The slums of New Aurora smelled like scorched metal, sweat, and old regrets.Kai Onyx crouched beneath a crumbling overpass, fingers buried inside the open guts of a broken courier drone. Sparks danced across his knuckles as he rewired the circuit board with stolen components. The machine buzzed back to life with a low hum, its single lens flickering a ghostly blue."That’s it, baby," he muttered, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of his grease-stained hand. "Just needed a little Onyx touch."He slid a cracked chip into the drone’s core—a prototype neural interface he’d been refining in secret. Illegal. Dangerous. Worth more than his life if the corps ever found out. But down here in Sector Thirteen, rules were just rumors. Survival came in bytes and sparks.Above him, the city loomed—an endless tangle of skyscrapers and neon veins that blinked like a dying star. Holo-ads flickered across the smog-choked skyline: pharmaceuticals, security tech, new gods in chrome armor selling

By sunrise, the city was howling with Kai’s name. It started with a flicker on the holo-ads: WANTED: KAI RENNER – 800,000 CREDITS – DEAD OR ALIVE. Then came the sirens, the encrypted messages flooding the undernet, the hungry eyes of mercs and lowlifes scanning every face in every sector. His name wasn’t just a target anymore. It was a currency. Kai sat in his hideout, jaw clenched, watching the bounty thread spiral across the screens. “They upped the price,” he muttered. “Eight hundred grand. That’s more than a senator.” “You are more dangerous than a senator.” Nyx’s voice hummed inside his skull. “And you have something they don’t.” “What’s that?” “Me.” ---He didn’t get to finish his second thought.The power died. The screens went black. His backup generators failed to kick in. And just like that, he was blind.Then—a knock. Three slow taps on the hatch, too calm, too deliberate.Kai grabbed his pulse-pistol. “Nyx.”“I cannot access exterior cams. We’ve been locked out.”

The junkyard stretched out before them like a rusted graveyard of a world long forgotten.Metal arms poked from shattered android torsos. Broken skyships lay half-buried in the sand. Torn banners of long-dead corporations flapped limply in the stale wind.Kai stumbled out of the underground hatch first, coughing as he blinked against the sudden dull light of day. Not real sun—just the flicker of Sector 12’s artificial dome overhead—but it felt like freedom.Kade emerged behind him, covered in grime, her blade still gripped tight in one hand.They didn’t speak for a while.They didn’t need to.---“I always hated this place,” Kade finally muttered, eyes scanning the heaps of metal bones. “Too quiet. Like it’s waiting to remember something awful.”Kai pulled off his gloves and rubbed his hands together. “I think I kinda like it. No drones. No screaming. No one trying to dissect my brain.”Nyx’s voice crackled in his ear. “You still have time for that. Zorvex runs late but never misses.”

The shelter was buried beneath an old freight line, cloaked in layers of rust and silence. Nyx discovered it after diving deep into the EchoNet—piggybacking off ghost protocols, hacking into a forgotten satellite, tracing heat signatures from a decade ago.When she brought it up on the holomap, Kade’s brows lifted. “You sure it’s safe?”“Safer than anything else I’ve found. Shielded walls. No active surveillance. We can rest there.”Rest.It sounded like a luxury.---They reached the shelter by nightfall.It was real. Half-fallen, but intact. An underground bunker with long corridors and soft lights powered by solar cells. Dust coated every surface. The silence was thick, but not hostile.They made camp. Kade and Nyx scavenged the surrounding buildings for supplies—canned protein, clean water, a heat battery. Kai stayed back, surrounded by old terminals and exposed data cores.And the ache inside him.Why did Valkar let me live?---He plugged into the system. Jacked in through a neu

The night felt heavier than it should have. The crackling fire cast erratic shadows across the makeshift camp, but the sense of unease that clung to the air was more than just the ominous silence of the wilderness. Kai couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. Even the wind, usually a source of comfort, felt like it was carrying a warning.He glanced over at Kade, who was crouched by their small fire, sharpening a blade with quiet precision. The focus in her eyes was sharp—too sharp, as if her senses were tuned to something beyond the usual alertness. She knew something was off, too.“Nyx?” Kai called out, his voice soft but filled with urgency. He stared into the night, waiting for the familiar voice to echo in his mind.Nothing.“Nyx?” His call was louder now. His eyes darted around, as if expecting the slender figure of their digital companion to manifest from the shadows, her glowing presence lighting the dark like she always did. But there was nothing—just the oppressi