The Industrial Belt smelled like stale metal, old machine oil, and dead hope.
Thick smoke from the underground manufacturing plants hung low, creating a dense artificial ceiling. Unlike the noisy, suffocating Under-Grid, this sector was like a vast, tiered graveyard. Only automated machines and workers who had sold their right to sleep still moved through the corridors of cracked concrete.
Ivo walked at the front, leading Kaelen and Aira through a narrow passage beneath the maglev tracks. Kaelen's damaged left arm was now bound tightly behind his jacket with a ragged strip of cloth, reducing the swing of dead weight that sent sharp pain through his shoulder.
“This is the place,” Ivo said, stopping in front of a heavy metal door marked *PUMP HOUSE 04 — NO ENTRY*.
There was no bell. Ivo used the muzzle of his drill gun to tap the door's steel plate in a specific rhythm: two hard knocks, three quick ones.
One second. Two.
A camera the size of a human eye's iris emerged from a gap in the concrete above the door, rotating with a faint mechanical hiss before firing a green laser to scan their faces.
*BZZZT.*
The steel door slid open with the heavy thud of hydraulics.
Inside, the air was warm and dry—a luxury in Aethelgard. The place was both a hacker's lab and a sprawling refuge bunker. Dozens of old tube monitors and transparent OLED screens hung from the ceiling on thick cables strewn across the floor like the roots of some enormous tree. In one corner, stacks of jury-rigged servers emitted a steady, soothing hum.
At the center of the room sat a man in ragged clothes stamped *Soma Maintenance*.
Nix Calder didn't look up when they entered. His hands danced across two mechanical keyboards at once, while his left eye—a synthetic lens—blinked rapidly as it processed streams of green code across his screen.
“Kaelen Vance,” Nix's voice rasped, dry as sandpaper. “You've brought the smell of acid rain and failure into my room.”
“Nix,” Kaelen called, his voice hoarse. “We need your expertise.”
Nix stopped typing. He slowly spun his chair around. His narrow face looked even gaunter and paler beneath the reflected screen light, but his natural right eye fixed on Kaelen with dangerous sharpness.
“My expertise doesn't come cheap, Investigator,” Nix said, picking up a tin cup filled with thick black liquid. “And as far as I know, the civil authorities haven't paid you in five years. So what brings you here besides desperation?”
Aira stepped out from behind Kaelen's shadow.
Nix's synthetic eye suddenly whirred rapidly, adjusting its focus with a faint *click*. His gaze locked onto Aira's neck, where lines of organic tissue still emitted a faint blue glow.
“That thing...” Nix whispered, a thin, cold smile spreading across his lips. “Not some black-market cyborg. That's bio-synthetic architecture from Soma Corp's secret division. The *Elysium Prototype* series.”
“Aira,” Kaelen said curtly. “Her name is Aira.”
“You can call her whatever you want,” Nix replied as he rose from his chair. He approached Aira like a collector who had just discovered a rare artifact. “But her organic structure was built at a cost enough to feed the entire Under-Grid population for ten years.”
“Can you crack its encryption?” Kaelen asked bluntly, cutting off Nix's rambling.
Nix gave a quiet, humorless laugh. He walked to the main table and patted a metal chair with torn padding. “Sit there, Bio Girl.”
Aira looked at Kaelen first. Kaelen gave a small nod of approval. Aira then sat obediently.
Nix took a scanning device wired directly into his main server array. He pressed four transparent electrode pads against Aira's temples and neck.
The moment the device powered on, the screens around the room began to shudder violently. Thousands of lines of encrypted code flooded Nix's monitors, moving so fast that ordinary eyes couldn't read them.
“Extraordinary...” Nix murmured, his digital eye blinking frantically. “Three-layer biometric encryption. This isn't just a digital data lock. It's locked using *organic properties*—heartbeat patterns, neural structure, and...”
Nix abruptly cut himself off. His hands froze above the console.
“And what?” Kaelen pressed.
Nix enlarged a sound-wave graph that appeared on the central screen. He turned a dial on the scanner. A high-frequency static hiss filled the lab, followed by a crystal-clear fragment of an audio recording.
*“...Dad, if you're seeing this... don't look for me where it's bright...”*
That voice. A child's voice.
Kaelen felt his breath catch in his throat. His intact hand clenched so hard that his nails dug into his palm. The pain from his dead prosthetic arm was instantly eclipsed by the shock pounding in his chest.
It was Mira's voice. No distortion, no signal interference.
“This voice...” Nix said, staring at Kaelen with his natural eye wide. “This isn't some crudely implanted sample. This child's vocal waveform is being used as the *primary encryption key* to open the deepest layer of this cyborg's organic memory.”
“How is that possible?” Kaelen's voice trembled. “This girl... she's not Mira. So why is my daughter's voice inside the heart of her system?”
Aira touched her own chest. Her eyes remained fixed on the screen displaying the sound wave. “That voice... it doesn't feel like a foreign memory. It feels like... part of my bones.”
Nix shut off the audio, restoring the room to tense silence. He leaned against the table, folded his arms, and looked at Kaelen.
“I can break this encryption,” Nix said quietly. “I can uncover what Soma Corp actually implanted inside Aira's head, and what it has to do with the daughter you've mourned for seven years.”
“Do it,” Kaelen said firmly.
“There'll be a price, Vance,” Nix cut in quickly, his business smile returning. “A full decryption requires massive computing power. I have to hack a direct access route into Soma Corp's central archive network at Soma's summit tower to verify this biometric key. And to do that, I need a high-level Soma official's identity code.”
“I don't have a Soma official's code,” Kaelen said.
“But you do have the original data wafer from Mira's case,” Nix said, pointing at Kaelen's jacket pocket. “And we have Aira-9. Give me full access to Aira's signal pathway while I breach Soma's archives. Let me take some of Soma's valuable data as my commercial compensation on the black market.”
“You're selling our information?” Ivo cut in from behind them, his voice thick with menace.
“I sell the sun to people who live underground, Doctor,” Nix replied coldly. “I'm a hacker, not a charity. If you want the truth about Mira, you have to let me collect my profit.”
Kaelen looked at Aira, then at Nix. He knew the risk of handing over access to Aira's signal—it could trigger an alarm if Soma Corp noticed. But as he watched Mira's sound graph twist across the screen, Kaelen knew he had no way back.
“Decrypt it, Nix,” Kaelen said quietly. “But if Aira's put in danger... I'll make sure my remaining right hand is enough to crush your throat.”
Nix grinned, showing a gold tooth at the back of his mouth. “Fair deal. Now let's see what secrets Vektor Vane has hidden inside this girl's body.”