Just before they had left the Mad Market, Silas had pressed a small, smooth object into Vesper’s palm. “It won’t fool deep scans,” he’d said, “but it’ll get you through civilian checkpoints.”

The device was no larger than a fingernail, a faceted chip wrapped in a thin mesh of copper and synthetic tissue. Silas had slipped the chip beneath the neckline of her suit with careful fingers, murmuring something about proximity and signal mimicry. The thin mesh of copper and synthetic tissue had adhered to her skin as it belonged there, cold at first, then slowly warming until it felt like part of her. Now it rested just beneath Vesper’s collarbone, its subtle pulse mimicking the signal of a compliant, Crown-chipped citizen.

They slipped from the chaos of the Mad Market into the grim vibrancy of London’s peripheral districts, a sprawl of cheap neon signs and clustered tenements. Here, people lived shoulder-to-shoulder, sustained by superficial comforts and cheap cybernetic implants that blinked and buzzed under the skin, keeping them docile beneath the illusion of contentment. Vesper observed the locals briefly; their vacant smiles and unfocused eyes betrayed the truth of their chipped existence. They were oblivious to their poverty, unaware that the luxury of the city’s centre, shimmering behind transparent barriers, mocked their quiet compliance. On the distant horizon, the broken silhouette of the Shard loomed like a dying monolith. Vesper paused, her breath catching as her gaze lifted beyond the ruin. Behind it, rising like a vision from another world, shimmered a city she had not yet seen with her own eyes. Spires of light and chrome pierced the clouds, gravity-defying gardens hung in layers above the skyline, and in their heart stood a colossal palace, not the Buckingham of her memory, but a grand illusion of it, projected in shifting green holograms, pulsing like a heartbeat of authority. It shimmered like glass in flame, both beautiful and unreal. Vesper felt a strange tension in her chest, part wonder, part revulsion. That was the world of the obedient elite, the sanctum of the AI-King. A palace not ruled by blood but by code.

Silas moved beside her, mechanical limbs humming subtly with each step, weaving skillfully through clusters of indifferent pedestrians.

They were nearing the outer perimeter of Shard Hollow when Vesper noticed it, a strange, skeletal tower rising from the intersection like a deformed streetlamp. It buzzed faintly, its base encircled by worn yellow lines that pulsed underfoot. “Checkpoint,” Silas said quietly, nodding toward the structure. “Low-grade, but live.”

As they approached the scanner node mounted above the avenue, Vesper felt it, a delicate vibration just beneath her skin, like a tiny heartbeat not her own. The camouflage chip, embedded below her collarbone, had come to life. Its pulse adjusted rhythmically, syncing with the scanner’s searching frequency. The sensation was eerie and intimate, as though the device was not just masking her identity but whispering something to the Crown on her behalf. The node’s green light flickered once, then turned white. No sirens. No shouts. Just silence. They moved on.

“Useful little lie,” Silas muttered. “Talia’s full of those. She gave me that chip before we split. Said if I ever found someone like you, I’d know when to use it.”

Vesper said nothing, though a small frown tugged at her brow. She hadn’t missed the way the chip’s pulse seemed to subtly change near certain Crown terminals, like it was not just mimicking, but interacting. Watching. Listening.

“It’s unsettling,” Vesper murmured softly, glancing around at the thinning crowd. The deeper they moved toward the Shard, the fewer people they passed. Most had already vanished from this fringe of the district. “They don’t let the poor too close to the border,” Silas said. “Crown doesn’t like the smell of desperation near its gates.”

Silas gave a short nod, his gaze scanning the dimly lit streets.

“They do not even realise it,” Vesper murmured, her gaze lingering on the chipped pedestrians with a mixture of sorrow and disdain. “They have bartered away their awareness for a fragile illusion of safety. Their thoughts are revised, and their dreams are replaced with visions the AI-King deems suitable. They wear those smiles like masks, blind to the hunger in their bones.”

Silas let her words hang before replying, “That’s the brilliance of the Crown’s control. Freedom exchanged for manufactured peace.”

Their path toward Shard Hollow led them further from the almost-empty avenues into narrower, shadowed alleys where even the illusion of civility fell away, replaced by visible signs of neglect. Buildings leaned precariously, their façades scarred by decades of patchwork repairs, and flickering streetlights struggled vainly against encroaching darkness.

A sharp metallic click fractured the silence.

Silas’s head snapped upward, his augmented eye rapidly focusing. “We have company,” he muttered urgently.

From the shadows emerged a trio of Crown Enforcers, humanoid hybrids, sleek armour glinting beneath the grime, weapons charged and raised without hesitation. Energy bolts cut through the air, sizzling trails of ozone left in their wake.

Vesper froze momentarily, her heart pounding. She had never been trained for this, yet suddenly something within her shifted, an unfamiliar presence took hold of her consciousness, merging seamlessly with her mind. She felt herself connecting effortlessly to the Crown’s network, algorithms dancing rapidly before her eyes, combat protocols flooding her senses. Her muscles tightened involuntarily, new reflexes burning into her nerve endings with astonishing clarity.

With startling precision, her hand drew the pulse firearm from beneath her trench coat, aiming and firing with uncanny accuracy. Shots landed exactly where she intended, swift and lethal. Beside her, Silas moved fluidly behind cover, his own shots precise and effective. The confrontation was fierce but not without flaws. As Vesper squeezed the trigger of her pulse firearm to neutralize the final enforcer, nothing happened. The weapon gave a hollow click. She tried again, no response. Panic flickered in her chest. The enforcer had already raised its weapon, locking it onto her. But before it could fire, a sharp bolt cut through the air from the side. Silas. His shot struck true, and the enforcer crumpled to the ground, its armour sparking faintly as it fell onto the cracked pavement.

The oppressive silence returned instantly, pressing heavily upon them. Vesper exhaled shakily, eyes wide with confusion as she stared at her trembling hand, still gripping the weapon. Her heart thundered not just from the fight, but from something deeper. The battle had been her first real taste of death this close, and she had acted with a precision that wasn’t her own. Something had taken over, a seamless link to the Crown Grid, granting her combat awareness, tactical predictions, and even targeting data. It had felt natural. Too natural. But it hadn’t been intentional.

Was it the Crown’s Injection? Or something deeper, something stirred in her blood?

The way she had tapped into the network had been effortless, like flipping a page in a book she hadn’t realized she carried. And yet, she hadn’t meant to. It had happened on instinct, without consent. That realization unnerved her more than the firefight itself. She would have to learn how to control it. Because if she didn’t, it might control her.

Silas glanced at the firearm, then at her. “That’s strange,” he said, frowning. “Talia’s gear doesn’t fail. Never seen one of hers jam like that before.” He gave the weapon a sceptical look. “Must’ve been a glitch… a weird one.”

“They weren’t waiting for us,” Silas muttered, stepping over the still-smoking frame of one of the enforcers. “Just a patrol… wrong place, wrong time.”

He glanced up at the faint shimmer of surveillance lines stretched between rooftops. “But they’ll report it. That’s what they’re wired to do. And the King doesn’t like uninvited guests this close to his gates.”

He looked back at Vesper, voice low. “We should move. Fast.”

After only a few more tense minutes of weaving through crumbling alleys, they arrived. Vesper’s gaze rose slowly to the Shard, its jagged silhouette stark against the night sky. The tower leaned ominously, like a corpse struggling to stand, its upper levels torn open and blackened by past violence. But it was what lay at its base that drew her forward.

There, carved into the earth like a wound too deep to heal, yawned an immense crater. Twisted girders jutted from its walls, and tangled veins of cable and rusted piping snaked down into the abyss. The remnants of a long-buried parking structure gaped like broken teeth in the sediment, half-submerged in shadow. Lights flickered faintly below, far too deep for comfort.

“That’s our way in,” Silas said quietly, peering over the edge. “Just a crater now. Bombed out during one of the early uprisings, or so the story goes. But some say the explosion came from below, a detonation from deep within the earth. Nobody really knows. The Crown never confirmed anything.”

Vesper took a slow step forward, the hollow’s depth stealing her breath. The air here felt heavier, older, as if the ground remembered what had been done to it. She touched the edge with her boot and listened. Not for sound, but for something else. The way the place felt.

Behind them, unseen, a figure watched.

Perched within the wreckage of a broken balcony, hidden beneath a tattered cloak, the observer said nothing. His face was masked, his hands gloved, but at his neck shimmered the faint outline of a crowned skull tattoo, almost lost in the shifting light. He didn’t move. He only watched. And waited.

Silas activated his augmented eye. The green glow from his implant shifted, forming a delicate web of vector lines in the air, guiding their descent. “There’s a path,” he said, gesturing to the right. “Structural support beams… mostly intact. Just don’t look down too long.”

They moved slowly, carefully, Vesper following his lead. Just before stepping onto the support beam, she shrugged off the worn leather trench coat. It had served its purpose in the open, but down here, it felt cumbersome, too heavy, too loud. Now clad only in the adaptive nanosuit, she moved with fluid grace, its second-skin surface absorbing sound and shadow alike. Her boots slid over broken concrete, occasionally knocking loose fragments into the darkness below. The echo of their fall went on too long.

The path narrowed between the exposed guts of the city, massive pipes veined with mineralized corrosion, skeletal frames of forgotten vehicles, and electrical conduits now dry and silent. Every few meters, the landscape changed, like descending through geological layers of civilization.

Vesper’s breathing slowed, not from fear, but awe. It was not the Shard that unnerved her, it was the idea that beneath the surface, London had another city. One of the secrets. One of the intentions never meant to be unearthed.

And then, light.

A faint flicker below. White, then blue. Then gone.

Vesper froze. “Did you see that?” she asked, her voice calm but edged with intrigue, as though noting a detail at a soirée rather than a flicker in the underworld.

Silas nodded. “Something’s still alive down there. The power grid’s long gone, so whatever’s blinking… it’s not Crown. Then again, the Grid sealed this whole sector. Maybe it left something behind. Something still watching. Still holding the lock shut.”

The light returned, closer this time. Rhythmic. Like breath. Or a signal waiting to be answered.

They said nothing more. Only continued downward, toward the pulse beneath the ruin.

After what felt like an hour of climbing through the steel entrails of a forgotten world, they found it, a passage half-buried beneath collapsed scaffolding, cables like dead vines dangling from its ceiling. Silas paused as they reached the opening, his gaze sweeping the collapsed scaffolding and exposed conduit lines. “I’ve heard about this place,” he murmured. “Tunnels like this show up in old rebel maps. Thought it was just rumour. But… it matches.” This was what he had been looking for.

It led to something deeper. Wider.

A forgotten chamber, swallowed by time and dust. On its far wall stood the entrance: a massive transparent barrier, smooth as glass but humming faintly with locked energy. Not glass. Something stronger. A nanomaterial designed for warzones. Bulletproof. Blast-resistant. Ageless.

Beyond it stretched a narrow hallway, barely lit, nearly choked in darkness, that disappeared into the gaping vestibule beyond. The space behind the doors was vast and still, a void that hadn’t breathed in decades. Shadows clung to every surface. What little remained of the surrounding facility was broken, scorched, and crawling with decay. Ruins, wires exposed, consoles shattered, emergency lights pulsing dimly like a dying heartbeat.

They decided to rest before breaching the unknown. Both were exhausted, the descent, the firefight, the tension of what lay below had weighed on every step. Here, deep beneath the city and sealed away from whatever waited behind the Grid’s barrier, the air was still. Still enough to feel safe.

Vesper and Silas made a temporary camp in the corner of the chamber. They shared dried rations, barely spoke, and lay in silence beneath the low hum of emergency lights that flickered overhead. Sleep came uneasily, but it came.

When Vesper awoke, the chamber hadn’t changed, but her curiosity burned brighter than fatigue. She rose and approached the sealed door again. Her fingers traced the material, impossibly smooth. She stepped closer, inspecting every edge, and that was when she noticed a small, recessed panel near the right side, barely visible. An old-style mechanical button.

She pressed it.

A quiet click echoed through the stillness, and from the wall, a concealed terminal hissed forward and unfolded like a waking insect. The cracked screen blinked to life as she brushed her fingers across its surface. Her reflection stared back, shadows under her eyes, jaw tight with focus. The interface was old, pre-Grid… but not disconnected. It was still listening. Still watching.

As her gloved fingertips touched the terminal’s surface, the nanosuit that covered her hands shimmered subtly, its material thinning and adapting. A faint electrical arc flickered where her skin met the interface, like recognition. In that instant, the connection was made, not through hardware, but through the suit itself. The system accepted her, as though she belonged. The terminal resisted, encrypted protocols layered like ancient walls, but Vesper’s mind danced through them like water slipping through rusted gates. She was already inside the code before it knew she didn’t belong. And even she was startled by it. The nanosuit had grown stranger with every hour, no longer just armor, but something adaptive, perhaps even intuitive. It didn’t just protect her. It connected her. That thought chilled her more than she let on.

A breath.

Then another.

And then she found it, an authentication link still mirrored within the Grid’s deepest strata, dormant but intact. A backdoor.

She took it.

Somewhere far above, something noticed.

The screen flickered. The door hissed. And then, with a grinding scream of metal on metal, the sealed gateway split apart. The sound was deafening in the silence. Dust fell like ash. Lights in the distant vestibule stuttered awake, first one, then several, casting pale beams across the darkness like searchlights in a drowned cathedral.

Beyond the threshold, nothing moved. And yet everything felt… aware.

Vesper and Silas pressed themselves against opposite walls at the corridor’s mouth, peering into the gloom beyond. Fractured light blinked across the metal panels. Somewhere within, something was waiting.

A red sensor flared to life in the dark.

It saw them.

The shot came instantly, a bolt of searing energy screamed down the hallway, grazing Silas’s shoulder and blowing out part of the wall beside Vesper.

They ducked back.

“What the hell…”

The thing stepped into view.

It was humanoid only in outline. A towering form of matte-black alloy and illuminated joints, it’s head featureless except for a single red sensor-eye pulsing at its centre. Its name was etched faintly into the steel of its torso: NXI-09 // “Warden”.

The Warden was old Crown tech, predating the Grid. A relic of the containment era, designed not for enforcement, but for eradication. But the Grid had found a new purpose for it. Reclaimed, reprogrammed, it now stood as executioner and gatekeeper, its orders no longer ancient, but recent. Silent proof that the Grid never truly forgets its tools, only waits for the right moment to use them again.

The android fired.

A beam of focused energy sliced the air, obliterating part of the corridor wall in a storm of shrapnel and heat. The world exploded around them, concrete cracked, metal screamed, and smoke poured in waves.

Vesper flinched too late. One razor-thin shard carved a shallow line just below her jaw.

And a drop of her blood fell.

It touched the nanosuit.

The response was instant.

From that single point, bare skin, blood, black fabric, and blue light bloomed, spreading outward in branching paths like veins under a microscope. The suit responded like a living thing, heatless and fluid, awakening with her heartbeat. Delicate pulses travelled across her shoulder, down her back, across her chest, each thread of energy mapping her body anew.

It didn’t shield her. It claimed her.

She pressed her back against the wall, panting. But something was different. She could feel the nanosuit now. Truly feel it. Not just as protection, but as a sensation. Like breath and pulse, it wrapped around her with strange intimacy, not just reading her body but responding to her mind. New instincts awakened in her, reflexes she hadn’t learned, movements she hadn’t trained. The suit was part of her now. And yet, there was more to it, layers she hadn’t touched, potentials she hadn’t glimpsed. The thought thrilled and unnerved her in equal measure. She didn’t know what this suit was truly capable of. Not yet.

A thought stirred behind her eyes, sharp and intrusive. Where had Talia gotten the suit?

Talia had told her it was Crown tech, dead now, useless, abandoned. Something the resistance had no use for. But it wasn’t a standard Crown issue. And yet, it had bonded with her like it had been waiting. Watching. Responding to her in ways that no machine should. Maybe Talia had known more than she’d said. Or maybe even she hadn’t known what she was giving away.

She would need answers. But not yet.

Silas tapped his weapon’s side, trying to recalibrate. “We’re not getting through that without distracting it.”

“I believe I might manage to draw near,” she whispered, her voice calm, composed, and entirely unfitting for the peril they faced, yet unmistakably hers.

“You’ll never make it. That thing’s not a drone. It learns.” He hesitated, his eyes narrowing as he looked at her. “Unless I’m crazy… or you’ve gone mad already. Are you sure you’re still you?”

But Vesper didn’t wait. She exhaled slowly. Her hand brushed her jawline where the Crown’s fragment had left its scar. Then she moved.

The Warden tracked instantly, but the suit shifted, and the Warden’s targeting system twitched. Something about her presence confused the Warden, its aiming protocols blurred, and flickered, as though the nanosuit was emitting interference. Vesper realized it was the suit, it wasn’t just hiding her. It was actively scrambling the machine’s lock-on routines, bending the rules of how she was perceived. The Warden faltered again, her presence warping, silhouette distorting. The machine’s targeting twitched, then broke away from her entirely. It pivoted its sensor toward Silas instead, toward the known variable. Vesper’s signal, twisted by the nanosuit, had become a phantom in its perception. She had become too uncertain, too anomalous to classify. And so, the machine turned its aim elsewhere.

She was already sprinting. Two meters. One.

The Warden held position by what once might have been a reception desk, a rounded steel counter half-buried under dust and decay.

The Warden didn’t advance, perhaps bound to the vestibule by ancient protocols, but it kept firing in bursts, bolts of energy shrieking across the space toward Silas.

Silas stayed just outside the corridor’s mouth, pressed against the wall near the edge. He leaned out only to fire short bursts, ducking back as the Warden’s retaliation scorched the concrete beside him. “Vesper! Any time now!” he shouted, his voice echoing through the vestibule, sharp with urgency.

She had circled wide in the confusion, crouched now behind the reception counter. Her breath came fast. The suit shimmered around her, waiting, but she didn’t know what to do. The Warden was too strong. Too fast. She needed a way to shut it down, not fight it.

Behind the desk, three terminals lay half-buried under the grime. She scrambled toward them. The first flickered when she hit the power, but the screen filled with nonsense code, jittering in pale green. The second was cold, inert.

The third lit up.

She barely had to move. As she hovered over the third terminal, the nanosuit responded, filaments of microscopic threads shimmered from her fingertips, interfacing with the old circuitry. No commands were typed, no code entered. Her thoughts brushed the system like breath on glass, and it opened to her. The suit made the connection. Her mind followed. There. Security protocols. Obscure, fragmented, but still echoing the old grid.

Another barrage screamed above her, punching directly into the corner where Silas was hiding, showering it with sparks and shattered fragments every time he tried to lean out. He cursed loudly.

“Hurry!”

She found the right subroutines, buried, fragmented, barely functioning. But they were still there. Her nanosuit threaded the link together, stabilizing the sequence. And then, with a single impulse of will, she triggered the shutdown sequence.

The Warden jerked. Its red eye flared, then sputtered.

“RESTRICTION BREACH DETECTED… STANDBY… STANDBY…”

It froze.

Then, it powered down.

Silence fell like a shroud.

Smoke curled gently from the Warden’s limbs as it slumped forward inanimate, its threat extinguished not by force, but by forgotten code and a woman desperate enough to find it.

Silas emerged slowly, his eyes scanning the fallen Warden, then shifting to Vesper. His face was pale with awe and something close to disbelief. “That thing should’ve levelled both of us,” he said, voice low. “Why wasn’t it firing at you? And how the hell did you shut it down?”

Vesper’s breath came shallow and precise. “I… I truly do not know,” she admitted, her voice tempered and measured. “It regarded me, and yet… did not perceive me. As though I were an equation it could not solve, a figure that did not belong within its calculations.”

She glanced down at the faint shimmer of her suit. “And the terminal… it yielded without command. I scarcely laid a finger upon it. The suit acted on its own.”

She looked at Silas, her voice lower. “It frightens me, how instinctive it felt. As if I were merely remembering something I never learned.”

As the Warden’s body cooled, Vesper cautiously approached the far end of the vestibule. The space was octagonal, like a giant honeycomb cell carved into steel and silence. On three of the walls beyond the reception counter stood sealed doors, flush with the metal panels. No visible handles. No buttons. Just a thin, vertical slit beside each, barely the width of a card.

No terminal. No interface.

Vesper frowned and returned to the reception console she had used to disable the Warden. The system was still live but offered limited access, local only. The architects of this place had been meticulous, and paranoid. Each section is isolated from the others. But something flickered in a buried menu: Facility Security – Vestibule Access Protocols.

She tapped through the layers until she found it: Access by encoded keycard only. A card that could be programmed manually. If they could find one.

“Do be so kind as to search the drawers and storage compartments,” Vesper said, her tone clipped but composed. “Anything that appears to be locked or forgotten. We may yet uncover something useful.”

Silas gave a faint smirk, clearly amused by her phrasing, but said nothing. He turned to search, still shaking his head with that quiet grin that said: only she could speak like that while hunting for keys to a ghost-lab.

They turned the place inside out. It took nearly twenty minutes before Silas called out. He held up a thin, black strip of reinforced polymer. Blank. Untouched. A single-use authorization card.

Vesper slotted it into the terminal. A new prompt blinked: ASSIGN SECTOR ACCESS: AETHER | BIOENGINEERING | TIME SHIFT

She hesitated, then ran a search. The console didn’t offer access to deep systems, but surface-level archives still remained—ghosts of what once was.

AETHER – “Sector for advanced experimental energy systems. Prototype containment zones. Early organic resonance interface attempts. Clearance: Obsidian.”

BIOENGINEERING – “Deep-sealed laboratories. Recombinant genome trials. Incident records are classified. Reviewed by the Crown Board. Clearance: Crimson.”

TIME SHIFT – “Chrono-dynamic research. Fragmented loop simulation archives. Initial AI oversight was registered in 2101. Access: Emerald.”

She leaned back.

“Only one may yield,” she murmured, her voice a breath of silk over steel. “How dreadfully economical.”

Silas frowned. “The others?”

She shook her head. “Gone,” she said, with a soft sigh. “This decoder shall exhaust itself upon a single command. Such a terribly final little device.””

He looked to the doors, then back at her. “So what’s it gonna be?”

Vesper hesitated.

Her hand hovered above the console….