The diner booth's cracked leather seats squeaked beneath them as they leaned in close, voices low and breath steaming slightly in the overactive AC. The place was mostly empty, save for a sleeping trucker two tables down and a robotic waitress whose left arm glitch-twitched every forty seconds.
Sterben traced the rim of his coffee mug with a finger.
They hadn't spoken much since they ordered. Too many eyes, too much risk. But now, finally, with their food half-eaten and the dark outside growing heavier, they started to talk.
Kira was the first to break the silence.
"We need transport. Something off-grid. No ID-linked ignition, no onboard AI, no biometric steering."
Sterben smirked faintly. "So... basically a miracle."
She tilted her head, unimpressed.
"I'm serious," he said, putting the mug down. "They'll trace every street cam, every drone sweep. We can't keep walking."
Kira tapped her nails against the table. "I know a chopshop that might still run skeleton rides. East side, old underpass. Used to service off-worlders before the reset boom."
Sterben nodded. "We can go after curfew, less surveillance."
Then he paused, staring down at his reflection in the coffee.
"I've never done anything like this before."
Kira looked up.
He didn't laugh. He didn't even smile.
"I mean," he went on, "I've spent my whole life just... existing. Trying to stay out of trouble. Blending in, even when I didn't know what I was blending into."
His voice dropped lower.
"But right now, with all this, running, hiding, stealing, I feel something I've never felt before."
He looked her in the eye.
"I feel like I matter."
Kira didn't interrupt. She let him have the moment.
"Like maybe I'm part of something bigger. Not a passenger. Not a name lost in a registry."
He touched the edge of the briefcase still tucked beneath his jacket.
"I feel... special."
Kira breathed out slowly, her expression unreadable. But not cold.
"Just don't let that feeling get you killed."
REMCORE R&D Sublevel Theta
Juna Elric hadn't left the lab in hours. Not since Ilena Mor walked out and the door sealed shut.
The data crystal sat in her palm like it radiated heat, though it was cool to the touch. She watched it flicker in the dark, then slotted it into a stripped terminal she'd reprogrammed from salvage. No net connection. No uplink. Just raw interface.
The grainy photo again: Sterben under that streetlight.
Her fingers moved fast across the console, booting layers of emulation environments, bypassing proprietary REMCORE security rings she wasn't supposed to know even existed. The protocols weren't designed for this. But that was the point.
"zero...huh," she whispered again.
Not in any registry. No Reset tags. No psychological logs. A statistical impossibility in a city like this.
A Zero.
There had always been rumors of such anomalies. Theoretically possible. Practically erased. Children born without anchors to the Reset system, systemic ghosts. The stuff of conspiracy theory channels and digital urban legends.
But this wasn't a rumor. He was real. She'd seen the briefcase sync. Just for a second.
And something synced back.
She opened her sketchpad. Not digital, real paper. That way, even if the network scanned her files again, it wouldn't catch the changes she was making. She began sketching energy transfer pathways, hypothetical sync resonance fields, and recursive imprint loops.
Her conclusion sent a jolt through her chest.
"The prototype didn't bind to him," she whispered. "It was already his."
A sudden vibration buzzed across the metal flooring. Juna froze.
Security sweep? Or just environmental?
It passed. For now.
She clicked the terminal off and slipped the crystal into a hidden socket inside her left boot. One way or another, she had to find him. Before REMCORE did.
Before Ilena turned him into another experiment.
--
Two hours later
They stood at the edge of a sloping service alley near the industrial ring. The chopshop had long since been swallowed by rust and broken neon. The sign barely flickered.
Behind the caged fencing were husks of old cars, battered, wheel-less, most stripped down to bone.
But one caught their eye. A black, armored service rover. Military retrofit, maybe. No plates. No visible ID lock.
Sterben crouched beside the door. "You're sure this one won't scream the second I breathe on it?"
"No guarantees," Kira muttered, checking the street. "But if we can hotwire the ignition relay, we're gone before it alerts a node."
Sterben inhaled, cracked his knuckles, and yanked the panel open.
The first wire sparked. The second hissed. On the third, the console lit green and the engine purred softly, like a beast waking up from sleep.
He laughed, giddy. "You have to admit that was badass."
"No, I don't," she said flatly but with the hint of a smirk.
Sterben slid into the driver's seat. "Feels weird."
"What?"
"I've never driven before."
Kira blinked. "Wait, what?"
Before she could stop him, he tapped the gas.
The vehicle jerked forward six feet, then stalled.
In the silence that followed, they both froze.
Two red-blue lights appeared at the alley's mouth.
A patrol drone hovered into view. Then two more. Followed by a full REMCORE precinct cruiser.
Kira cursed under her breath. "They're fast tonight."
"Hands where I can see them!" barked the amplified voice.
Sterben raised his slowly.
The cruiser's side hissed open. Two officers stepped out, city police, not REMCORE black suits. Their armor was clunky but real. The female officer scanned them once, then again. Her scanner beeped.
Kira's data flashed red.
"Flagged," the cop said. "That's a wanted marker."
She turned to Sterben.
"ID scan."
The handheld reader pressed against his forehead.
Nothing.
No profile. No Reset record. No history.
The silence stretched.
The male officer frowned. "That's impossible."
His partner shook her head. "Not even a null-code. It's like he doesn't exist."
The two officers exchanged a glance. One reached for cuffs.
Sterben didn't resist. Neither did Kira.
But as they were led into the cruiser, the scanner in the dashboard blinked once more, quietly, almost apologetically.
[ZETA SIGNAL, ANOMALY SYNC DETECTED]
[Forwarding to REMCORE.]
The holding room was white.
Not clinical. Not padded. Just… white.
Walls without lines. Corners without edges. Light without a source.
Sterben sat in the center, wrists still bound, feet uncuffed but watched.
There were no visible cameras, no mirrored glass, just the hum of artificial silence. He didn't know how long he'd been here. No clock. No change in temperature. They were good at this.
The door hissed open.
Two figures entered. One wore the uniform of a senior REMCORE officer, platinum trim, black collar. The other was less distinct. Glasses. Clean face. A slate tablet in hand.
The officer spoke first. "Sterben Stein."
He didn't answer.
The one with the tablet stepped forward. "You have no Reset ID. No citizen logs. No network anchor points. Your only traceable medical record is a fracture from a clinic seven years ago. Everything else is… absent."
Sterben met his eyes. "So?"
"So," the officer said coldly, "people like you don't exist."
"Then why am I in your chair?"
A pause. The officer tilted his head slightly, as if analyzing a puzzle with missing pieces.
"You activated a device tied to a restricted program. Zero-Point Sync Technology. No civilian has access to that level of prototype hardware, especially not someone off-grid."
"I didn't activate anything," Sterben said. "I was just there."
"You were there. The prototype pulsed. We caught the data ripple."
"I don't know what that means."
The officer stepped closer. "The girl you were with. Kira Gens. She was classified deceased twice in the last year. You were with her. You're not a bystander. You're an anomaly."
Sterben's mouth tightened. "I'm not one of your Reset experiments."
"No," the other man said quietly. "You're something worse."
They turned. The door hissed shut behind them.
Sterben sat there in the lightless white, heart thudding. His wrists ached. His back itched. He wanted to scream, but it wouldn't matter. The room wouldn't echo.
They weren't asking questions because they needed answers.
They were measuring him. Waiting to see if he bent. Broke. Shifted into something they could define.
But he wouldn't.
He'd never been part of the system, and now that the system was looking at him like a disease, he realized something that had been growing since the moment the briefcase lit up:
He didn't need their permission to matter.
Elsewhere, Kira crouched in the maintenance crawlspace beneath the precinct's second floor.
She wiped grease from her hands, jaw clenched, breath low. The wrist scanner she'd snagged from the supply room blinked green against her palm.
She'd barely dodged interrogation by feigning a tech sync error, using a scrambled Reset log she'd crafted months ago for a mission that never finished. Her prints were clean. Her face flagged but passed under "corrupted data exception."
Sterben wasn't so lucky.
She looked down at the floor panel beneath her. It hummed faintly. Embedded tracking relays and detention logs. His cell was two stories down, past five biometric locks, internal checkpoint A, and at least eight REMCORE officers.
She couldn't brute force this.
But she didn't have to.
She pulled the cracked briefcase from her satchel. It was dormant again. But when she touched its surface,just briefly, it flickered. Once.
A single heartbeat pulse.
The Zero Sync still recognized him.
She exhaled.
They'd take him deeper. Not just jail.
REMCORE had facilities for anomalies. Places off-books. He'd vanish before the next day started.
Unless she broke protocol. Broke everything.
Kira slung the satchel across her shoulder and crawled forward.
Back in the white room, the walls shifted.
Lines formed. Color returned, barely.
Sterben blinked as the back wall opened like an eye.
A new figure stepped in.
Not a soldier. Not an interrogator.
She wore white. Sleeves rolled. Pale, sharp face. Her voice, when she spoke, was calm.
"I'm Dr. Ilena Mor."
He said nothing.
"You probably don't know what you are yet. That's okay. I don't need you to know. I just need you to respond."
She stepped closer, placed something on the table.
A thin band of metal. Like a crown. Or a trap.
"Put it on," she said.
"What is it?"
"A test."
He hesitated. But something in her gaze was different than the others. Not cold. Not hostile.
Clinical.
He reached out. His fingers brushed the band.
And the room pulsed.
Lights flickered. A sudden surge of pressure rolled through the air like thunder underwater.
Dr. Mor's smile widened.
"There it is."
Sterben dropped the band, gasping. "What… what did I do?"
"You didn't do anything," she said.
"You are."