II – The Shadow Below
The maintenance tunnels beneath the Central Sector Dome Settlement were older than the dome itself — skeletal remnants of an earlier civilization, patched and welded over decades until no one could tell where the old world ended and the new one began.
Condensation dripped from rusted pipes. The floor hummed faintly from the Thorium currents running through conduits just below the surface.
And there, crouched beside a relay node glowing with faint crimson light, Talgat worked in silence.
The detonator's pulse mirrored his heartbeat — slow, deliberate, but uneasy.
A low, distorted voice crackled through his comm implant:
"Status report."
Talgat froze for half a breath. The voice was unmistakable — harsh, composed, with that hollow authority that made obedience feel like inevitability.
"Grid ready," Talgat answered, voice tight. "But… the east sector's still occupied. Civilians. Non-combatants. There are kids down here."
Korren's reply came like frost on metal.
"Then free them from their cages. The world is already dying — mercy is just slow decay."
Talgat stared at the red node pulsing before him. "You want control, Korren. That's all this is. You're no better than the ones who built these walls."
A pause — long enough to hear static breathing on the other end.
"Control," Korren said finally, "is the only mercy left. Execute on reset."
The line cut.
He sat back against the cold wall, jaw locked tight.
His reflection shimmered faintly in the relay's metallic casing — a face both soldier and stranger.
In the hum of the Thorium lines, his thoughts drifted unbidden to a memory:
A dirt road. A burning convoy.
And a boy — his younger self — screaming for parents who never came back.
He remembered the weight of that loss not as sound, but as silence.
The same kind that now filled the tunnel.
He turned the detonator over in his hand.
The digital display blinked 03:11 A.M. — the precise time Korren ordered the strike.
He muttered under his breath, "I was their age when the world took everything. Maybe it's time to stop helping it finish the job."
A faint sound echoed from the upper walkway — laughter, high and careless.
Two children.
They shouldn't even be here.
Maintenance shifts ended hours ago.
He stood, muscles tense. Through a grated passage, he saw them — a pair of small silhouettes chasing a drone that projected tiny bursts of artificial starlight.
He closed his eyes, exhaled once. His thumb hovered over the detonator's safety pin — then stopped.
"…Damn it."
He pulled the relay chip from the core, disconnecting the primary trigger. The light faded to orange. The timer froze.
Then, his comm cracked again — but it wasn't Korren this time.
The voice was smoother, colder.
"You think you can disobey him, soldier?"
Talgat froze. "Daren?"
"Your hesitation will get us all killed. Zhang's system updates in fifteen minutes — if the bomb doesn't go off before that, the data breach shuts itself. You'll lose your only chance to reset the grid."
Talgat turned toward the voice's direction — though it came only from static.
"How the hell are you even on this frequency?"
"Because I own it," Daren replied, tone dripping with smug certainty. "You're just an instrument, Talgat. Don't pretend you've got a say in the song."
"Guess that makes you the fool holding the flute," Talgat muttered.
"Careful. Instruments break when they stop playing."
The line went dead.
Far above the tunnels, the night stormed quietly across the wasteland.
In the ruins north of CSDS, Nyla sat perched atop a cracked watchtower, her scope glinting faintly under the auric haze. Through her bionic eye, she could see the faint heat signatures flicker beneath the dome's outer shell — drones, guards, and one she recognized immediately: Talgat.
Her voice came through the comm line to Korren.
"Perimeter stable. No external movement. But… he's down there again."
Korren's tone sharpened through the static. "He's supposed to be."
"Not like this," she said quietly. "Something's changed. He's been off since that run with the boy and the android. He's questioning orders."
"That boy again," Korren muttered. "Every weakness starts with sympathy. He's forgetting who he serves."
"Maybe he's remembering who he used to be," she said.
A pause — the kind that always meant Korren was smiling without warmth.
"You were raised under fire, Nyla. You should know: remembering is how you die."
"I also remember what mercy looks like," she whispered. "And it's the only thing that ever made us human."
Korren's reply came quiet, but with venom.
"Then it's a disease. And if he's infected, I'll cure him myself."
The comm clicked off.
Nyla sat in silence, wind brushing her hair, her finger resting on the rifle's trigger.
Her bionic eye flickered once, zooming on the faint glimmer of Thorium light below.
She could see Talgat's outline in the maintenance shaft — one man against two collapsing worlds.
"Hold on, idiot," she murmured. "Just hold on a little longer."
Down in the tunnel, Talgat stared at the detonator again — the timer now frozen between two choices.
He muttered, "If I can't save them, I'll save what's left."
He disconnected the second line — the one leading to the grid's override panel — and stuffed the relay into his coat pocket.
Behind him, the walls thrummed louder. Somewhere, a secondary system was booting.
He looked up toward the humming sound, a faint vibration spreading through the steel.
"Someone's bypassing the main circuit," he realized. "But I just—"
The console above his head flickered to life again. A new signal had been inserted, spliced through the network he'd tried to disable.
And though he didn't yet know it, that was Daren's override, looping through the merchant tier and back into the maintenance grid — the spark that would ignite everything.
Talgat's breath hitched as he recognized the code signature.
"Daren… you bastard—"
A faint tremor rippled through the floor.
The Thorium conduits began to hum at a higher pitch.
And far above, in Zhang Bo's command tower, alarms began to wake.