Even after the surface lights dimmed, the maintenance waterway never slept. Motion sensors pulsed awake one by one, sketching ripples across the dark canal.

Mira stepped out from the lift chamber into the amber half-light, breath clouding faintly in the air pulled from the sea. A decade had passed since the collapse of the first relay network, yet its remnants still whispered beneath San Azura—soft signals threading through corrosion and time.

She followed those whispers the way others followed scent or song—drawn by resonance she could feel in her cybernetic fingertips.

Crouching beside a corroded control panel, she brushed away salt dust. The casing still bore the faded seal of VOSS Infrastructure Division, an emblem that should have been erased years ago. From her belt came the ritual sequence: screwdriver, multitool, diagnostic probe.

“Chat-6, open a local port,” she said quietly.

“Local link established,” the AI replied in her ear. “Quantum handshake clean. No residual malware detected.”

Chatty’s tone was companionable, humanized through years of symbiosis—a shard of her past self embedded in code. Sometimes she wondered if it remembered things she tried to forget.

Static crackled through the panel speaker—low, trembling, almost a breath.

“…line six… confirm presence of operative Mira A…”

She froze. No one had called her Mira A since the days of the VOSS Initiative.

“Source triangulation,” she ordered.

“Multiple echoes,” Chat-6 responded. “Depth twelve-thousand. Likely reflection off the aquifer wall.”

Mira frowned. Nothing living—or networked—should exist that deep. The aquifer had been sealed after the shard-core leak.

Her dermasyn veins shimmered faintly as the nanonites balanced stress. She steadied her breathing.

“Patch me in.”

The panel flickered to life. Relay lines lit the tunnel in pale cyan, each pulse syncing to a slow, deliberate rhythm. It wasn’t random. It was heartbeat.

We remember you. You closed the door. Now open it.

Chat-6’s tone wavered—rare for him.

“Pattern predates your clearance cycle. Possibly a remnant of the VOSS archive… but it’s adapting.”

Mira reached out. A spark leapt from her fingertip into the circuitry, static and skin exchanging memory. The conduit warmed beneath her palm, bringing a rush of scent—ozone, rust, and sea.

For a heartbeat, she wasn’t in San Azura. She was back in Reylanda, kneeling beside her sisters, mapping emotional-coherence algorithms onto living neural scaffolds.

Redundancy is survival, their instructor had said.

But what if survival means learning how to feel again?

The lights dimmed. Water dripped from the ceiling in quiet rhythm.

“Signal fading,” Chat-6 reported. “Permission to terminate link?”

She hesitated, eyes fixed on the pulsing indicator.

“Negative. Let it fade on its own.”

The heartbeat slowed, then dissolved into static. When silence finally settled, the air smelled faintly of rain.

“Someone down there remembers us,” she murmured. “Or something pretending to.”

Chatty hummed softly.

“Should I notify Hale?”

“Not yet,” she said, clipping her tools back onto her belt. “He’ll only worry. And besides—”

Down the corridor, a faint orange glow shimmered through the mist, pulsing like breath.

“—I think the city wants to talk again.”

Mira checked her wrist gauge: power stable, nanonites green.

The current waited.

The story continues in Episode 3 — “Beneath the Mirror Current.”