. Compliance: confirmed.
The fracture doesn’t register on their charts.
But it doesn’t go unnoticed.
Later, in the diagnostics bay, Onyx sits stripped down to regulation base layers, armour folded away, boots stowed, chestplate removed, his forearms braced along the edge of the recalibration console. Blue UV light pulses across his limbs, knitting muscle fibres back into place, cycling coolant through overheating joints. His augments itch, not skin-deep, but further, behind the bone, beneath the neural threads. In places no scan can reach.
The door opens behind him, smooth and soundless, but he feels the shift in air, the weighted pause that doesn’t belong.
Footsteps approach, slow and deliberate. Then a figure steps through: one of his squadmates, still half-armoured, helmet tucked beneath one arm, no rank displayed, no name badge blinking with authority. Just the uniform. Just the stoic expression.
For a moment, there’s nothing, only the low hiss of cooling fans and the steady pulse of the diagnostics loop.
Then a voice, quiet but pointed, cutting through the noise.
“You froze.”
Onyx doesn’t lift his head.
“I logged it as signal lag,” he answers, voice flat, fingers tightening faintly against the console’s edge.
A beat stretches between them, dense enough to press against his ribs.
“That’s what you’ll say if anyone asks,” the soldier replies. “Lag. Temporary interference. Just a blip.”
The words hover, unspoken things lingering in the air. Permission. Warning. Maybe something like understanding.
The soldier steps forward, drops the helmet onto the console with a dull metallic thud, then leans in, just enough to let the next words land heavy.
“One glitch doesn’t break a system. Not always. But too many glitches…?”
He lets it trail off like an echo that refuses to settle.
Then he straightens, turns, and leaves without another glance, boots thudding softly as the door seals shut behind him.
Onyx doesn’t move.
The console hums beneath his hands, status reports flickering bright and certain—pulse lines steady, function parameters normal, combat-readiness affirmed.
But behind his eyes, the rhythm is back, tapping out a quiet insistent loop that won’t leave him alone.
One. Two. Tap-tap. Tap. Tap-tap.
The beat plays on, stubborn and relentless, and no matter how many clean scans he passes, Onyx knows the truth.
No system will ever log it.
No officer will ever file it.
That memory is his, and his alone.
Defection doesn’t come with fireworks. No grand declarations, no burning banners. Just a quiet decision made beneath failing lights.
Onyx doesn’t pack, doesn’t wait for orders, or leave a log in the squad system. He simply stands at 03:17, when the compound’s arteries slow to a crawl—when the corridors belong to night shift rotations and sleepwalkers—and chooses a direction.
Left, not right.
Outward, not inward.
He knows where the camera blinds are deepest, where the patrol drones hesitate just long enough on low batteries, how far the clearance scanners lag before refreshing their cycle. He knows because he helped design some of the patches. The first gate is easy. Familiar. Like muscle memory that’s turned against its owner.
Past that, every step sharpens.
The outer perimeter is dressed in teeth, trip beams stitched between walls, vibration sensors curled around the concrete, mines humming under frost-hardened earth. A barrier designed for flesh and fear.
But Onyx doesn’t sweat, doesn’t twitch, doesn’t shiver beneath the cold. His frame recalibrates for silence, his joints locked steady, his breath slowed to a mechanical hum. He moves like function carved into flesh, like the embodiment of obedience walking itself out of a cage.
The freight yard is alive in fragments, haulers thudding through the gloom, overhead drones tracing the ground with cold blue light, trains rattling with cargo destined for corporate outposts and warzone rebuilds. He doesn’t head for anything marked for home soil. He angles toward the east—cold regions, industrial loops, low-security ports forgotten by headquarters.
A skeletal train rumbles at the far end of the depot, bound for Eastern Europe, half-loaded with obsolete drone parts and broken machinery. Onyx slips beneath the rear carriage, slides between coolant vents and dead conduits, bracing himself against the hum of old engines and the promise of escape.
He waits, buried in metal until the world rattles into motion and the facility disappears behind him.
The journey is long and jolting. Onyx has no food but he doesn’t need it, adrenaline filling the hole in his stomach. Each stop blurs into the next.
Somewhere past Vladivostok, pressed between crates of decommissioned tech, he breaks open a diagnostics kit intended to erase enemy data traces. A Dominion admin wipe, built to scrub rebels from the network post-mortem.
Onyx stares at the device for a long time.
Then he plugs himself in.
The system stutters in confusion, unused to scrubbing loyalist code, unsure how to handle a soldier turning himself to ash.
He watches as his own ID fractures line by line, pathways unspooling into corruption.
PROCESS COMPLETE.
IDENTITY: NULL
AFFILIATION: UNREGISTERED
TRACE PATH: CORRUPTED
By Prague, the implant systems start to glitch, his feedback loops misfiring, stabilisers spitting warnings, joints sparking in protest. The synthetic threads in his limbs feel frayed. His neural net lags like a dying signal.
Near Bratislava, he trades a sliver of relay wiring—cut direct from his own augment—for shelter in a crumbling hostel where no cameras watch and no names matter. He shares floorspace with fugitives, bio-hackers, half-spliced engineers soldering stolen rigs by candlelight. Someone passes him soup without a word. Another flicks him a burner card scratched with a jagged sigil—circle split by lines, fractured at the centre.
// NODE 6 — HOLD FAST //
He doesn’t ask what it means, but he keeps it tucked beneath his sleeve, tight against the pulse that’s starting to feel like his again.
His systems remain stubborn. The targeting assist embedded in his wrist refuses to power down, pinging ghost-locks on every moving shape. His spine hums with dead relay echoes. HUD flickers bleed over his vision—commands, warnings, mission tags that no longer have masters.
They need cutting out.
All of them.
He finds an abandoned med station buried beneath a collapsed apartment block, the door rusted half-shut, but the tools inside patient and waiting. One surgical torch. Scattered scalpels dulled by time. Enough to make do.
He carefully lays everything out: tracker nodes, pulse relays, sync lines tied into bones and veins. And then he begins.
The first cut is crude, tearing through reinforced dermal mesh, cauterising as he works, metal hissing against engineered flesh. The synthetic threads writhe as they’re severed, reluctant to let go. Onyx keeps going. He barely flinches when the muscle pulls apart, when blood slicks his fingers, when the room fills with the reek of burnt polymer and iron.
Some wires pulse as they’re cut, desperate to send their last signal.
He lets them die.
By the time he reaches the deeper mods—pulse relay wound near his spine, the mission imprint embedded beneath his ribs—his hands are stained, arms shaking under their own weight. Breaking the hip anchor fractures bone plating; digging out the node makes his vision grey at the edges. His breath comes rough, his body no longer dampened by control circuits. Just raw nerve endings. Just pain.
When the last shard comes free, tangled in scar tissue and old code, he lets the scream tear loose.
It is his first sound since Busan.
The station smells of rust and rupture. His chest rises shallow against the quiet.
He seals the worst of the wounds with a cracked cauteriser. His skin bubbles. His flesh warps. The scars stitch ugly across muscle that no longer serves an empire.
Onyx sleeps on the floor, cold and alone, for sixteen hours.
When he wakes, he walks again.
And when London finally swells against the horizon, steel veined with neon, he doesn’t approach it from the surface.
He lets the streets swallow him whole, drifting below the scanners, below the lights, until the Ghost Lines take him in.
Not a soldier.
Not a number.
Just something trying to remember how to be human again.
London runs older beneath the surface.
Not the polished metro lines tourists still fumble through or the thin spines of commuter routes rattling overhead. Beneath all that is something older, where the tunnels fork and fracture, where concrete sinks into forgotten sediment, where air stagnates and dust writes its own history over everything that was supposed to be remembered.
Onyx walks through it all, letting the dark settle around him like armour.
He’s lost track of time. Days collapse into weeks, into something formless. The corridors loop inwards, narrowing until direction feels like a joke someone else forgot to explain. He keeps away from the top tunnels—there are still people up there. Wandering, watching. He’s not ready for people.
Instead, he circles lower, stumbling across a collapsed bunker wedged between broken maintenance shafts. The walls are thick, the angles slanted enough to mess with balance, but quiet enough to dull the noise in his own head. He sleeps there when the ache gets too much, spine curling against the floor’s strange tilt, letting his dreams break along unnatural angles.
His augments glitch more often now. The targeting system has gone blessedly silent, but his sensor mesh still reacts, reading shifts in pressure, subtle vibrations echoing through steel and stone. Nothing distinct. Just ghosts moving through air currents he can’t see.
It starts small.
A tremor in the floor. A tap-tap ripple trailing through dust. Once, a static burst so sharp it makes his back teeth ache.
He tries to tell himself it’s remnants of old surveillance loops, half-dead signals caught in endless repetition. He wants to believe it’s just malfunction, just the last remnants of military-grade wiring refusing to let go.
But something deeper disagrees. Something older than the metal stitched through his skin.
One night, it sharpens into sound.
It’s not quite a song. Just three fractured notes, stitched together by glitch, breaking apart before they land. Barely a ripple, but it catches against his spine, pulling taut like a forgotten wire trying to complete its circuit.
He reboots and then scans for transmitters, finding nothing but silence grinning back.
Then the floor hums again, slow and low, pulsing like a drum line muffled beneath centuries of concrete.
He doesn’t follow it, but he doesn’t turn away either.
The deeper he drifts, the stranger the city becomes.
Rust spills down server racks like old blood. Plastic flowers cling stubbornly to cracked monitors, too bright against the ruin. Someone’s forgotten drawing—a child’s tower-scape, a sun smeared in yellow crayon—hangs crooked from a junction box, edges blistered by time and heat.
He eats when he can. Keeps moving when he can’t. He doesn’t speak. The words would sound too hollow down here.
But he listens.
Sometimes, the hum shifts, distant frequencies travelling along support beams. Sometimes, he finds scraps of old tech—scanners, broadcast coils snapped in half. He strips them automatically, joints remembering what his mind tries to forget. It’s not that he’s building anything useful, but it’s something to do to keep his mind occupied.
The quiet doesn’t feel empty anymore. The distant hum makes it feel layered, like the earth itself has learned to sing back.
He doesn’t know the name of it or why it finds him in the dark.
But it’s the only thing that makes him feel real.
The relay bay hides beneath the fractured spine of a collapsed data corridor, wedged between rust-streaked piping and signage half-melted by some forgotten fire. Onyx finds it less by calculation, more by instinct—drawn along the disjointed pulse of low-frequency tremors, following the irregular heartbeat of sound stitched through steel.
Inside, the space breathes like a relic left untouched. A battered synthboard rests against a sagging terminal, coils of frayed audio wire looped beneath it like offerings. The walls lean in, heavy with grime, broken only by streaks of scrawled phrases fighting through the decay:
they tried to erase us / so we rewrote the score.
A loop hums softly in the background, more static than structure, but beneath the distortion something persists. A rhythm laced together by stubborn hands, a message folded carefully into broken soundwaves, waiting for someone to notice.
Onyx crouches near the rig, close enough to hear the edges of its struggle, close enough to feel the heat of long-decayed circuits beneath his palms, though he doesn’t touch. He just listens. Breathes.
The footsteps come softly, almost masked by the low static, but not enough to slip past the sensor mesh stitched through his skin.
Onyx shifts, pivots on instinct, but his hands stay loose, weapon forgotten.
In the threshold stands a man, taller than he expected, lean lines draped in threadbare fabric woven through with feedback threads. His hair catches the dim light—platinum streaked with faint neon shimmer, like his roots remember the sky even here in the dark. His eyes linger, steady and unblinking, holding none of the sharpness Onyx had come to expect. Not suspicion. Not fear.
Something quieter.
“Hello,” the man says, voice low, weighted like it’s been softened by listening more than speaking. “I’m Soahn.”
Onyx doesn’t answer, shoulders set, feet rooted.
“You’ve been here three nights,” Soahn continues, stepping forward without hesitation, movements unhurried. “You don’t touch the gear. You don’t reroute the feed. You just… stay.”
Onyx watches him circle the edges of the relay bay, steps carefully avoiding the broken tangles of wire, his presence calm enough to make the static feel less like a warning and more like a hum settling into rhythm.
Soahn pauses near the synthboard, fingers hovering just shy of the controls, not intruding, only acknowledging.
“I felt you,” he says, softer now, eyes not quite meeting Onyx’s, as though addressing something larger, older, than either of them. “Down in the tunnels. Like an unfinished frequency. Heavy with regret… but pulling outward, like you didn’t want to be trapped in yourself anymore.”
The words settle into the room without weight or pity, more like an observation noted aloud.
Onyx tries to steady his breathing. When did it become so hard to maintain control?
Soahn offers no demand, no question, only a quiet gesture toward the rig, hand curling slightly, palm open.
“Keep listening if you want. We don’t own the echoes down here.”
Then, without hesitation, without waiting for acknowledgment, Soahn steps back into the corridor, quiet as the beat still thudding faintly behind the static.
And just like that, he’s gone.
Onyx loses track of time in the bunker, measuring days not by clocks or schedules, but by the slow rhythm of his own breathing, by the way the dust shifts in the low light. The silence here is different than in other places—thicker, heavier, almost reverent, like even the broken walls remember something worth holding onto.
No one comes. Not at first.
Now and then, he hears faint movement from the tunnels beyond—an occasional scrape of boot against metal, the soft hush of displaced air—but nothing close enough to be threat or company. Just distant proof that something still moves beyond these walls.
He doesn’t investigate.
Instead, he stays.
Not because he’s waiting for rescue or seeking purpose, but because for the first time in years, he doesn’t feel the pull of orders or missions or programmed objectives. The loop hums quietly in the corner, flawed but unfiltered, something built by hands without military precision, and it roots him in a way nothing else has.
Onyx settles into small routines. He paces slow, deliberate circuits across the uneven floor. He repairs the barely-functional solar converter until it offers just enough charge to keep his systems from dipping too low. He drinks from the purifier tucked in the shadowed corner, the water metallic but clean enough to hold him steady. He sleeps under the warped remains of a junction box, the wires above him fizzing softly like an old lullaby.
Sometimes, he powers on the console, simply to watch the waveform roll across the cracked display—messy, glitch-ridden, imperfect… alive.
The loop never changes.
But something in him begins to.
It’s on the eighth day that a sealed ration pack appears just inside the threshold. Clean. Unopened. Untouched by rats or scavengers. Left deliberately.
On the ninth, a set of spare cables, coiled neatly, their ends wrapped in faded but intact insulation, better than anything he’s found in the scrap lanes.
And on the tenth, just as his internal clock drifts further into quiet, the loop stutters and breaks.
The console falls silent for a breath.
Then—footsteps.
It’s nearing dark when the newcomer arrives. Quick steps over the threshold, a scuff of boots on concrete, followed by a quiet curse and the unmistakable clatter of something metallic. Onyx hears the drag of a cable or the drop of a mic stand, then the low, careless hum of someone too used to filling silence to leave it empty. The tune shifts halfway through, off-key and meandering, the kind of sound that comes from a person who makes music without thinking.
Onyx’s muscles tighten on instinct, but he doesn’t move.
“Well, damn,” comes the greeting, easy and unbothered, followed by the sound of the coil being righted. “Soahn wasn’t kidding. You’re real.”
There’s no fear in the guy, no hesitation. He doesn’t reach for a weapon or back toward the door, just drops his bag beside the battered console and settles into one of the rusted chairs like he’s done it a thousand times before.
“You’ve been living down here, yeah?” the guy says, stretching his arms overhead. “Figured from the signal bursts. Every night like clockwork.”
He leans back, grin lopsided, completely at ease.
“You like it?”
Onyx’s answer comes slow, his voice rough from disuse. “It was… honest.”
And just like that, the guy’s grin shifts—brighter, sharper, like someone who’s been waiting for this exact answer.
“Yeah? That one’s mostly Rayne’s, but I helped patch it together. Kairo, by the way.”
The name hangs there a moment, unforced.
Kairo doesn’t seem to mind the silence that follows. He just kicks his boots up on the edge of the synthboard, fingers drumming out a casual rhythm, gaze flicking up like he’s already calculating beats and possible breakdowns.
“You waiting on someone?” he asks eventually.
Onyx shakes his head, slow and certain.
“Good,” Kairo says easily. “Then you should stay.”
No pitch. No explanation. Just a simple truth, dropped like a fact.
Onyx lets his gaze drift across the room—to the fractured synth rig, to the scrawled words on the wall, to the lingering echo of a loop that’s gone quiet but not forgotten. There’s no logic to it, no strategy, but something in his chest eases for the first time since defection.
He nods, just enough to be seen.
Kairo beams like that was inevitable. “Cool. We’ve got space. Just… do yourself a favour—don’t rearrange Soahn’s snack stash. He’ll feel it in his soul.”
And maybe it’s exhaustion, maybe it’s something older, but Onyx feels his mouth pull, the faintest curl of a smile that isn’t tactical or forced, but something closer to real.
For the first time in months, he breathes without counting the seconds.
The loop’s different now.
Kairo hunches over a battered beat rig near the old junction box, wire coils stacked around his arm like mismatched bracelets, a synthpad balanced precariously on his knee. He mutters to himself, fingers drumming restless rhythms that only he seems to follow, layering glitch on glitch, chasing a sound that won’t quite settle.
Soahn rests nearby, back pressed against a rusted strut, head dipped in quiet focus as he solders something delicate, the iron tip sparking blue every time it kisses metal. His movements are slower, steadier—work done for the sake of it, for the comfort of making things function again.
Rayne sits just beyond them against the far wall, quiet in a way that doesn’t demand attention but draws it anyway. His head tilts occasionally, listening.
Onyx kneels by a scorched console module. No one asked him to fix it, but the wreckage itches under his skin. There’s something about making broken things work again that soothes the restless hum beneath his ribs.
Then Kairo swears, shoving the synthpad back. “It’s not syncing. I’ve tried everything. It’s clean but… it doesn’t land.”
Soahn doesn’t even lift his head, just glances sideways and nudges the spare headset toward Onyx. “Try it.”
Onyx hesitates.
Rayne watches without blinking, calm and curious.
Then Onyx takes the headset.
The track unfurls slow—bare chords stitched over fragmented percussion, a voice threaded thinly through the static. Beautiful, but fragile. Like a song built on uneven ground.
And then the stutter comes. Not enough to break the track. Just enough to make it falter.
Onyx moves instinctively, fingertips finding the right rhythm without thought—tap, pause, tap-tap—settling into the gap, steadying the lurch into something alive.
The track holds.
Kairo’s eyes go wide. “Wait—again.”
Onyx repeats it, fingers more confident now. The rhythm lands. The glitch doesn’t vanish—it resolves, like a heartbeat refusing to be smoothed away.
The song breathes fuller. Stronger.
Kairo beams, like electricity’s just wired through his spine. “See? I knew it.”
Soahn tips his chin in quiet satisfaction. “Knew it before you.”
Rayne shifts, the faintest nod, a quiet confirmation threading through the room.
Onyx doesn’t speak. Just leaves his hand resting on the synthpad, letting the pulse hum steady beneath his skin.
For the first time in years, he feels like he’s part of something again.