The City Beneath the Archives..
The city of Mirov wasn't found on modern maps. It was folded beneath the crust of Eurasia—its coordinates registered only in a corrupted backdoor embedded deep in the Genesis archive. It had once been classified as a research relay station, but according to Ara’s decrypted notes, it was repurposed before the fall.
Now it was something else.
Above ground, there were remnants of civilian life—dusty cafes, half-operating subway stations, a market with unmarked vendors. But beneath the surface, Ara located what she’d feared: a pulse node. Barely active, concealed behind false walls and leftover radiation dampeners.
And one signal.
Biometric match: Subject E-06.
Status: Awake. Active. Unregistered.
The Mask of ‘Luka’..
It took Ara two days to find them.
She tracked subtle anomalies: ATM footage showing mismatched pupil dilation, hospital logs for blood anomalies flagged and dismissed. A girl, seventeen at most, living under the name Luka Savalin. Birth record forged. No family. Worked nights as an ER volunteer and spent mornings sketching fractured blueprints into hidden notebooks.
At first glance? Normal.
But when Ara followed her into the tunnels beneath the metro grid, things changed.
Luka moved with pattern awareness. Every step calculated. Every echo registered. She pressed her palm to rusted walls like she was listening for old heartbeat sensors—ones Genesis used to calibrate obedience.
She was hiding.
Not from the world.
From herself.
Contact..
Ara waited until dusk.
She caught Luka near a drain access tunnel, sketchpad open, headphones in—but with no music playing. Ara approached slowly, disarmed, her posture relaxed.
“Your lines are too straight to be untrained,” Ara said softly.
Luka flinched. For one breathless second, she didn’t blink.
Then: “I’m not who you think I am.”
Ara nodded.
“I know. But neither am I.”
Silence passed like glass cracking in slow motion.
Then Luka whispered, “You’re the one they call Ara.”
That meant someone had told her. That meant someone was still watching.
The Memory Unlock..
Later that night, Luka let Ara into her subterranean quarters—lined with repurposed tech, walls covered in chalk drawings that resembled neural maps and dreamscapes.
Then she showed her the mirror.
Not a physical one. A neural playback recorder—a salvaged Genesis relic that pulled stored memories from the hippocampus and projected them in crude fragments.
Luka activated hers.
Ara watched in aching silence as flashes emerged:
Luka in a Genesis facility, screaming while electrodes tried to rewrite her empathy.
A doctor calling her “the incomplete empath.”
And a boy—unnamed—reaching for her hand before being dragged out of view.
She was one of the failed “Emotion Models.”
Genesis tried to train loyalty without eliminating compassion—but it made the subjects unstable. Half her batch was terminated.
Luka had escaped.
She had been running ever since.
Reaching for Trust..
“I didn’t want to be found,” Luka admitted, curled on the cot beneath a worn thermo-blanket.
Ara sat beside her, hands clasped.
“I didn’t come to retrieve you.”
Luka glanced over, suspicious. “Then why?”
Ara’s voice was steady.
“To ask.”
“To ask what?”
“If you want to stop running… or if you want to help rebuild something better.”
Luka stared for a long time. Then said what no Genesis child had ever been allowed to:
“I’ll think about it.”
The Blood That Lurks..
Ara left the bunker the next morning.
But as she crossed into the upper tunnels, her skin prickled.
She wasn’t alone.
Seconds later—before she could turn—something grazed the corner of her jacket. A dart embedded itself in the metal doorway just behind her. Laced with nanite inhibitors.
Only one type of operative used that tech.
“Program Remainders.”
Traitor agents who’d broken from Genesis… but built their own network, twisted and militant, intending to revive the control systems for private use.
They didn’t want reconciliation.
They wanted order.
And now?
They wanted Ara.
Escape into Fire..
Ara ran.
Not just to evade. To draw them away.
She looped through Mirov’s power lanes, triggered a city-wide blackout, and used old Genesis scramblers to reroute the chase into the refinery maze east of the channel.
But as she reached the escape dock…
She looked back.
And saw Luka watching her from the roof. Eyes wide. Pale.
Then Luka lifted her hand.
And detonated one of the old voltage disruptors.
The enemy collapsed.
Ara screamed.
She’d told her not to follow.
Aftermath..
Ara got Luka out.
Barely.
The girl suffered internal contusions, burns, and a shattered implant.
As she lay unconscious on the med deck back at the Araxi's vessel, Ara sat at her bedside.
She brushed ash out of Luka’s hair and whispered:
“You were supposed to be hiding, not saving me.”
Luka didn’t reply. But her hand curled slowly, fingers locking around Ara’s.
Maybe this wasn’t trust.
But it was a beginning.
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