Maria moved deeper into the underground tunnels far beneath the King's Gambit, her boots echoing softly against the damp stone floor. The air grew heavier the further she went, thick with the smell of old moisture, rust, and something metallic that lingered at the back of her throat. She had been walking for hours now, her tablet held in one hand while the other gripped her collapsed staff. The map on her screen updated slowly as she marked each new section, adding lines and notes with quick taps of her wet fingers.
The tunnels stretched on endlessly. Some sections were nothing but long, empty corridors of bare stone, their walls marked by faint tool scars from whatever machinery had carved them decades ago. Others opened into random rooms that offered little value. One held nothing but dust and a single broken chair tipped on its side. Another contained stacks of old crates, their wooden lids pried open long ago, revealing only crumpled packing paper and rusted metal parts that no longer fit anything useful. She paused in each one just long enough to scan for anything that might help her navigate or hide, then moved on.
"Keep going," she muttered to herself. "North sector has to connect somewhere down here."
Time lost meaning in the constant artificial dimness. Emergency lights flickered every thirty meters, casting weak orange pools that barely reached the ceiling. She passed through a series of chambers filled with junk—discarded pipes, tangled wiring, and broken monitoring equipment from some forgotten maintenance era. In one larger room she found rows of empty metal shelves, their surfaces covered in a thin layer of grime. She ran her fingers along one shelf, noting the temperature and humidity, then added the details to her growing map.
Hours continued to slip by. Her legs ached from the earlier chase and the long glide, but she refused to stop. The purple marker on her tablet showed the passageways leading toward the north sector of the Gambit, but the route twisted and turned more than she expected. She climbed over a collapsed section of tunnel where rubble blocked half the path, squeezing through with her bag scraping against the stone. On the other side she found another empty room, this one with faint stains on the floor that looked suspiciously like old blood. She noted it but kept walking.
Eventually she stepped into a different kind of space. The door was heavier, sealed with an old mechanical lock that she picked in under a minute. Inside lay an old lab. Workbenches lined the walls, their surfaces scattered with broken glassware and dried chemical residue. A few overturned stools sat near a central island table equipped with drainage grooves. Dusty monitors hung from the ceiling on articulated arms, their screens dark and cracked. Maria walked slowly through the room, picking up a scalpel that still held a surprisingly sharp edge. She tested it on her fingertip, drawing a tiny bead of blood, then wiped it clean and slipped it into her bag.
"Interesting," she whispered. Not useful right now, but worth remembering.
She spent twenty minutes cataloging the room on her tablet—photographing layouts, noting power outlets that still hummed with faint current, and marking the location for possible future return. Then she left, sealing the door behind her again and continuing northward.
More tunnels. More empty rooms. More crates filled with nothing but forgotten inventory lists and broken tools. Her stomach growled, but she ignored it. The stolen cash in her pockets would buy food once she reached the surface levels. For now, survival meant movement and mapping.
Then she saw it.
A body lay face down on the tunnel floor far ahead, limbs splayed awkwardly across the stone. Maria froze, staff already in hand. She extended it with a quiet click and tapped the end against her shoe, causing a thin blade to slide out from the tip. Heart steady but alert, she crept forward, keeping her steps light.
As she drew closer she recognized the figure. It was the boy from earlier—the one who had tried to chase her near the van. She found my body, there on the cold stone, unconscious and still.
Maria stopped a few meters away, blade pointed forward. She poked the side of my leg with the tip. A small trickle of blood welled up from the shallow cut and ran down my skin, but there was no reaction. No twitch. No sudden jump or groan. Just stillness.
She watched for another minute, breath held. When nothing changed, she turned to leave.
But then the pulsating blue light from the thin patterns on my bionic right arm caught her eye. The glow moved in slow, hypnotic circuits beneath the surface plating, tracing elegant lines that pulsed with quiet energy. Maria had seen many prosthetics in her life—crude street models, military-grade enhancements, even experimental black-market pieces—but nothing quite like this. The design was beautiful in its precision. The integration of light and function made her pause. Even she could probably design something similar on paper, but to have it built, actually installed and working at this level… that fact itched at her skin. She needed it. She needed to understand it.
Maria glanced back down the tunnel toward the old lab she had passed earlier. Then she looked at my unconscious body again. She reached into her bag and pulled out a purple cylinder. With a quick motion she clamped it over my mouth. The device bent and expanded, forming a tight seal that turned into a sort of gas mask. It began pumping a steady flow of sleeping gas into my lungs, ensuring I would remain deeply unconscious for hours.
She hoisted my body onto her shoulder with surprising strength for her small frame, adjusting my weight so my arms hung down her back. The bionic arm brushed against her side, still pulsing that soft blue light. Maria strode back toward the lab room, her steps quicker now, determination setting her jaw.
Once inside the old lab she threw my body onto the medical bed in the center. The frame creaked under the impact. She worked fast, pulling heavy straps over my wrists, ankles, and torso, locking each limb into place with metal buckles that clicked loudly in the quiet room. She tested the restraints, pulling hard on each one to make sure they held.
"Perfect," she said quietly. "Stay right there."
Maria focused first on the arm. She hit it lightly with her knuckles, listening to the metallic resonance. She poked at the joints with tools from her bag and others scavenged from the lab drawers—probes, small screwdrivers, and voltage testers. The arm reacted in fascinating ways. Certain pressure points made the blue lights brighten. Others triggered soft whirring sounds from internal motors. She found a hidden panel at the fingertip and opened it carefully.
A USB compartment slid out. Maria's eyes lit up. She plugged her tablet into the port immediately, watching as data streams began flowing across her screen.
She spent a long time working on the arm—minutes stretching into over an hour. The engineering made her dizzy with desire. The way the synthetic muscle fibers connected to bone anchors, the precision of the neural interface points, the elegant power distribution system… it was enough to make her want to own it completely. Yet the software side disappointed her in places. Some sections were well made and heavily secured, showing real skill. But large parts were exposed, weak, almost lazy in their encryption. The body was perfect. Its brain was not. That contradiction annoyed her and made her happy at the same time.
"Sloppy on the inside," she murmured while typing rapidly on her tablet. "Beautiful shell, mediocre core. I could fix that."
While the tablet continued downloading and analyzing, Maria stepped back and looked at my full body. She had stripped my clothes earlier to make the examination easier, folding them neatly on a nearby bench. I wasn't heavily built, but I wasn't out of shape either. There was clear definition in the muscles from bits of movement, training, and survival. Not athletic, but not pathetic. She studied the scars, the places where old injuries had healed unevenly, the way my chest rose and fell in slow, drugged breaths.
She pulled a lever on the side of the bed. The surface tilted back closer to horizontal with a mechanical hum. Maria rolled a dusty chair over and sat down, tools arranged neatly beside her.
She began dissecting.
Why? Well, why not. Maria loved the human body. She believed it was the perfect host for the genes that gave certain people powers—the mutations she had studied for years. Everything needed to be learned. Everything needed to be figured out. And eventually, everything needed to die for that knowledge to be complete.
She started small and methodical. A scalpel traced a careful line along my left forearm, parting skin to reveal muscle and tendon beneath. She noted the density, the fiber alignment, speaking softly to her tablet's recorder as she worked.
"Subject shows above-average muscle resilience despite recent physical stress. No immediate signs of augmentation beyond the right arm. Interesting."
Blood welled up slowly. She dabbed it away with gauze from the lab supplies and continued, peeling back layers with precise movements. She examined the connection points where my bionic arm met flesh, marveling at the surgical integration. Hours passed as she explored further—mapping veins, testing nerve responses with small electrical probes, taking samples that she sealed into vials.
At one point she paused, scalpel hovering, and looked at my face. The sleeping mask still covered my mouth and nose, keeping me under.
"You chased me," she said quietly. "Now you're here. Might as well be useful."
She adjusted the lights above the bed, bringing them closer, and continued. She opened a small incision near my shoulder, studying the joint capsule and rotator cuff. Her hands moved with the calm confidence of someone who had done this many times before in her mind and in secret practice. Every discovery went into her tablet—notes, measurements, photographs, hypotheses about how my time-slowing ability might connect to physical structure.
Maria lost herself in the work. The lab felt alive around her now, the old equipment humming faintly as she rerouted power to a few monitors to display real-time data. She talked to herself frequently, small bits of dialogue keeping her focused.
"Neural density here is higher than average… could explain the reaction time. Nice."
"If I reroute this connection, the arm could handle twenty percent more load. Whoever built this stopped halfway."
She spent additional time on the bionic arm while my body lay open in controlled sections. She ran deeper diagnostics, copying entire firmware logs and rewriting small sections on the fly to test vulnerabilities. The blue lights pulsed brighter under her commands. At one stage she caused the fingers to flex and curl independently, smiling at the smooth motion.
By the time she had mapped most of my upper torso and right arm systems, fatigue began to pull at her own body. She sat back in the chair, blood on her gloves, and looked at the work she had done. Precise. Educational. Satisfying.
Maria stood and stretched, cracking her neck. She checked the restraints again, making sure everything remained secure. Then she walked to the lab door and peered out into the tunnel, listening for any distant sounds of pursuit. Nothing. Only silence and the faint drip of water somewhere far away.
She returned to the bed and looked down at me.
"You're going to stay here a while longer," she said softly. "There's still so much more to learn."
The tablet continued syncing data beside her as Maria prepared for the next phase of examination, the old lab lights casting long shadows across the scene. Outside the room the tunnels of the King's Gambit waited, vast and indifferent, while above them the districts continued their endless neon pulse. But down here, in this forgotten corner, Maria had found something far more interesting than simple escape.
She picked up the scalpel again.