"A machine remembers everything it's ever been told to forget."
The sun was a bruise behind the clouds as they approached the Helix perimeter. The land before Sector Theta was a ruin of glass and metal, a field of collapsed pylons and fractured concrete that whispered with the memory of old detonations. Towers rose from the haze like ribs of a giant corpse; between them, cables hung like spiderwebs, humming faintly with stolen power.
Less kept to the shadows, scarf tight, rifle slung low. The three of them moved like a single thought—silent, practical, contained. Khale cut a path with boots that had learned to trust nothing. Shelly moved with a careful haste, checking their packs and muttering to herself as she read the small instruments clipped to her belt.
The data core they'd pulled from the sentinel sat in a mesh pouch against Less's chest, its glow hidden. It was the only thing they had that promised answers. And answers, she had learned, came with teeth.
They skirted the outer fences, slipping through a collapsed tram depot and into a maintenance corridor where old service bots lay toppled and sleeping in rusted pools. The air here tasted metallic and old—like the inside of a closed clock.
Khale paused, listened, then touched Less's shoulder. His hand was warm through the fabric. "Sensors show a blindspot up ahead—old frequency shadow. We can cut across at the substation."
Less nodded. "Lead."
He moved, fluid, as if the ruin itself had become an ally. They crossed into a shell of a substation; control panels leaned like tombstones, monitors dead and black. In the center, a bank of consoles still hummed, powered by a scavenged reactor someone had rigged and hidden. The glow was faint, but enough to bring maps and schematics back into partial life.
Less pulled the data core out, cradling it like a heart. She set it on the console. The machine protested, coughed, and accepted. Light spilled across the screen, and with it, the whisper of code.
Shelly hovered over her shoulder. "Careful. Whatever this was built for, it's not just an archive."
Less's fingers moved with the precise economy of someone who'd fired a thousand times and learned where to place her hands without thinking. The encryption sagged, folded, and then, grudgingly, opened. Lines of code scrolled, and a map of Sector Theta formed—rings of security nodes, detention blocks, a central laboratory marked with a small, clean name: GENESIS CORE.
Khale's jaw tightened. "That's the nest."
Less's mouth was dry. "Lysandra's lab."
Shelly read over the schematic, lips moving. "And here," she said, pointing to a subsection, "an access key hidden behind a biometric veil. They used a living signature. Whoever set that up wanted it forgotten."
Less felt her pulse speed—less from exertion than from a cold, threading realization. "If Lysandra left a living key, she might've left the map inside someone who survived."
Khale's eyes flicked to her. "People who survived Helix experiments aren't people they could always keep. They're weapons—or warnings."
Less thought of the girl in the pod, Vira, and of the sentinel that had called her designation. "Whatever it is," she said, "we go tonight."
The approach to Sector Theta was a lesson in patience. They crawled through maintenance ducts, hugged pipelines, and used old supply elevators that still obeyed the ghosts of commands. At every turn, Helix had left reminders—dead cameras, scorched posters promising a brighter gene, and automatic turrets that still remembered how to hate. Each small system they bypassed felt like lifting a lid off ancient grief.
When they reached the perimeter wall, towering and scarred, Less said, "This is it." The wall was a living thing; armor plating jammed with old barcodes and patches of brittle polymer. A single maintenance hatch offered a narrow entry. Khale undid the lock with tools that looked cobbled together but were precise, a craftsman's kit for theft and survival.
Inside, the corridor hummed with power and the scent of ozone. Pipes snaked overhead, and the lighting skewed toward clinical white. They moved fast—two shadows and a smaller, slower one—each aware their silence could be recorded and turned into a crime scene against them.
Halfway through the access tunnel, Shelly paused. "Listen."
At first Less heard nothing but the jitter of systems. Then—beneath the hum—a low tone, like a distant machine singing. It was rhythmic, repeated, almost like a lullaby. Less's palms went cold. It felt like the sound of someone breathing underwater.
"Audio watermark," Khale whispered. "They dog-tag every corridor."
"No," Shelly murmured. "That's not a watermark."
They pressed forward, and the sound coalesced into a voice—thin, recorded, repeating on loop.
"Subject L-01… follow the heart… follow the heart…"
Less stopped. The voice was familiar—fragmented, youthful. Lysandra? Or someone else who had been asked to repeat. Her throat closed.
Khale's hand rested lightly on the small of her back, a steadying weight. "They want you to find it."
Less's gut hooked. She could not ignore it. Not anymore. She moved, each step a promise or surrender.
They came to the heart of Sector Theta after what felt like hours—an aluminium vestibule and a set of double doors that slid open with a sigh. Beyond was a cavernous lab, clinical and terrible in equal measure. The walls pulsed with embedded conduits, veins of light running like blood through glass. Long tanks lined the room, some empty, some holding the fossilized shapes of things too much like humanity to be comfortable. Monitors glittered with dormant data, and driplines traced patterns along stainless steel involving a script that might once have called itself mercy.
At the center of the lab, raised on a dais and wrapped in translucent polymer, stood a machine that might have been a cathedral to science. It was a sphere of braided tubing and polished alloy—cold, humming, and merciless. A ring of platforms surrounded it, each lined with clamps and small sockets coated with the fine dust of disuse. On the sphere's surface, inlaid like scars, a single line of handwriting—Lysandra's handwriting, Less could feel it in the way the letters leaned—read: For the child who will not forget.
Shelly exhaled. "This is it."
Less stepped forward and the machinery acknowledged her like a sleeping thing sensing its maker. The sphere's skin warmed, and a ribbon of light braided its way across the consoles to a central interface. A biometric scan began: a soft blue glow crawling over the polymer like a pulse check.
Less's breath hitched. The core wanted recognition. It wanted to be held by someone who belonged to it.
She pulled the data core from her pack—the old one from the sentinel—and set it into the reader. The machine hummed louder, and the ring of platforms vibrated faintly. Then, as if a latch had been clicked open, a recessed panel shed its dust and opened to reveal a small, sterile cradle—one anatomically shaped for a child. The console displayed a prompt: LIVING SIGNATURE REQUIRED.
Less put her hand to the cradle's cool surface. Her fingers tingled, and a memory—thin at first, like the edge of a dream—rushed back in shards: Lysandra's hands, a syringe, a lullaby in a language Less couldn't place. Her throat constricted. She wanted to look away, to refuse the pull. But instead she leaned in, listening to the machine's slow respirations.
"Your DNA will be compared," Shelly said, voice small. "If you're what she used—"
Less finished the sentence for her. "…then it will open."
The cradle accepted her palm like an authentication. The lights threaded through the sphere, wrapping her hand in warm metallic light. For a moment, the lab held its breath. Then a cascade of images projected into the air—folders, recordings, faces. Lysandra's voice played, clean and trembling, speaking into emptiness.
"If you ever wake and don't remember, this will. Live for the rest of us."
The image shifted to a recording of a child—Less as a child—small and fragile, eyes closed in a tank of blue light. Lysandra's face loomed over her in the projection, hands stained. She said something softer that Less had never heard before:
"You will be the proof that mercy and survival can be the same thing."
Less's knees went weak. The floor tilted. Memory and machine braided until she couldn't tell which was which. Her fingers tightened on the cradle.
Khale's voice—hoarse—cut through the swirl. "It's a recorded archive. She left the map. She left a voice. But if you're the key—we need to know why."
Less swallowed. The lab hummed. Data poured into their minds in flashes—names of tests, dosage schedules, the moment Lysandra had overridden protocol to keep a child alive. One file collapsed inward, labeled SPAWNER LINK. The meaning of the word unfurled like a bad omen: a process designed to seed adaptive genomes across environments.
Shelly's face went pale. "She didn't just save you," she whispered. "She integrated you into the system."
Less felt the implications in the marrow of her bones. She'd been a survival chance, not a cure. She had been grafted into a machine designed to remake the world.
Images continued, but among them was Lysandra's final note—an address, a set of coordinates, and one instruction: IF SHE SURVIVES, END IT.
Less's mouth formed the word before she could stop herself. "End it."
A light in the lab dimmed, then brightened like a heartbeat. The sphere's voice—ephemeral, almost maternal—spoke in a tone that felt like someone soothing a child.
"Choice is a paradox. The child who lives keeps both sins and mercy. Choose."
Less's heart rammed at her ribs. Choice. The word tasted like iron.
Khale moved, placing his hand on her shoulder—steady, human. "We choose together."
She looked at him, at Shelly—at the two ragged people who'd chosen to stand with her when the world wanted them to fold. Less drew a breath that felt like an oath.
"Then we end what needs ending," she said. "But not because I'm afraid."
Shelly's eyes shone with a fragile ferocity. "We end it because mercy without cost is a lie."
The lab's hum softened. For the moment, answers had opened doors. Sometimes those doors were cages. Less closed her fingers around the data core and stood, small and terrible and human.
Beyond the lab, a far-off generator coughed; someone had spotted them. The world would not allow a lull of certainty for long. They had to move—now, before they could be measured and dissected by the very machine that had birthed them.
Khale smiled faintly, the kind of smile that promised both violence and protection. "Let's go burn their heart."
Less nodded. The machines had remembered everything. Tonight, they would make the machines remember what it meant to be broken.
They left the Genesis Core behind them to its humming and its ghosts, stepping out into the corridor where alarms had already started to churn. The path they chose was not one of redemption—it was a chosen blade, moving forward until it found its mark.
And in the place where mercy had been catalogued and archived, Less carried the weight of a mother's last instruction through the pounding of her blood and the clatter of their boots.