They slipped deeper into the maintenance veins, metal ribs closing around them like the Archive's own hands. The ladder had been a narrow bridge between two worlds; now the tunnels were a maze of dead conduits and rusted pipes. Nero kept his hand low against the wall, feeling the faint hum of the Archive under his palm. The memory from before—the white hallway, the warm hand—hung in him like a wound.
Helia moved ahead with the same careful urgency she always wore. Her breaths were shallow but steady; her eyes kept darting to the ceiling, to vents, to anything that might give them away. Nero matched her pace because he trusted her, because she'd kept him alive twice now, and because for the first time there was someone who didn't look at him like a malfunction.
The distant thump of heavy machinery hit them like a premonition. It was slow at first, then faster—each beat a measured footstep somewhere above. R_Unit was following.
"Keep low," Helia hissed. "Heat signatures—keep to the shaded piping. Don't run electric."
Nero nodded. The memory pulse had left him raw; his hands trembled in the cold air. He swallowed and forced his lungs to calm. His heartbeat tried to speak louder than the Archive's own cadence, and the tunnel lights pulsed faintly in reply.
They rounded a corner into a wider shaft. Old maintenance catwalks crisscrossed above them, and a dead console sagged against the wall, its display frozen mid-error. For a second everything seemed stopped—suspended between the moment they'd left the ladder and whatever hunted them next.
Then a high, brittle shriek tore through the space. Overhead, the thin whine of drone rotors sliced the air, followed by clicking servos as multiple scout drones swept the corridor. Red targeting lenses blinked to life.
Helia's body tensed. "Drones," she breathed. "We're in a dead zone—how did they—"
They had less than a heartbeat.
Two drones angled down, cutting the corridor with laser focus. One immediately locked onto Nero's outline; the other swiveled toward Helia.
Helia shoved Nero behind the console with a force that knocked the breath out of him. She slammed her shoulder against the metal and fired—shots rang out, and one drone convulsed, sparks spraying across the floor. But the others were too many, too quick. A beam skimmed the concrete beside Helia's boot; hot metal hissed where it burned a line into the floor.
Nero felt the heat of panic like a physical thing. His Veyra prickled under the skin, a dangerous, unsteady pressure. He could feel the Archive reacting—sensing the bond between them, cataloguing it as an anomaly. His hands clenched the console's edge until his knuckles went white.
Helia's eyes glinted. "We can't fight all of them. We move on three—" She swallowed, not finishing. There wasn't time.
A drone dropped lower, bright red scanning fan whirring. Nero's chest tightened—he didn't know if it was fear or the memory flaring back up. He could see himself losing control, flinging light like a blade, and the image made him flinch.
Then the corridor went black.
Not a flicker. A clean, suffocating blackout that swallowed the drones' glowing eyes and their hungry whirs. For a blink, the only sound was the damped ringing in Nero's ears.
Helia hissed, "Power surge—someone just—"
No more words. A dull, concussive force hit the corridor like a hand. Every drone stuttered, limbs jerking. Sparks popped. One crashed sideways into a pile of rubble. Another fell limply from the ceiling like a dead insect.
From the shadowed intersection beyond the broken console, a small device rolled into view—charred on one side, with a faint blue diode pulsing. A low chemical smell hung in the air.
Silhouetted behind it was a figure sitting on the edge of a pipe, legs dangling into the dark. He wore a battered coat and a hood pulled low, but when he moved—when he pushed off the pipe and stepped toward them—he moved with confident, practiced calm.
"You two look like you're auditioning for demolition," he said, voice steady and oddly warm. He tossed a small, circular unit at Helia's feet; its casing had blown, but the edges were clean—an EMP grenade, old but powerful. "Lucky for you, I've got a spare."
Helia's weapon stayed raised, but her shoulders lost some of their tension. Nero peered at the man—at his hands, which showed no tremor, at the way he checked the ceiling as if he'd already anticipated each sweep.
"Who are you?" Helia asked. Suspicion cut every syllable.
The man tilted his head, a faint half-smile. "Call me Klaus." The name sounded ordinary in a place where nothing was. "I keep the lights honest."
Klaus moved the grenade with a swift, precise motion into a protective pouch and flicked a small switch on the device. "You're lucky I'm near. Drones hate those dark spots." He glanced at Nero, and for the first time he met Nero's eyes squarely. There was nothing unnatural in the meeting—no pity, no calculation—just a level, tired look of someone who'd seen the Archive chew through more lives than he cared to count.
Helia scanned him from head to toe, a hundred micro-judgments passing across her face. The man's clothes were patched, his boots worn, but his gear looked deliberately chosen: a mix of Archive scavenged parts and custom add-ons. He knew how to move through the tunnels. He knew how to make a grenade like that sing.
"Why help us?" Nero managed.
Klaus shrugged, then gestured down the passage. "Because it's boring watching the Archive tidy up orphans. And because you don't look like you belong in its trash heap."
Helia's hand didn't lower all the way, but the urge to follow—a human, irrational thing—pulsed through her. She checked the corridor they'd come from; the drones had begun to hum again, slower now, recalibrating. Time was thin.
Klaus crouched and tapped a console with the ease of someone who'd forced better things to obey. "This way," he said. "There's a service shaft two bends down—less heat, fewer eyes. Quiet. Trust me for five minutes and I'll get you to real shadow."
Helia hesitated, then exhaled through her teeth. "If you betray us—"
"You won't see me again," Klaus said simply.
Nero felt the fragile thread of trust begin to knot. Helia glanced at him—looking for the same sign she'd used half a dozen times: the human flicker. Nero nodded.
They followed him, Klaus moving like he belonged to the dark, guiding them through maintenance hatches and gravity-shifted ladders. With each step, the drones' red dots faded behind them until only the Archive's low hum remained, and Nero allowed himself a slow breath.
Behind them, somewhere in the tower above, heavy metal scraped in warning. The Archive was still watching. But for the moment, Klaus led them deeper into a pocket of dark—an ally out of the shadows, or a shadow itself.
Nero kept his hand close to Helia's sleeve, not letting go.
Klaus glanced back once, a shadowed promise in his eyes.
"Stick close," he said. "I know a place that'll make you forget the Unit for a while."
Nero didn't believe him yet. But when Helia finally relaxed the smallest fraction—and when the world's lights no longer pulsed to his heartbeat—he could feel something dangerous and hopeful at once: a stranger who had just saved them, and the fragile, terrible knowledge that sometimes rescue came from hands you didn't expect.