The smell of rust, cold lubricant, and poisonous ozone filled the underground service tunnel.
In the claustrophobic darkness, four shadows crawled through the vibrating support beams. The concrete walls thrummed low, reflecting the pulse of the colossal machinery overhead—the mechanical heart of the sleepless Megacity Aethelgard.
Ivo grimaced every time he shifted his injured left thigh, but he made no sound. Nix led the way, using a small flashlight with its beam covered by a thin cloth so it wouldn't trigger the motion sensors. Behind him, Kaelen walked hunched over. His dead left arm hung heavily beneath his jacket, while his right hand gripped a Kinetic-7 pistol with only a few rounds left.
Aira brought up the rear, serving as their defensive anchor.
“Twenty meters,” Nix whispered, his digital-lens eye blinking slowly as it mapped the high-voltage pipes around them. “This route is an ancient drainage channel from before Soma seized the city's foundations.”
“How long until the tactical forces above realize we've breached the blockade?” Kaelen asked, his breathing quietly labored.
“The thermatite shielding above melted the blast door shut and clogged the main channel,” Nix replied with a dry smile invisible in the darkness. “They'll need at least an hour to break through that iron crust. We've got a little room to breathe—if you can call this poison-scented stuff air.”
Aira suddenly stopped.
Her usually silent synthetic footsteps came to a halt on the metal grating. The blue glow at her neck and temples, which had dimmed moments earlier, lit up again—this time not with an irregular pulse, but with a calm, steady rhythm that ran deep.
Kaelen turned. “Aira?”
Aira didn't answer. Her eyes didn't turn white as they did when her killing protocol activated, nor did they blink in confusion as they did when Mira's memories surfaced. Her gaze remained fixed on the darkness at the end of the corridor, as if her vision could pierce layer after layer of concrete and steel blocking the way.
“Aira, what is it?” Kaelen pressed, stepping toward her.
“The signal...” Aira whispered. Her voice was no longer hoarse. It was remarkably clear, echoing faintly along the iron pipes. “The network architecture ahead... its temperature is different.”
“Its temperature?” Nix stopped and turned around. “This channel connects to the central server's liquid-nitrogen cooling network. Of course it's colder.”
“Not the air,” Aira said softly, raising one hand to touch the corridor wall. “Cold storage for consciousness. There are millions of patterns sleeping behind this wall.”
The words left Ivo and Nix speechless.
Kaelen followed Aira and stood beside her. They reached the end of the tunnel, where the drainage channel terminated at a massive wall made of pure steel and dull titanium. The wall stretched from the depths of the ground to a peak beyond sight, forming an impenetrable boundary between the underground slum district and the lowest structure of Soma Corp's summit tower.
At the center of the colossal wall stood an ancient double-leaf blast door.
Its design differed from the doors of modern Soma technology. There were no glowing promotional monitors, no gold Vektor Vane logo, and no speakers proclaiming counterfeit immortality. The door was cold and heavy, covered in scars from plasma cutting years ago.
Beside it sat a first-generation biometric panel—a palm reader encased in thick glass, dulled by soot and old oil.
“Sector Zero Security Gate,” Nix murmured, approaching the panel in awe. “This system was isolated from the city's wireless network. It can't be hacked from outside. You'd need a high-level biometric encryption key registered before the corporate war...”
Nix turned to Kaelen. “You still have your old investigator authorization key, Vance?”
“My license was revoked five years ago,” Kaelen said coldly. “This system won't recognize a fugitive's identity.”
Before Kaelen could reach into his pocket for Mira's data wafer, Aira stepped forward.
Her movement was slow, almost poetic in the filthy corridor. She stopped directly in front of the ancient biometric panel.
“Aira, don't touch it carelessly,” Ivo warned from behind. “If that panel triggers the static defense system, this entire tunnel will be flooded with high-voltage electricity.”
Aira didn't listen. She slowly raised her right hand.
Her delicate synthetic fingers settled precisely on the dull glass surface of the scanner. The moment her skin touched the panel, the blue lines at Aira's neck blinked three times. A transparent stream of data flowed from her palm into the ancient scanner's circuitry.
BZZZZZT...
The panel, dead for decades, suddenly lit up. A dim red light spun beneath the glass, then shifted to a bright green.
The boom of massive hydraulics echoed behind the titanium wall. Steel locks the size of human arms shifted one by one with heavy metallic clangs.
KLANG! KLANG! KLANG!
The colossal blast door shuddered, then slowly slid open a few centimeters, spilling minus-five-degree air and the intensely sterile smell of pure antiseptic into their filthy tunnel.
Nix held his breath. “How... how could this cyborg's authorization be recognized by the Sector Zero Gate?”
Aira didn't remove her hand from the panel. Her eyes stared at the open gap, radiating bottomless depth.
Kaelen stepped beside her, studying Aira's profile. An intensely bitter feeling seized his chest as he watched her stand before that door—not as an intruder, but as someone returning to the place she most wanted to forget.
“Aira,” Kaelen called, his voice rough with a thousand restrained questions. “Have you... been here before?”
Aira slowly lowered her hand. The green panel on the wall gradually went dark again.
The girl turned toward Kaelen. Amid the silence of the underground tunnel and the cold air spilling through the gap in the door, Aira looked straight into Kaelen's eyes and whispered with a sincerity that shattered the night:
“I haven't just been here, Kaelen...”
Aira stared into the darkness beyond the open door.
“...I died in the place where she disappeared.”
[END OF ACT I — THE ESCAPE AND THE RECOGNITION OF THE WORLD]