Part 1: The Outpost
The desert didn't sleep.
It stretched on forever, endless sand and silence, broken only by the jagged outline of Black Ridge's skeletal antenna towers silhouetted against a dying moon. Dust crept over everything like ash, wind whistled low through rusted fences, old floodlights flickered in the distance, like long dead ghosts trapped in a useless rhythm, and through it all, Kairo moved.
He didn't walk, he dragged. One arm limp, one leg locking every third step. His skin glowed faintly under the moonlight, veins twitching with a sickly blue luminescence that pulsed slower now, weaker, fading.
Every breath tasted like copper and static.
His hands were coated in drying black blood and grit. The fingers had started to calcify, bone pushing through the skin in sharp ridges, his nails flaking off like burned plastic, he didn't recognize the shape of his own shadow anymore.
He stumbled up a rocky incline, collapsed once, caught himself with a grunt that wasn't entirely human, and kept going. He didn't stop moving,
not until he saw the shack.
Half buried in the ridge like a rusted blister, the surveillance outpost was no bigger than a shipping container. An ancient structure from the early days of Black Ridge asset field tests. The government had called it a "ranger hut" in the files. Nothing inside but dust, maybe an old map, and spiders.
But to Kairo, it looked like sanctuary.
He reached the dented door and pressed his hand to it, it didn't open, he didn't care.
He gripped the metal and pushed. His fingers dug into the door like heated rebar, crushing the panel inward with a shriek of tortured hinges. He stepped inside, dragging his leaking shadow with him, and kicked the warped frame closed behind him.
The room went dark, not black, just... still.
He leaned against the door and slid to the floor, back against cold steel, head bowed, chest heaving.
For the first time since waking in the kill chamber, there was no alarm. No gunfire. No voice in his head trying to override him.
Just his breath.
And the sound of something shifting beneath his ribs.
His eyes adjusted slowly to the inside of the outpost, the air was stale, heavy with dust and machine rot. One single overhead light flickered to life—low voltage, connected to an emergency solar battery that hadn't been drained yet. It bathed the room in a sickly amber glow.
The place looked like it hadn't been touched in years.
Old monitors lined the left wall, dead screens cracked or webbed in static. A desk cluttered with long dead radio equipment sat beneath a peeling wall map labeled
ASSET RANGE PERIMETER - SECTOR ECHO.
Bullet holes dotted one corner of the ceiling, an old skirmish, maybe. Or something that never made it into the files.
Kairo pushed himself upright, stumbled forward, and fell hard against the edge of the desk.
He forced himself up again. His body responded like a dying machine, still moving, but with parts screaming to be shut off.
He reached down and opened the lower drawer, empty.
Next one, dust, a dead rat.
He ignored it.
The third—
A med kit, old, military grade, still sealed.
He tore it open.
Most of the supplies were useless, expired stimulants, shattered vials, but one small injector remained intact. It had no label, just a red stripe across its body.
He didn't hesitate.
He jammed it into the side of his neck and hit the plunger.
The chemical surged through his bloodstream like napalm, his body convulsed, his vision flared white, for a moment, he thought he'd injected acid.
Then—
Clarity.
The pain dulled.
His muscles locked, then relaxed.
His breath evened out, not calm, but manageable.
He dropped the injector and looked to the far corner of the room. There, half buried under fallen insulation, was a rusted metal chair bolted to the floor, wires trailing from its base like intestines. A cracked neural uplink jack hung from the wall nearby, its red indicator light still blinking.
He remembered this room now.
This was where they had once monitored his first open-range field run, the chair was where they sat him after he failed to obey a test kill order.
The jack… that was where they plugged in the override.
He stared at it for a long time, then he crossed the room and sat in the chair.
It creaked under his weight, rust flaked off into the air, he picked up the neural jack cable, it was frayed at the end, stained with old blood. It shouldn't work.
But it didn't need to.
Kairo tilted his head forward, brushed his hair aside, and found the recessed port at the base of his skull, long sealed, surgically embedded. It hadn't been used in years.
He forced the jack into place.
It didn't go quietly.
The prongs sparked as they connected. The room illuminated suddenly, with monitors flickering to life and static blaring across the wall of screens.
Then the pain hit.
Not pain.
Invasion.
His mind convulsed.
Images, Sound, Code, Voices. All of them crashing into his brain like a tidal wave of static and fire. He gripped the arms of the chair, muscles locked in spasm, eyes rolled back into his skull.
The shack shook.
The floor hissed beneath his boots.
And then, from the center monitor, one screen came to life.
A login screen.
BLACK RIDGE // SHADOW NODE 7
RESTRICTED ACCESS
ENTER ID
Kairo didn't type, his blood did.
The machine read his internal code—the DNA encryption wired through every cell of his altered body. He didn't speak, didn't think. Just opened himself.
The screen accepted him.
ACCESS GRANTED
WELCOME, KAIRO-7
And then, the list appeared.
Names.
Rows and rows and rows of them.
Mercer Halden
Lt. Cmdr. Rhys Daxon
Dr. Rilla Chen
Handler Voss
Commander Lynn Frell
Dr. Julian Mire
Architect Keyes
Control Agent 0042A – REDACTED
Each with a relocation log, a new alias, a last seen ping. Some had already disappeared, others were flagged as "pending relocation."
All of them were the same thing in Kairo's eyes.
Targets.
The console buzzed.
A voice line broke through the system, not synthetic, not distorted.
A girl's voice.
Soft, familiar.
"…Kairo? If you're hearing this… then you're still in there, God. They told me you were gone, but if you're hearing this—please—remember me."
It wasn't a log.
It was a planted message.
DNA locked. Hidden inside him like a timebomb memory, it was Sera.
She had left it behind for him. Buried in the code they used to erase him.
And now, it was awake.
Kairo sat frozen.
Eyes forward.
Not blinking.
Just listening.
To a voice he hadn't heard in over a decade,
to the blood that never forgot her.