The border between Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of the Congo was a blurred line of jungle and smoke. Samson and Chipo didn't cross through the official gates; Thorne's influence reached deep into the customs offices. Instead, they navigated the Lualaba River on a low-slung barge, hidden among crates of heavy machinery and dried fish.
The air in the Katanga Province was different. It didn't have the dry, ancient heat of Kadoma. It was humid, thick with the scent of wet earth and the metallic tang of the world's largest cobalt and copper deposits. Samson's arm—now golden from fingertips to elbow—felt like a lead weight in the damp air. The sapphire tattoo beneath the gold shimmered with a restless, bioluminescent light, reacting to the massive mineral wealth beneath the riverbed.
"The coordinates led us to Kolwezi," Chipo said, studying a tablet she had salvaged from Thorne's complex. "But the signature is different here. It's not pulsing like the 'Heart' in Zimbabwe. It's... breathing."
The Cobalt King
They arrived in the outskirts of Kolwezi under the cover of a tropical thunderstorm. The city was a sprawling beehive of industrial mining and "crevice" digging. Here, the gold wasn't the primary target. It was Cobalt blue metal that powered the world's batteries, the very "blood" of the digital age.
Their contact was a man named Banza, a former union leader who had lost an eye during a protest against the "New Syndicate." They met in a cellar beneath a bustling marketplace where the sound of rain on corrugated tin muffled their voices.
"You are looking for The Alchemist," Banza said, his voice a rasp. "We call him L'Ingénieur. He arrived six months ago. He promised the miners that he had a way to extract cobalt without the 'blood-tax.' No more children in the pits, no more cave-ins."
"And did he keep his promise?" Samson asked, his golden hand resting on the table.
Banza looked at the hand, his lone eye widening. "He kept it in a way we did not expect. The children stopped going into the pits because they became the pits. L'Ingénieur has built a 'Living Battery' in the Mutanda Mine. He says he is not making gold; he is making 'Pure Energy'."
The Living Battery
Samson and Chipo moved toward the Mutanda site that night. The security wasn't gray-clad mercenaries this time. It was something worse: The Wired.
As they peered through the perimeter fence, they saw men patrolling the grounds. They moved with a jerky, mechanical precision. Their spines were reinforced with copper cables, and their eyes glowed with a dull, cobalt blue light. They weren't being transmuted into metal; they were being turned into conductors living wires designed to transmit energy from the earth to a central capacitor.
"Thorne was an amateur," Samson whispered. "He was interested in the value of the soul. The Alchemist... he wants the current."
In the center of the mine sat a massive structure that looked like an inverted cathedral. Huge cobalt rods plunged into the earth, vibrating at a frequency that made the very air feel electric.
The Surge of the Ancestors
"Samson, your arm," Chipo warned.
The sapphire ink was overflowing. The blue light was leaking out of Samson's pores, drawn toward the cathedral like iron to a magnet. He realized the Alchemist's machine wasn't just pulling energy from the earth; it was pulling it from anything with a high Aetheric signature.
"I can't stay hidden," Samson realized. "The machine is calling the ink in my blood. If I don't move toward it, it will rip my arm off."
"Then we go in loud," Chipo said, checking her magazines. "Banza said the miners are ready for a signal. They know something is wrong, but they're scared of the Wired."
Samson stepped out from the shadows, his golden arm raised like a torch. The "Wired" guards turned in unison, their copper spines hissing as they drew electrified batons.
"I am Detective Samson," he roared, his voice amplified by the electromagnetic field of the mine. "And I've come to unplug the world!"
The Alchemist's Gambit
The doors of the cathedral opened, and a man stepped out. He didn't wear a suit like Sibanda or a lab coat like Thorne. He wore the traditional robes of a Luba chief, but they were woven with fiber-optic cables. This was L'Ingénieur, a man whose face was a perfect, expressionless mask of polished silver.
"The Architect of Tredex," the Alchemist said, his voice echoing in Samson's mind rather than his ears. "You come to stop the harvest? You are too late. The 'Global Mint' was just the beginning. We are no longer interested in currency. We are building a god of Cobalt."
The Alchemist raised his hand, and the ground beneath Samson erupted. Not with dirt, but with liquid copper, rising up like a tidal wave to consume the man who had dared to cross the border.