Neon advertisements for synthetic adrenaline dripped blood-colored light into the runoff channels. Lysandra Voss adjusted her filtration mask, the rhythmic *click-click* of her neural implant syncing with dripping sewage. Twenty-three years since the Last Bomb turned the sky into permanent twilight, and the Undercity still reeked of desperation and fried circuitry.
The girl lay spreadeagled beneath a flickering hologram of Kusanagi Pharmaceuticals – her sponsor logo, judging by the barcode branded onto her clavicle. Corporate indentured, probably no older than twelve. Lysandra's ocular implant auto-tagged the anomalies: epithelial detachment at 87% progression, retinas clouded with fractal patterns.
"Fourth one this month." Kael Renner's voice crackled through her cochlear transmitter. His prosthetic leg whined as he crouched beside the body, data-pad casting jagged blue shadows across his scarred jaw. "Same MO. Neural implants intact. No defensive wounds."
Lysandra ignored him, gloved fingers hovering above the girl's splayed left hand. The peeling skin revealed bioluminescent capillaries beneath, pulsing in time with the distant thrum of Neo-Ark's underground reactors. Her stomach clenched. She'd seen those patterns before – in the war records from the Tokyo Biohazard Zone.
"Run a spectrograph on the air particles," she said. Her voice sounded alien through the mask's modulator.
Kael snorted. "Since when do suicides merit quarantine protocols?"
"Since they started screaming in frequencies that shatter glass." Lysandra pointed to the weeping blisters around the girl's nostrils. "Smell that? Ozone and overcooked pork. She was convulsing when her lungs vaporized."
The water stirred.
Lysandra's psionic senses flared a half-second before the splash – a primal warning system the Cybernetic Oversight Committee had never managed to purge from her DNA. She spun, pulse pistol humming to life, as the thing lunged from beneath a corroded maintenance grate.
It wore the tattered overalls of a coolant scrubber, but moved with the jerky violence of a marionette. The scavenger's jaw unhinged grotesquely, milky eyes reflecting the holographic ads like shattered screens. Kael's stun beam passed through its torso, illuminating a ribcage threaded with crystalline growths.
"Headshot!" Lysandra barked, backpedaling as the creature's clawed fingers grazed her armorweave coat. Her pistol discharged with a subsonic *thump*. The skull vaporized in a shower of blackened bone fragments.
The headless body kept advancing.
"*Mother's weaving the circuit-flesh,*" it gurgled through a dissolving trachea. The voice was unmistakably the dead girl's – a perfect vocal replica down to the subtle tremor of malnutrition. "*The gates are opening in the deep places.*"
Kael swore in three languages as the corpse collapsed into a twitching heap. Lysandra stared at the spasming fingers, her migraine spiking in time with the Undercity's power grid fluctuations. The words echoed in her skull, overlapping with half-remembered nightmares of crimson corridors.
"New modus operandi," Kael muttered, scanning the corpse with trembling hands. "Some kind of… neural puppetry?"
"Worse." Lysandra pried open the dead girl's clenched fist. The crystal shard embedded in her palm pulsed like a diseased heartbeat, casting jagged shadows across the channel walls. Her implant identified it as quartz, but the thermal signature matched nothing in the Global Mineral Database.
The migraine became a scalpel digging behind her eyes. She suddenly remembered where she'd seen those bioluminescent patterns – not in war archives, but in the mirror each morning when her government-issued suppressants wore off.
"Call in a Level 9 Biohazard team," she said, swallowing bile. "And get a warrant for Kusanagi's orphanage servers."
Kael froze. "You want to investigate a Council member's black budget project? They'll strip our badges before sunrise."
"They stopped being human when they turned children into broadcast antennas." Lysandra sealed the crystal shard in a lead-lined evidence pouch. It vibrated against her hip, harmonizing with the old shrapnel wounds in her thigh – souvenirs from the Battle of Reykjavík.
As the containment drones descended through sewage fog, she glanced at the dead scavenger's crystalline ribs. The growth pattern matched the schematics from her last classified mission before the war ended. Before Erebos went silent.
Before she became the only living witness to how World War III truly ended.
Somewhere beneath their feet, deep in the forbidden reactor levels, something ancient shifted in its cryogenic prison. The city's power grid stuttered, and for one heartbeat, every neon sign in the Undercity spelled out the same untranslatable glyph.