The tremor hit before the system alarms could catch it. A sharp crack split the corridor, metal shearing somewhere deep in the tunnels, and then everything came down at once.
Onyx didn’t remember moving. Only pressure, a rush of shattered air, the crush of earth where ceiling used to be. Light fractured; heat slammed through him. The world broke apart and swallowed him whole.
When he came back to himself, the air tasted of iron and dust. A single emergency strip flickered weakly overhead, throwing sickly light across the rubble. The relay junction they’d come to inspect was buried under half a wall. His sensors scrambled through debris readings, one arm refusing to respond beyond the elbow.
He ran a quick systems scan, saw the left forearm flashing red across his HUD. Servo lock. Great.
Movement stirred a few feet away.
“Okay,” Minjae’s voice rasped through the dust. “That was not in the briefing.”
Relief punched through Onyx before he could stop it. He twisted, forcing the rubble off his legs. “Status?”
“Cranky. Breathing. Possibly covered in my own sarcasm.” Minjae coughed, sitting up. “You?”
Onyx flexed his shoulder, the damaged limb twitching like an irritated animal. “Functional enough.”
The tunnel groaned again, a slow metallic protest that made both of them freeze. Onyx’s internal compass flickered and failed. He didn’t like that. Losing orientation made him feel… vulnerable.
Minjae squinted through the dim light, brushing dirt from his hair. “Comms are down, yeah?”
Onyx tested the earpiece, but it was dead. “For now.”
“So we’re doing this the old-fashioned way.” Minjae kicked a loose panel aside and whistled low. “Gotta say, not your best field trip idea.”
“Wasn’t supposed to be a field trip.” Onyx glanced around. “We’ll need to mark a safe zone before the secondary collapse.”
Minjae rolled his eyes but started moving, clearing smaller debris with quick, sure hands. For all his jokes, he knew exactly what he was doing—ex-corporate efficiency underlaid by an engineer’s brain.
Onyx joined him, one hand digging through a tangle of cables. The prosthetic in his other arm stuttered again. The smell of overheated circuitry hit the air.
Minjae frowned. “That doesn’t sound healthy.”
“It’s fine.”
“Sure,” Minjae said. “If fine smells like burning metal.”
Onyx ignored him, but the tremor in his grip betrayed him.
Minutes passed like that — the two of them working in the near-dark, trading barbs between the clatter of falling dust. It wasn’t until Onyx tried to move a section of pipe that the limb finally seized. The servo screamed and locked, sparks snapping across his sleeve.
He bit off a curse and knelt hard against the wall.
Minjae was beside him in seconds. “Hey. Don’t you dare fry yourself; Soahn will kill me for letting you melt. You’re one of his favourite hybrids.”
Onyx’s jaw tightened. “It’s a malfunction. I can handle it.”
“Yeah, I can see that,” Minjae said dryly, watching another spark jump. “Move your hand before you cook the joint.”
He reached toward the arm; Onyx flinched away automatically.
“Don’t.”
Minjae’s eyebrows lifted. “You planning to wrestle it into compliance, or are we gonna fix it like rational people?”
Onyx glared at him, breathing sharp. The limb was locked in a half-clenched fist, metal hot against his skin. He hated this — the helplessness, the reminder that his own strength could betray him.
Minjae knelt anyway, voice gentler. “You’ve patched me up more than once, you know. Let me return the favour.”
The words cut through the wall of Onyx’s pride. He hesitated, then slowly extended the arm. The heat shimmered between them, faint ozone curling through the air.
Minjae worked quickly, scanning the servo housing. His touch was careful, almost reverent — not out of fear, but respect for what it was. “You should’ve told me it was running this hot,” he muttered. “You’re basically holding a furnace.”
“Didn’t seem relevant.”
“Everything that might explode is relevant.”
That earned a tiny, reluctant huff of laughter. Minjae glanced up and caught it, lips quirking. “See? You do have a sense of humour.”
“Limited use,” Onyx said.
The light above them flickered. Dust drifted down again, fine as ash.
Minjae adjusted one of the power cables with a tool pulled from his jacket. “If I can vent the charge, it should stabilise—”
He was cut off by a low rumble echoing through the tunnel. Both of them froze.
“—Or not.” Minjae winced. “Guess we stay put for a bit.”
Onyx nodded once, scanning for any viable exits. None. Just the sound of their own breathing and the faint whine of failing power.
They settled side by side against the wall, the light stuttering overhead.
Minjae’s voice came quieter this time. “You think they’ll find us soon?”
“They’ll look,” Onyx said. “But it could take hours.”
“Right.” A pause. “So… we talk, then. Otherwise, I’m going to start narrating the slow demise of my sanity.”
Onyx didn’t answer. But his head tilted fractionally, a silent concession.
Minjae smiled faintly into the dark. “Knew I’d win that one.”
The quiet came in waves, the kind that didn’t really feel like silence but sound folded into itself. The only things alive were the emergency light’s pulse and the faint ticking from Onyx’s damaged servo.
Minjae crouched across from him, sleeves rolled up, a small toolkit splayed out on the ground. “I still can’t get over the fact you carry a wrench set but no snacks,” he muttered, blowing dust from a connector. “Who does that?”
“Snacks compromise alertness.”
“Sure, soldier. Keep telling yourself that.”
Onyx watched him work. Minjae's fingers were deft and unhurried. For someone who lived on jokes, he turned into pure focus when he had something broken in front of him. It was almost comforting — the soft click of tools, the controlled rhythm.
The faint light caught on the old burn scars tracing Minjae’s hands. Onyx had seen the lines before plenty of times, but he’d never really looked at them. They mapped over Minjae’s knuckles like pale circuitry, the skin pinched and uneven. Onyx knew some of the story — the escape, the fire, the servers gone up in smoke — but Minjae had never spoken of it in detail.
For a moment, he found himself wondering what it had cost. What those hands had done to buy freedom.
Minjae didn’t notice the scrutiny; he was lost in the rhythm of repair, focused and calm. Onyx turned his gaze away, the thought settling somewhere deep and uncomfortable — admiration tangled with something quieter and harder to name. He shifted his damaged arm closer, the metal’s heat easing slightly under Minjae’s touch. Sparks had scorched the plating along the forearm, blackened in places.
Minjae let out a low whistle. “You’ve been running this joint past safe threshold for a while.”
Onyx lifted a shoulder. “It performs.”
“Yeah, until it doesn’t.” Minjae pried the panel loose with a small groan of metal. “You know, I always thought you’d have some fancy self-repair protocol, or a secret Dominion drone that follows you around with a spanner.”
“I prefer control.”
“Control’s good,” Minjae said. “Until it eats you alive.”
Onyx silently assessed that statement. It wasn't wrong. He frowned.
Minjae smirked. “Hey, don’t give me that. I get it. You and I both play god with our own disasters. Yours just involve more metal.”
Onyx stayed quiet. A bead of coolant rolled from the joint and sizzled out.
Minjae kept working as if nothing had happened. “You ever think about it? What you’d be like without all the upgrades?”
“No.” The answer came fast. Then, after a beat: “I don’t remember a version of me before this.” This was a lie, but it was easier.
Something in the way he said it made Minjae still. He didn’t push. He just nodded, adjusting a filament with the tip of a screwdriver. “Guess I know that feeling.”
Onyx looked at him properly then. “You?”
Minjae gave a half laugh. “What, you think I was born with the personality of a security breach? NuYu rewrote more code in me than I care to remember. I left before they could finish the job.”
He snapped a connection back into place; the servo twitched.
Onyx’s voice dropped a little. “And you joined us.”
Minjae shrugged. “Better ghosts than gods.”
They both sat with that for a moment, the tunnel around them humming faintly, like even the walls were listening.
The repair was nearly done now. Minjae’s hands hovered over the exposed servos, steady despite the fine dust still drifting from the ceiling. “All right, big guy. Last connection. You’re gonna feel it.”
The surge kicked through the limb like a lightning bolt. Onyx’s fingers spasmed once before settling. He exhaled through his teeth, low and controlled.
Minjae grinned. “See? Look at that. Didn’t explode. Ten out of ten.”
“Eight,” Onyx corrected. “You skipped calibration.”
“God, you really are impossible.”
They both laughed — quietly, tiredly. The sound echoed oddly in the confined space, too human against all that metal.
The light dimmed again. A minute passed before Minjae spoke. “You could’ve escaped sooner, you know. Back when you first started doubting your superiors. No one would’ve blamed you for running.”
Onyx’s jaw flexed. “Leaving wouldn’t have stopped the program.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Onyx didn’t answer at first. The faint blue gleam from the servo cast long shadows across his face, picking out the human skin from the metal seams. “If I’d gone,” he said finally, “they would’ve taken someone else. Someone younger. Easier to rebuild.”
Minjae sat back, breath catching. “So you stayed to make sure no one else got turned into a weapon.”
Onyx’s eyes stayed on the tunnel wall, unfocused. “I didn’t stay long enough. Perhaps I could’ve… made more of a difference.”
It was Minjae’s turn to fall silent. The weight of it pressed against his ribs — the realisation that behind all that discipline was a man running on guilt and duty like they were oxygen.
He reached for the arm again, tightening one last bolt. “You know,” he said lightly, “most people just take up knitting when they want redemption.”
That drew a sound. Not quite a laugh, more like the ghost of one. “Knitting requires softness.”
“Ha! There’s the Onyx I know.”
The light flickered again. Far away, a faint echo of comms crackled through the dust.
Onyx tilted his head, listening. “Signal.”
Minjae tapped the side of his earpiece. “It’s weak, but yeah — Soahn’s probably panicking.”
“Then we wait.”
Minjae stretched out his legs, leaning back against the wall. “Could be hours. You realise you’re stuck with me.”
Onyx glanced down at him, the corner of his mouth twitching. “I’ve endured worse.”
“Flattery will get you everywhere,” Minjae murmured, smiling into the dark.
For the first time since the collapse, Onyx let himself relax. The tension in his shoulders eased, his breathing slowed, and the hum of the repaired servo matched the low rhythm of Minjae’s breathing, two frequencies settling into the same range.
They didn’t speak again for a long time. The tunnel held them in its dim, steady pulse, and for once, neither of them tried to fill the silence.
By the time the faint comms signal returned, the air in the tunnel had turned thick and stale. Dust shimmered in the beam of Minjae’s portable light, suspended like fading stars. Every sound—the shift of debris, the low hum of Onyx’s repaired servo—seemed amplified, trapped inside a sealed world that didn’t want to let them go.
Minjae knelt by the buried relay junction, stripped down to his undershirt, skin streaked with grime and faint arcs of blue light from the circuits in his neck. “If I can get the core coupler back online, we might have power for a ping,” he said, voice low but oddly calm. He glanced up at Onyx. “You sure this thing won’t blow us sky high?”
“Seventy percent sure.”
“Wow. Comforting.”
Onyx crouched beside him, prying at a metal panel with his newly steady hand. “Cables first.”
Minjae passed him a frayed bundle. “You’re lucky you fixed that arm, because I am not strong enough for this nonsense.”
Onyx adjusted the wiring, his movements methodical. “You are resourceful enough.”
“Don’t butter me up while we’re still buried alive.”
He caught the ghost of a smirk on Onyx’s face—so faint it could’ve been a trick of the light—and something about it steadied him. They’d both spent too long pretending they didn’t need people, yet here they were, breathing the same recycled air, keeping each other alive.
When the coupler finally clicked into place, the relay shuddered, throwing sparks. A thin blue arc of energy raced along the floor conduit and disappeared into the dark.
The sudden hum filled the tunnel, soft and low, the sound of power returning.
Minjae sat back, exhaling hard. “There we go. Little heartbeat.” He leaned against the wall, looking up at the strip of light that flickered back to life overhead. “God, I missed that sound.”
Onyx watched the glow pulse against Minjae’s cheekbones, the contrast between his bright irreverence and the exhaustion beneath it. “Why did you stay?” he asked quietly.
Minjae blinked. “What?”
“With us,” Onyx said. “After you left NuYu. You could have disappeared. Started over.”
Minjae stared at the floor for a long moment. “Started over as what? A ghost with good Wi-Fi?” His smile was thin. “I spent years helping build the system that broke us. The least I can do is help the ones who still believe it can be rewritten.”
“Redemption.”
“Survival,” Minjae corrected. Then, softer: “But redemption sounds prettier.”
The relay hummed louder, a rising pitch that filled the silence between them. Onyx’s voice cut through it, low and even. “You don’t owe us anything.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Minjae said, glancing at him. “I owe you all everything. You gave me a place to stop running.”
Onyx’s expression didn’t change, but something in his eyes did—a flicker, faint but undeniable. “And you think staying will erase what was done to you?”
“No.” Minjae wiped a streak of dust from his face. “But it makes it matter less.”
They fell quiet again, the hum of the relay wrapping around them. For a moment, Onyx listened—not to the machine, but to the evenness of Minjae’s breathing beside him. A rare stillness.
Minjae nudged his boot lightly against Onyx’s. “Your turn. Why’d you stay?”
Onyx didn’t answer right away. He stared at the lit conduit running along the wall, at the faint reflection of his metal fingers in it. “Because fighting for E.V.E.N is different,” he said at last. “It’s the first time I’ve chosen what my strength is for.”
Minjae let out a slow breath. “That’s the most Onyx answer imaginable.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Yeah,” Minjae said softly. “That’s what makes it hurt.”
The relay blinked again, stabilising to a steady pulse. In the thin blue light, the two of them sat shoulder to shoulder—one built of discipline, the other of defiance—held together by shared exhaustion and the fragile rhythm of survival.
Minjae tilted his head back against the wall. “When we get out of here, I’m filing for hazard pay.”
Onyx almost smiled. “Denied.”
“Figures.” Minjae closed his eyes. “Then at least you’re buying the first round.”
Onyx’s voice came quieter, almost like a promise. “Deal.”
They waited like that, side by side in the flickering light, until the comms crackled properly this time, and Soahn’s panicked voice burst through the static.
“Hello? Guys? Hold tight—we’ve got Hollow ops here to help get you out.”
Minjae’s grin lit up the dark. “Told you they’d find us.”
Onyx gave a small nod, already scanning for the direction of the rescue signal. “Time to go home.”
The Hollow’s rescue team cut through the last barrier at dawn. Cold air poured into the tunnel, sharp and alive after hours of stale breath and dust. The smell of rain filtered down from above — petrichor and metal, the scent of the world returning.
Onyx climbed out first. He braced one hand on the edge of the breach, servos whining softly, and pulled himself through. The light hit him like impact: too bright, too clean. Behind him, Minjae swore under his breath and squinted, shielding his eyes with a grimy sleeve.
Soahn was there the second they surfaced, kneeling in the mud, relief breaking through his usual quiet. “We lost your signal for twelve hours.”
“Yeah,” Minjae rasped, brushing dust off his arms. “Next time, we’re installing a skylight.”
Onyx’s expression didn’t change, but Soahn caught the quick once-over he gave Minjae — checking for injuries, not trusting his own relief until he saw the other man still standing.
“Arm’s stable,” Minjae said lightly, noticing. “No spontaneous combustion.”
Onyx grunted, which in Onyx-speak probably meant thank you.
Minjae stretched, grimacing at the stiffness in his back. “You know, I think I’m gonna start charging for near-death experiences. Premium subscription service.”
“Refund denied,” Onyx said.
That earned him a laugh — genuine this time, a sound that carried further than it should have.
Rayne helped haul the last of the equipment up. Onyx took a step back, giving the team room, but Minjae lingered beside him. They stood together on the broken lip of the tunnel, watching dawn bleed over the city’s skeleton skyline. The Ghost Lines hummed faintly beneath their feet, alive again.
Minjae glanced sideways. “You ever notice how it’s always sunrise when we crawl out of a hole?”
Onyx didn’t answer. The wind caught his hair, scattering dust across the gleam of his metal arm.
“Feels like a metaphor,” Minjae added.
“Too obvious,” Onyx said.
“Ha! And they say you don’t have a sense of humour.”
A rare, almost-smile tugged at the corner of Onyx’s mouth. The air between them carried a new quiet — not the wary kind they’d had before, but something settled. A shared rhythm found in the dark and carried into light.
When Soahn called them back toward the transport, Minjae gave a lazy salute. “Come on, soldier. Time to go home before I start writing poetry about you.”
Onyx started to walk, then paused, looking back once at the collapsed tunnel. “You’d make it rhyme,” he said.
Minjae grinned, falling into step beside him. “Always.”
They didn’t speak again as they rejoined the others, the morning light glinting off steel and dust. Outwardly, nothing seemed different — same banter, same exhaustion, same ghosts in their eyes.
But as they moved toward the waiting transport, the distance between them was gone. Whatever had cracked open beneath the earth hadn’t closed again. It just hummed there quietly, a new signal, impossible to hear unless you were listening carefully enough.