The wind on this level had teeth.
He stood at the rooftop’s edge, concrete grit digging into his palms, and stared out at the city that had swallowed the sky. No stars. Just the amber cancer-glow of a billion lights bleeding upward, choking out anything that dared exist beyond the cage.
His gaze drifted to the other skyscrapers. They clawed at the darkness, concrete fingers tipped with glittering, electric nails. He imagined them stretching just a little higher, piercing the veil and snatching the distant suns for themselves, hoarding their light. The corporations would do it if they could. Bottle the stars. Patent the constellations. Sell them back to humanity one photon at a time.
He’d seen stars once. Only once.
Years ago—he’d been ten, maybe younger—his parents had driven him out past the city limits. A rare trip. An impossible luxury. He’d pressed his face against the car window until his breath fogged the glass, watching the light pollution fade in the rearview.
And then, for the first time in his life, they’d appeared.
Thousands of them. Scattered across the void like someone had spilled diamonds on black velvet. Watching him. Ancient light that had traveled impossible distances just to die against his retina.
He’d felt so small. So impossibly, wonderfully small.
It was the only time he’d ever felt like the universe was bigger than the cage.
The memory should have comforted him. It didn’t. Nothing did anymore.
A drone shrieked past his ear, its delivery algorithm completely indifferent to his existence. He didn’t flinch. Below, traffic flowed through the city’s arteries—autonomous cars gliding on predetermined rails, their passengers locked inside their own private hells, pretending the motion meant something.
A million people. All of them as empty as him.
He leaned forward. The wind pulled at his jacket, whispering its promises.
That’s when the world broke.
A sphere materialized in the air before him—just appeared, like reality had glitched and forgotten to render it until now. Football-sized. Impossible colors flowing across its surface, aurora light trapped in a soap bubble. Emerald bleeding into magenta bleeding into something his brain had no name for.
His heart stopped.
Then restarted, slamming against his ribs like it was trying to escape.
The sphere pulsed.
His vision warped. The edges of the world dissolved into black, like someone was pulling the universe tight around a single point. Space . For a fractured second, everything was light and dark and—
The sphere unfolded.
A caterpillar the size of a sedan hovered in the air, its body constructed from solidified light. Those same hypnotic colors flowed across its frame in psychedelic waves, its massive head throbbing with a rhythm that felt like it was coming from his skull.
The city’s roar died.
The wind stopped.
The caterpillar drifted closer, and he couldn’t move. His legs had forgotten how. His lungs had forgotten their purpose.
A tendril of crystalline light grew from the creature’s forehead, reaching toward him with glacial inevitability.
His own forehead tingled.
No. Not tingled. . Like something was pushing through from the inside, trying to meet the creature halfway.
The tendrils met.
The universe exploded into prismatic agony, then collapsed into a void so absolute it had weight. He felt himself falling, not down but , spiraling through layers of himself he didn’t know existed, peeling back like—
Nothing.
Pain dragged him back.
Targeted. Precise. Like someone had driven a nail through the center of his forehead and left it there to rust.
He was staring at a wall. White, or what passed for white in this half-light. A water stain near the ceiling looked like a face. Or a country. Or nothing at all.
Fabric pressed against his cheek. Synthetic leather, worn smooth in places, cracked in others. A couch.
He didn’t remember a couch.
He didn’t remember .
He pushed himself upright, slowly, the room tilting like he was still falling. His head throbbed with each heartbeat, a metronome of .
The room was dark. No lights. Just thin blades of neon leaking through window shutters, painting everything in shades of cyan and amber.
And she was standing in it.
“Beautiful.”
The word fell out of his mouth before his brain could stop it. He didn’t know where it came from. Didn’t know why that was the first thing his broken mind decided to say.
But it was true.
She stood in the strip of light like a statue someone had carved from moonlight and forgot to animate. Twenty, maybe. Younger. A black blanket wrapped around her from neck to floor, turning her into a shadow with a face.
That face.
Porcelain skin. Heart-shaped. Symmetrical in a way that made his eyes hurt, like he was looking at something that had been mathematically optimized for beauty and overshot into the uncanny valley. Her hair was metallic silver, cut in a sharp bob, and a single teal strand fell across her right eye like someone had painted it there.
But her eyes.
Silver-grey. Luminous. Liquid mercury pooled in her skull, catching the neon and throwing it back at him.
They were looking at him.
him.
She hadn’t blinked since he’d woken up.
“Hello,” he tried. His voice came out sandpaper-rough, like he’d been screaming. Had he been screaming?
She didn’t respond.
Didn’t move.
Didn’t .
His nervous system started sending up flares.
He ignored it. Pushed himself to standing, the room doing a lazy spin before deciding to stay still. “Do you… can you understand me?”
Nothing.
He scanned the apartment, looking for anything that might anchor him to reality. Small. Cramped. A grey couch—the one he’d been unconscious on. A dented wardrobe. A pull-up bar bolted to the wall. Dumbbells and resistance bands in the corner. A crumpled black jacket on the floor near the couch, riddled with small holes.
Signs of a life.
His life?
He reached for a memory—his name, his job, what he’d eaten for breakfast, the color of his childhood bedroom—and came up empty. Not blank. Not forgotten. Just… . Like someone had scooped out the parts of his brain that stored him and left the hardware running on nothing.
His hands were shaking.
He looked down at what he was wearing. Damp clothes. Grimy. Smelling of rain and concrete and something else he couldn’t identify. When had it rained?
Movement. He looked up.
The woman’s head had tracked him, her silver eyes following his motion with mechanical precision. But the rest of her hadn’t moved. Not a millimeter. Her chest didn’t rise and fall. Her weight didn’t shift.
She was a photograph of a person, and only her eyes remembered how to be alive.
“Can you talk?” He heard himself say. His voice sounded distant, like it was coming from another room. “Are you… hurt? Do you need help?”
The questions felt absurd the moment they left his mouth. She looked perfect. Flawless. Like a doll someone had spent years crafting and then forgot to give a soul.
He took a step toward her.
She didn’t react.
Another step.
Nothing.
He was close enough now to see the individual strands of silver hair, close enough to confirm that no, her chest wasn’t moving, no air passing through those perfect lips.
Close enough to see the goosebumps rising on his own arms.
He needed to do something. Needed to . But his brain felt like it was running through mud, each thought taking twice as long to form and half as long to dissolve.
The hallway. There was a hallway.
He turned away from the woman—from the statue, from the —and moved toward the dark corridor. Two doors. One at the end, one on the left.
He chose left.
Bathroom. Cramped. Functional. Shower stall, sink, toilet. The essentials for keeping a body operational.
His body?
He gripped the sink edges, knuckles going white, and forced himself to look in the mirror.
The face staring back was a stranger’s.
Young. Mid-twenties, maybe. Capable build—the kind you got from work, not from vanity. Short black hair, practical. The kind of face people would call “reliable” if they were being kind, “forgettable” if they were being honest.
But the eyes.
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Not brown. Not blue. Not any color that belonged on a human face.
Luminous silver. Mercury poured into his skull, catching the bathroom’s dim light and holding it. They glowed faintly, like someone had installed LEDs behind his corneas.
Mods. Had to be. Cybernetic implants. He’d gotten mods and couldn’t remember—
His gaze snagged on a strand of hair above his right temple.
White. Bleached. Standing out against the black like a crack in porcelain.
He leaned closer.
No. Not white.
.
As he watched, the strand began to glow. Soft at first, then brighter, cycling through impossible colors. Emerald green melting into deep violet, shifting to magenta, then back to green. An aurora borealis trapped in a single hair.
The same colors as the sphere.
The same colors as the caterpillar.
His hand moved on autopilot, fingers reaching for the glowing strand. He touched it.
Just hair. Normal texture. No heat. No tingle of current.
But when he ran his hand through the rest of his hair, his palm caught on something. Calluses. Thick ones. The kind you got from gripping things until your hands forgot how to be soft.
A name surfaced through the fog. Distant. Familiar in the way a word you’ve heard a thousand times becomes just a sound.
“Arthur,” he whispered to his reflection.
The man with silver eyes and living light in his hair stared back.
Arthur didn’t know him.
He left the bathroom and returned to the main room, moving carefully, like the floor might give out if he stepped wrong.
The woman was exactly where he’d left her. Same position. Same thousand-yard stare. A mannequin someone had placed in his apartment as a joke he didn’t understand.
He knelt in front of her, keeping distance between them. The floor was cold through his pants.
“I’m going to…” He stopped. Started over. “I need to understand what’s happening. If you can hear me, if you can understand me, I need you to give me a sign. Anything.”
Her eyes tracked to his face.
That was all.
Arthur’s jaw clenched. Fine. New approach.
He reached for the edge of the blanket, moving slowly, telegraphing his intention like she was a spooked animal. His fingers closed on the fabric.
He pulled it back.
Then immediately jerked it back up, heat flooding his face, his heart trying to punch through his sternum.
He scrambled backward, running a hand down his face, forcing his breathing to slow.
She was naked. In his apartment. Standing perfectly still, not breathing, staring at nothing.
And he couldn’t remember how she got here.
Couldn’t remember .
The panic that had been building since he woke up finally crested. His chest constricted. The walls pressed in. The air turned solid.
A phone buzzed.
The sound cut through his spiral like a knife. Loud. Insistent. A melody he didn’t recognize.
The jacket. The crumpled black jacket, riddle with small holes, on the floor by the couch.
His jacket?
He lunged for it, digging through the pockets until his fingers closed on the phone. The screen lit up, a name displayed in bold letters:
KIRA
The name meant nothing.
He stared at it for three rings, his thumb hovering over the answer button, every nerve screaming at him that this was important, this mattered, this was a lifeline to whatever the fuck his life was supposed to be.
He answered.
“Arthur! Where the hell have you been?”
A woman’s voice. Sharp. Worried. Angry. All three at once, braided together with static.
“I’ve been pinging you for two days! I thought you were scrap, Art. I thought you were .”
Two days. He’d been unconscious for two days.
“I…” His voice cracked. He cleared his throat, tried again. “I don’t know.”
Silence on the other end. Then a heavy sigh that sounded like it carried the weight of every bad decision she’d ever watched him make.
“Midspire. Block 243, Level 14. The workshop. Get here. Now.”
The line went dead.
Arthur lowered the phone, staring at the dark screen. His reflection looked back—distorted, ghostly, wrong.
He had an address. A destination. A person who knew him.
But the words meant nothing. Midspire could be across the street or across the city. Block 243, Level 14—numbers without context, coordinates to a place his broken memory couldn't map.
He was still trapped.
His thumb moved across the screen, lighting it up.
23:53. Friday, 4 June 2083.
Below the time: eight missed calls. All from Kira.
Something that might have been guilt twisted in his chest. Or maybe just fear. He couldn’t tell the difference anymore.
He swiped. A keypad appeared.
ENTER PIN
Of course. Security. His own security, built by a version of himself that no longer existed, locked against the hollowed-out thing wearing his face.
He tried the obvious ones. 1-2-3-40-0-0-0
ACCESS DENIED. TRY AGAIN IN 60 SECONDS.
The migraine returned with interest, white-hot and blinding. The room tilted. His legs buckled.
Arthur slid down the side of the couch until he was sitting on the floor, head in his hands, pressing his palms against his eyes hard enough to see stars.
The stolen stars from the stolen sky.
He laughed. It came out broken, halfway to a sob.
He let his hands drop and looked at the woman.
She was watching him with those liquid silver eyes, silent and still and utterly, perfectly alien.
He pushed himself up, moved toward her, and clapped his hands together right in front of her face.
CRACK.
Nothing.
Not a flinch. Not a blink. Not even a flutter of her perfect eyelashes.
“Great,” Arthur muttered. “So I’m sharing an apartment with a very pretty corpse. Or a very still android. Or I’ve finally lost my mind.”
He turned away, ran both hands through his hair, and tried to think through the pounding in his skull.
He needed information. Needed to know who Arthur was before he could figure out who Arthur .
The wardrobe.
He crossed the room and yanked it open. Inside: a small collection of clothes. Black shirts. Cargo pants. A grey hoodie. All practical. All designed to be invisible.
He grabbed the cargo pants and a black shirt, changed quickly, his movements mechanical. The new clothes fit. Of course they did. They were his.
He kept searching. A data pad with a cracked screen that wouldn’t turn on. A worn paperback on a shelf—, the cover read. An astronomy guide.
He pulled it out, flipped it open. Pictures of nebulae, galaxies, star clusters. Explanations in dense text that his eyes skimmed over without absorbing.
Something in his chest warmed. A ghost of familiarity. A phantom memory of wonder.
He’d loved this once.
Who was the person who’d loved this?
He closed the book, set it aside, and kept looking. Found a pair of gym pants and a shirt, placed them on the floor near the woman. He wouldn’t touch her again. But if she could move—if she was just frozen, waiting for some command he didn’t know—maybe she’d dress herself.
Maybe.
The door at the end of the hallway was reinforced. Heavy. Locked.
A panel glowed beside it:
DOOR LOCKEDUNLOCK: YES / NO
Arthur pressed YES
BIOMETRIC ID REQUIRED
He pressed his thumb to the scanner. It read him. Accepted him. The door hissed open with a pneumatic sigh.
The certainty settled in his stomach like lead.
The corridor beyond bled atmosphere. Grimy walls. Flickering light panels. The smell of ozone and spoiled food and human desperation. Identical doors stretching into shadow. Trash piled in corners. A syringe glinting near his foot.
Bass-heavy music thumped from somewhere distant, vibrating through the floor.
Arthur slid the door shut. The lock engaged with a solid chunk.
He didn’t want to know what was out there.
He sat on the couch, head in his hands, the migraine drilling deeper.
No answers. Just more questions. More gaps. More proof that whoever he’d been, that person was gone.
Then: a heavy THUMP
Not a knock. Too final. Too deliberate.
Arthur froze.
The phone pinged. He snatched it from where he’d dropped it on the couch.
Bot Delivery: Your package is at the door.
He crept to the entrance, checked the door’s camera feed. Empty hallway. A brown box on the floor.
He opened the door just enough to grab it, scanned the corridor one more time, then yanked the box inside and slammed the door shut. The lock engaged. His heart hammered.
He carried the box to the middle of the room and stared at it like it might explode.
Plastic bands. He needed something sharp.
The wardrobe had a drawer. Inside: a folding knife.
He cut the bands, folded back the cardboard.
A note on top, handwriting neat and feminine:
The words should have meant something. Should have triggered warmth, nostalgia, .
They didn’t.
He set the note aside and pulled out a laptop. Old. Ruggedized. Covered in faded band stickers he didn’t recognize.
Beneath it: comic books. Sci-fi paperbacks. And at the bottom, nestled in foam, a data shard.
The data shard was a slim, rectangular sliver of metal and composite glass, no longer than two-thirds of a finger. Its form was precise and utilitarian, every contour engineered with surgical intention. Three parallel grooves ran along its length, housing microscopic filaments. The surface carried a brushed metallic sheen, broken only by delicate circuit etchings that glimmered under light like veins of quicksilver.
He stared at it.
This was the key. Had to be.
He found the charger, plugged in the laptop, and waited through its grinding boot sequence. When the desktop finally loaded, the background was a photo of a snow-covered forest under pale blue sky.
For a second—less than a second—he felt cold. Smelled pine. Heard the crunch of snow.
Then it was gone.
He opened the folders. COLLEGE. PROJECTS. PHOTOS.
The projects were anatomy diagrams, kinesiology studies, neural schematics. Homework. Proof that Arthur had been a student. Had studied bodies, how they worked, how they broke.
Then he opened PHOTOS
The first image: a boy, maybe ten, gap-toothed and grinning, sandwiched between two smiling adults in front of a cabin. Snow on the roof. Joy on every face.
He remembered this. Almost. The edges of it. Warmth. Safety. Hot chocolate.
He clicked to the next photo. Him and a girl—sister?—making faces at the camera.
The next. The next.
And with each click, the warmth drained away.
The photos got recent. College parties. Family gatherings. The smiles were still there, but they’d changed. Hardened. Became masks.
He stopped on one: Arthur at a table with friends, drink in hand, laughing.
But the laugh was performance. The eyes were dead.
He saw it now. The hollowness. The way he held himself like he was trying to disappear while still taking up space. The careful construction of someone who’d learned to be what other people needed and forgot to be anything else.
He’d been .
Arthur slammed the laptop shut.
His hands were shaking again.
But he didn’t have a choice. That person was all he had. Those brittle smiles. Those dead eyes. That was Arthur.
And Arthur was gone.
And he was all that was left.
He sat there, breathing hard, staring at nothing.
The data shard was still in the box.
He picked it up, slotted it into the laptop, and watched the icon appear.
He clicked it.
PASSWORD REQUIRED
Of course.
Of course it was.
A knock on the door.
Then another. Sharper.
“Art. It’s me, Kira.”
Her voice crackled through the intercom, tight with impatience.
Arthur’s gaze snapped to the woman. Still standing there. Still watching.
He moved fast, grabbing her by the arm—light, so light, like she was made of foam—and half-dragged her into the bathroom. She didn’t resist. Didn’t help. Just let herself be moved like a doll.
He shut the door, plunging her into darkness.
Then he took a breath, ran his hands through his hair, and opened the apartment door.
Kira’s eyes—brilliant cyan, clearly synthetic—met his.
Her frown was immediate. “Uh. Aren’t you taller than two days ago?”
She pushed past him without waiting for an answer, hands shoved in the pockets of her leather jacket. Umber skin covered in glowing neon tattoos that pulsed faintly in geometric patterns. Thick dreadlocks in black and electric teal pulled back in a high ponytail. Shaved sides revealing more glowing ink along her skull.
She looked like she’d walked out of a cyberpunk fever dream.
She looked .
“Place is still a dump,” she said, kicking the cardboard box. “What’s this? Fan mail?”
“Something like that.” His voice sounded off. Too rough. Too uncertain.
She turned to face him, and her expression shifted. The hot-headed energy drained away, replaced by something calculating. Worried.
“Seriously, Art. You look different.”
Her gaze flicked from his eyes to his hair and back.
“Whoa. Since when did you get mods?”
She stepped into his personal space—too close, invading, her face inches from his. Arthur recoiled but she grabbed his chin, tilting his head to catch the light.
She smelled like ozone and cinnamon.
“Hold still,” she commanded. Her cyan eyes scanned his, clinical and intense. “These are new. Expensive. Organic, high-quality. Not so frugal anymore, eh? I thought you hated mods.”
Her attention moved to the white strand. “And . That’s custom work. Couple thousand credits at least.”
She released him, stepped back, arms folding. “What’s going on, Art?”
“It’s new,” he said. Because it was true.
“New.” She didn’t believe him. He could see it in the set of her jaw, the way the tattoos along her arms pulsed brighter. “You disappear for two days. Ignore my calls. Sound like you’ve seen a ghost. And now you’ve got high-end mods in your head.”
She leaned in. “You in trouble?”
“I don’t know.”
The honesty of it must have registered because her expression softened. Just a fraction.
“Complicated,” she said flatly. “Art, we’ve been running together for a year. I’ve seen you talk your way out of a NovaForge security jam. I’ve seen you patch up a ganger mid-firefight. And I’ve never seen you look like this.”
“Like what?”
“Like a cornered animal.” Her voice dropped. “You’re scared. Actually, genuinely scared. So don’t give me ‘complicated.’”
She glanced past him at the bathroom door.
Arthur’s blood turned to ice.
“What’s in the bathroom?”
“Nothing.”
“Please.” She scoffed. “You’ve been staring at that door like it’s going to explode since I walked in. Did you finally kill someone?” She paused. “Wait. Is it a girl?”
Arthur opened his mouth. Closed it.
Kira sighed, shoving her hands back in her pockets. “Fine. Whatever. Be mysterious. But you’re pale, you look like you haven’t eaten in two days and you need help whether you’ll admit it or not.”
She moved toward the door. “Workshop. Now. I’ll run a diagnostic, get some food in you. You can tell me what’s actually going on while I do.”
“Okay,” Arthur said. Just to get her out. Just to have space to think.
He grabbed the grey hoodie from the wardrobe, pulled it on, and drew the hood up. Hiding the glowing strand. Hiding the silver eyes.
Hiding.
“Come on,” Kira said, already at the door.
Arthur took a step to follow.
Kira stopped.
Turned.
Looked past him at the bathroom door.
“Wait a sec.”
She strode past him, didn’t knock, just palmed the door open and stuck her head inside.
Arthur’s heart stopped.
Kira’s augmented eyes scanned the dark room. The shower. The sink. The toilet. The gym clothes he’d left on the floor earlier.
The black blanket puddled on the tile.
Where the woman had been standing.
Kira stared at the blanket for a long, silent moment. Then she stepped fully inside, knelt, sniffed the air. Her nose wrinkled. She checked the shower stall. The cabinet under the sink.
Nothing.
She stood slowly, walked back out, her expression unreadable.
She didn’t say anything.
Just walked past Arthur, slid open the main door, and stepped into the hallway.
“You coming or what?”
Arthur followed, his mind churning on a single thought:
End of Chapter One
