I thought I was still underground when I first opened my eyes.
Everything was gray. Windless. The air buzzed with static.
But then I saw the sky.
Not the stars—not the kind I remembered, anyway. Just a dim grid of surveillance satellites blinking red behind layers of artificial smog. The ground beneath me wasn't fractured stone anymore; it was black tile, scorched and humming like it remembered a war. I wasn't in the Nexus anymore.
I was on the surface.
And somehow… I wasn't supposed to be here.
I stayed low, slipping between shadowed walls and defunct rail lines, letting my body do what it had learned underground—move like a ghost, like a memory no one could catch. The ruins of the city loomed quietly around me. Not abandoned. Watched. The Harbingers had turned this place into something else.
Everything was humming. Not like a machine. Like a heartbeat.
Her heartbeat.
I don't know how I knew it was her. Maybe it was just wishful thinking—grasping for something real in all this static. But the energy pulling at my chest felt like Aaliah. Distant, muffled… but real. I followed it.
A ruined cathedral of glass and steel rose from the wasteland like the ribcage of a fallen god. It wasn't marked on any Sentinel map I remembered, but its walls were pulsing with Nexus-threaded tech—clean, bright, alive.
A Harbinger facility. Mainline.
I slipped in through a breach in the lower structure—no alarms, no motion sensors. Either they weren't expecting anyone to survive what I'd become… or they thought I wouldn't dare return.
The interior was worse.
It was too quiet.
No guards. Just corridors lined with cooling vents and glowing conduits. The silence wasn't absence. It was control. Everything here ran on energy. Something deep and powerful, channeling out from a central core.
Something alive.
I pressed against the wall as voices echoed down the hall. Two of them.
One mechanical. Rhythmic. The other—panicked, human.
"The interface is overextending her limits. Her neural readouts—"
"Are irrelevant," the other voice said flatly. "Stability requires sacrifice. You agreed to that, Doctor."
"She's not a capacitor, Apauex. She's a person—"
"Incorrect. She is a constant. Constants do not protest."
I didn't breathe.
Apauex. The Grand Calculus.
He was here. Not through a screen or a broadcast—but in the room. And he was working with… Sentinels?
The two voices moved down a corridor I couldn't follow, sealed behind shifting walls of light and steel. I counted to five. Then I moved.
The energy pull grew stronger with every step. Left. Down. A spiraling ramp that didn't exist on any blueprint I remembered. The facility was alive—reconfiguring itself around me. Trying to lead me somewhere. Or trap me.
I kept going.
A series of containment chambers flickered past. One filled with black smoke that coiled against the glass. Another held the armor of a hero I'd fought beside in Phase Two—just the armor. Nobody. No explanation.
This place was a graveyard pretending to be a laboratory.
Then I saw it.
A circular vault. Unmarked. Sealed by nothing but silence.
I placed my hand against the door.
It opened.
Light spilled out—not blinding, not harsh. Warm. Like sunrise. Like her.
The chamber wasn't like the others. It didn't hum. It breathed.
And in the center—suspended in radiant golden circuitry, veins of energy stretching out like starlight—was Aaliah.
I took one step in, and the temperature shifted.
Not heat. Pressure.
Her body was weightless in the field. Her skin shimmered with pale current. Her hair drifted as if underwater, eyes closed, face calm—too calm.
I reached for her—
And stopped.
A projection flared beside her containment.
VITAL LINK: SSTABLE. WARNING POWER GRID INTEGRITY DEPENDENT ON SUBJECT DISCONNECT = SYSTEM COLLAPSE = SUBJECT TERMINATION
No.
No, no, no.
My hand dropped.
This was the power source. This is what they were using her for. Aaliah—my Aaliah—was the battery keeping the Harbinger sector alive. Every drone. Every defense grid. Every cell. Her.
If I unplugged her, I'd kill her.
If I didn't… they'd keep her like this. Forever.
My knees hit the floor. I wasn't even sure when I fell.
I stared at her, willing her eyes to open. Willing something to make this a dream.
But it was real.
She was right here.
And I couldn't save her.
Not yet.
Footsteps echoed from behind me—distant, but closing.
I stood.
No more running.
No more hiding.
I'd find a way.
I always had.
I didn't leave the chamber right away.
I just sat there, staring at her—this girl made of light and wires and everything I'd sworn to protect. The field around her pulsed like a heartbeat, in sync with the hum I could feel under my skin. Nexus current. Aaliah's current. Feeding the entire sector like a soul stretched out over a grid.
Every second I watched her hover there, still and silent, I hated myself more for letting them take her in the first place.
And I hated them for turning her into this.
Eventually, I stood.
The warning message was still burning on the display.
DISCONNECT = TERMINATION.
I burned it out with a single pulse of energy from my fingertips.
They weren't going to decide how this story ends.
The facility was bigger than I thought.
The corridors seemed to loop back on themselves, like some algorithmic maze that shifted with every wrong turn. I mapped it in my head the way the Nexus taught me to—by rhythm, by pull, by pressure.
Sometimes the walls whispered when I passed. Not voices. Just… echoes.
I reached a control wing lined with terminals—each labeled with dense strings of Harbinger glyphs and Sentinel file codes. A technician sat slouched at one station, headphones on, oblivious. I ghosted behind him and tapped into a side console. Not even password protected.
PROJECT CAELUS.SUBJECT ALIAH – ACTIVE VITAL LINK – STABILITY: 99.7%TERRITORY GRID STATUS: OPERATIONALCO-DEVELOPMENT CLEARANCE: APAUEX // SENTINEL SCIENCE DIVISION
The cursor blinked.
And blinked.
I didn't breathe.
They knew what they were doing. This wasn't an accident or a miscalculation or a panic move. They designed it. Together. Harbingers and Sentinels, locked at the spine.
Aaliah was the battery keeping the war machine running.
The urge to punch my hand through the monitor boiled up hard, but I swallowed it. Noise would get me killed. Or worse—get her killed.
Instead, I copied the schematic to my wristband and slipped out the side door.
The hallway ended at a viewing deck.
I didn't know it until I stepped into the open and saw it—an entire engine spinning beneath glass. A sun forged in metal. The Nexus reactor.
It was tethered directly to Aaliah's chamber by thick coils of energy-wrapped steel. Everything—every Harbinger operation on the continent—was coming from her.
And that's when I heard him.
"Progress," said a voice behind the glass, "is built upon constants. We do not move forward by choice. We are pushed."
Apauex stood on the upper balcony, flanked by two scientists and a Harbinger tactician in chrome armor. His hands were clasped behind his back, like a conductor waiting for the music to rise.
"Pain is not failure. It is measurement. Every tremor of her pulse recalibrates our instruments. She is not suffering. She is synchronizing."
A Sentinel scientist spoke up.
"But the adaptive fields… they're showing foreign signatures. Something's interfering. We think he's back."
Apauex smiled.
It wasn't a grin. It was a solution.
"Good," he said. "Let him in."
I ran.
Not because I was afraid. Because I was about to lose control.
I didn't make it far before my hands started shaking. I ducked into a maintenance subhall and slammed my back against the wall. The light panels above me flickered in tune with my heartbeat.
I wasn't sure if it was rage or grief anymore.
I'd come all this way, clawed back through the dark, burned out half my soul for a chance to save her—and now I was standing in the heart of the enemy's machine, knowing the one thing I couldn't do was the one thing she needed me to.
I couldn't pull her out.
Not without killing her.
"There has to be another way," I whispered, palms pressed to the floor, drawing on the energy lines humming below.
The Nexus answered with silence.
I don't know how long I sat there.
But when I stood again, I knew what I had to do.
I was going to break into the primary control core. I was going to learn how this system was built—tear into its bones if I had to. I didn't care if it took a day, a week, or if I died doing it.
Aaliah wasn't staying in that machine.
Not if I had a say in it.
And I always did.