Even after the surface lights dimmed, San Azura’s flood tunnels never slept. Motion sensors stirred awake one by one, casting ripples of amber light across the water.

Mira stepped from the lift chamber, breath clouding faintly in the cool, briny air drawn from the sea. A decade had passed since the collapse of the first relay network—yet fragments of its voice still hummed through the subterranean grid.

She followed that hum the way others followed scent or memory—drawn by a resonance that pulsed through her cybernetic fingertips.

At the bend of the corridor, a corroded control panel waited beneath a veil of condensation. Its casing bore the faded insignia of VOSS Infrastructure Division, an emblem that should have been erased with the Initiative itself. She knelt, unfastening her belt with a quiet rhythm: screwdriver, multitool, diagnostic probe.

“Chat-6, open a local port.”

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

His voice—warm, familiar—felt less like a program and more like a companion that had learned her cadence. Sometimes Mira wondered if he remembered the things she tried to forget.

A burst of static broke through the panel speaker—soft at first, then rising into something almost vocal.

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

She froze. No one had called her Mira A since the early VOSS years.

“Source triangulation,” she ordered.

“Multiple echoes,” Chatty said. “Depth twelve-thousand. Possible reflection from the aquifer wall.”

That was impossible. Nothing—alive or networked—should exist at that depth. The aquifer had been sealed after the shard-core breach.

Her dermasyn veins shimmered faintly as nanonites balanced the spike of adrenaline. She steadied her breathing.

“Patch me in.”

The relay flickered to life, painting the tunnel walls in pale cyan. The signal pulsed in time with her heartbeat—slow, deliberate, hauntingly human.

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

Chat-6’s tone wavered, almost hesitant.

“Pattern predates your clearance cycle. Possibly an archive remnant… but it’s adapting.”

Mira touched the panel. A thin spark jumped from her fingertip into the corroded metal. The conduit warmed under her palm, carrying the scent of ozone, rust, and salt—an aftertaste of memory.

For one fleeting moment, she wasn’t in San Azura. She was back in Reylanda—kneeling beside her sisters, mapping coherence algorithms onto living neural lattices.

Redundancy is survival, their instructor had said.

But what if survival means learning how to feel again?

The tunnel lights dimmed. Water dripped rhythmically from above.

“Signal fading,” Chatty murmured. “Permission to terminate?”

She shook her head.

“Negative. Let it fade on its own.”

The heartbeat slowed, dissolved into static, then silence. The air smelled faintly of rain. Mira exhaled and stood, her reflection fractured in the dark water.

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

Chatty hummed in response.

“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 flickered through the mist, like the city drawing breath.

“—I think San Azura wants to talk again.”

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

The current below pulsed once, then waited.

The story continues in Episode 5 — “Beneath the Mirror Current.”