Darkness.
Not the gentle kind that cradles you in sleep—but absolute, suffocating, visceral. The kind that pulses with the screams of children echoing through void and steel. High-pitched. Ragged. Pain-warped. Terrified. Then... multiplying. One scream becomes two. Then four. Then dozens, like a chorus of broken memories clawing at the inside of your skull.
Kael's eyes snapped open.
Blurred shapes swam across his vision. Artificial light filtered in through a window, bent by polarized smartglass. His breath was ragged, shallow. He sat upright on the bed, drenched in sweat, pupils dilated. The room around him—a haze of cold chrome and lived-in heat. Future-tech decor tangled with disarray: women's clothes scattered across the floor like fallen petals, a cracked hologlass heel leaning against a chair leg, and a smart-TV flickering static before resolving into an interview. Onscreen, a man with both arms amputated was being fitted with new chrome limbs by a woman in medical streetwear pushing a trolley lined with cybernetic implants.
Kael exhaled sharply. He ran both hands through his hair, elbows resting on his knees. "Shit... That dream again."
A sleepy voice from behind. Velvet and slurred. "You awake?"
"Yeah," he said without turning. "You?"
"Not yet... still recovering," she murmured, curling deeper under the sheets. "Last night you wrecked me, you animal. I need a reboot..."
Kael let out a laugh, low and tired, glancing over his shoulder. "That's rich coming from the girl yelling 'harder' while riding my chrome like it owed you money."
She huffed, grabbed a pillow, and launched it at his head with lazy accuracy. It bounced off his face as he laughed harder.
"Ease up, Ivy," he smirked. "Just messing."
Ivy rolled to her side, clutching the blanket over her bare skin like armor. Her red hair spilled like neon across the pillow, haloed in the dim morning light. Kael's grin softened. He leaned in, kissed her cheek, then slid out of bed.
His feet touched the cold floor. The tactile response gel beneath his soles buzzed faintly. As he moved past the neural dock station near his desk, his eyes lingered on the locked room. A reinforced door with an embedded retinal scanner sat dormant beside a cyber-panel. He tapped the interface. The door hissed open horizontally—X-axis split—revealing a dark-tiled bathroom lined in blue backlight.
He stepped in. Gripped the sink.
The mirror above didn't show his reflection at first. Just black glass. Lightless. A cold slab of inactive tech waiting to be told who stood before it.
Then—an internal click. A flicker like static breath.
The surface pulsed once, low blue glow simmering behind the screen, then sparked to life as if reawakening from a deep system sleep.
A thread of data slithered along the bottom edge.
BOOTING NEURO-ID MATRIX // INITIATING REFLECTIVE LAYER
Electroluminescent glyphs blinked into place—burning diagnostic feed across the glass.
BIOMETRICS: RECOGNIZED
NEURAL LATENCY: 418ms
SLEEP DEFICIT: 79% — CRITICAL
CORTISOL INDEX: DANGEROUS
SUBDERMAL TEMP: 37.9°C
STIM RECOVERY: UNSTABLE
Then, pixel by pixel, his reflection began to manifest.
At first, fragmented—like a bad render stuttering on outdated firmware. The eyes came first. Crimson. Burning through the static. Then his jawline, shadowed by fatigue and scar memory. The chrome-laced veins glowing faintly along his neck. The flickering eye. The half-synth cheekbone that hadn't fully fused since the Ordos job.
But beneath the glitching silhouette, code began to emerge. Etched into the base of the mirror in a thin, serpentine strip of neon red.
It wasn't just a name. It was a signature—encrypted, breathing, alive with sublayer motion. Characters flickered through dead languages and rogue dialects before coalescing into something clean, razor-sharp, and terrifyingly personal.
𝗞ΛΞⱢ. ⱤϾӉПΞ
The line broke. Then stabilized.
KAEL RHYNE
[UNREG_MERC.ID // CLASS: BLACK THREAD // TRACE: 0.00 // STATUS: AWAKE]
Deep red eyes, sleepless and haunted. A cybernetic nose implant lined with glowing X-strips. Neck laced in chrome veins, converging at a matte-black hexagon just above his collarbone—an obsolete powerlink port now used for nothing but scars.
Above, a mane of black curls tumbled wild and unruly, strands coiled like dark wire. The tips shimmered with a faded white gradient—like ash burned into the ends of data cables—ghostlike against the ink-dark base. His hair moved slightly under the low ventilation breeze, catching the cold blue of the mirrorlight like static caught mid-fall.
Down his left arm, ink told a different story—etched deep beneath synth-skin. A futuristic serpent, its body laced with cybernetic filigree, coiled around the frame of a custom bio-gun. Its design was lean, brutal, elegant—a symbol of survival, silence, and strike. Not just a tattoo. A statement. A memory burned into flesh.
His right cyber-eye flickered. Then glitched violently.
"Fuck!" he hissed, clutching his face. The lens spiraled. Numbers—jagged red code—flashed across his retinal overlay like a corrupted bootloader. Internal error messages screamed silently. Data flood. Logic crash. The chaos lasted three seconds. Felt like forever.
Then... stillness.
He exhaled, slow and shaky, removing his hand. The eye steadied, but a faint hum remained behind the surface, like static crawling under skin.
"I need to see Raze," he muttered. "Those bastards wrecked my optics. Must've slipped a backdoor into my node... fuckers."
He splashed water on his face. The artificial skin beneath his eye peeled slightly—just enough to remind him that nothing about him was human anymore. He dried off, walked to the door. It auto-slit open as he approached.
Ping.
A glowing line flickered across his vision. Not a glitch—this time, a call.
INCOMING COMM // RIVEN CROSS
"Riven..." Kael whispered, brow furrowing. "You better not be calling just to say morning, asshole."
The call accepted—not with a button, but through neural command. The image materialized on his HUD, ghostlike, above his vision. A man with faded gold circuit-trails tattooed across both cheeks, short raven-black hair, and hunter green eyes leaned into view.
"Yo, Sleeping Beauty," Riven teased. "Did I interrupt your beauty cycle?"
Kael chuckled dry. "Nah, just came out of a dream that felt like a goddamn data dump from hell."
Riven's smirk faded slightly. Concern lingered behind his tone. "That same dream again?"
Kael nodded, walking over to his wardrobe. Its surface was mirrored glass, shimmered with soft pulses of color from within. It scanned him—clicked open.
"Yeah," Kael said. "Nightmare won't quit. But it's not just that. My chrome eye's fucked. Need Raze to take a look. Get some meds too."
"Shit," Riven replied. "I saw the feed lag during the last run, but I figured you tanked it. Those hacks must've burned deep."
"Yeah, well," Kael muttered, slipping into black tactical pants scratched from the knees down. "Turns out shielding wasn't enough."
"You'll live," Riven chuckled. "Anyway, I've got a Splice."
Kael paused while tugging a white tee over his chest. "Splice? From who?"
Riven's grin returned, sharp and full of weight. "Silas Zorren."
Kael blinked. His hands stopped. "Wait—Zorren? The Zorren? The one who ghosted after that Ocean Nine job?"
"The very one," Riven said. "Word is, he saw our last few gigs. The old woman from the clubhouse passed him our dossiers. He's impressed."
Kael zipped up a red jacket halfway, shaking his head in disbelief. "Shit, Riven. That's not just a gig. That's a goddamn tectonic shift."
"No deets yet," Riven said. "He wants to meet. This afternoon. At one P.M."
Kael moved to his boots, black with white trim, scuffed from old jobs. He laced up, tension brewing under every knot.
"I'll be outside your building in a few moments." Riven added. "Be ready."
"Copy that," Kael replied. "Let's see what legend smells like."
The call blinked out. HUD cleared.
Kael stood in silence for a second, flexing his fingers—half metal, half real—before walking toward the sealed side room. He stopped just outside.
A soft hum whispered from the other side of the door.
He breathed in deep.
"Alright," he said under his breath. "New gig. New thread. Let's rewrite the fucking code."