The rain had stopped, but the fog remained, clinging to the high peaks of the Central Mountain Range like wet wool.
They had ditched the van ten miles back. The roads were too exposed, too easy to track. Now, they were on foot, hiking up an old logging trail that Ren had found on a pre-war topographic map.
It was a brutal climb. The mud was ankle-deep, and the incline was steep enough to burn the lungs of a marathon runner.
David brought up the rear, his breathing ragged. His bad hip was screaming with every step, but he refused to ask for a break. He used his cane like a climbing pick, dragging himself upward through sheer willpower.
Isolde took point, her rifle held ready across her chest. She moved silently, stepping over roots and rocks with the grace of a predator.
Ren stumbled in the middle, his backpack weighed down by thirty pounds of computer equipment. "How much... further?" he wheezed.
"Until the thermal interference clears," Isolde whispered back without turning. "Or until you drop. Whichever comes first."
And then there was Saya.
She walked in the center of the line. She carried the cello case on her back, secured with makeshift straps Ren had fashioned from seatbelts. It weighed nearly as much as Ren's pack, but she didn't crouch under the weight. She stood perfectly straight.
She wasn't crying anymore. She wasn't mumbling to the case.
Her eyes scanned the tree line constantly—left, right, up, down. Her face was a mask of porcelain indifference. When a branch snapped nearby, she didn't jump; her hand simply drifted to the hilt of the katana inside the case, hovering there until Isolde signaled 'clear.'
She had stopped being a girl. She had become a mechanism.
"Hold," Isolde hissed, raising a fist.
They stopped. Ahead, the trail opened up into a small clearing dominated by a derelict shrine. It was a simple stone structure, roof caved in, overrun by vines.
"We camp here," David wheezed, finally allowing himself to lean against a tree. "It offers cover from the air."
Isolde swept the perimeter while Ren collapsed onto a dry patch of stone, shrugging off his heavy pack. "Oh god. My legs. I can't feel my legs."
Saya unslung the cello case. She set it down gently against the shrine wall, ensuring it was on dry ground. She checked the latches. Satisfied, she turned to David.
"Orders?" she asked.
David looked at her. The change in her tone was jarring. Two hours ago, she was sobbing over a boot print. Now, her voice was as cold as the mountain wind.
"Rest," David said. "Eat. We need to figure out our next move."
"I don't need rest," Saya said. "I'll take first watch."
"I'm on point," Isolde argued, walking back into the clearing. "You're untrained, Princess. You'll miss a heat signature."
Saya looked at Isolde. "You watch the heat. I'll watch the shadows."
She turned and walked to the edge of the clearing, sitting cross-legged on a mossy rock, her back to the group, facing the dark forest. She drew the katana from the case—just the blade, leaving the scabbard inside—and laid it across her knees.
Isolde watched her for a moment, narrowing her eyes. "She flipped the switch," she muttered to David.
"What switch?" Ren asked, opening a protein bar.
"The killer switch," Isolde said, popping the magazine out of her rifle to check the rounds. "Grief makes you slow. Rage makes you stupid. But Numbness? Numbness makes you efficient. She's locked it all away."
"Is that good?" Ren asked.
Isolde looked at the girl sitting alone in the mist. "For the mission? Yes. For her soul? Probably not."
Night fell quickly in the mountains. Ren had set up a low-light command center inside the ruins of the shrine, using a solar tarp to mask the glow of his monitors.
He had connected a cable to the helmet of the Chimera Alpha unit—the head Saya had ripped off back at the tea house. He was scrubbing the data, bypassing the encryption with a series of brute-force algorithms.
"Got it," Ren whispered. "I'm in."
David hobbled over. "What do we have?"
"It's... dense," Ren said, scrolling through lines of code. "Mission logs, schematics, biology reports. David, look at this."
He pulled up a file labeled PROJECT: ECHO.
"They aren't just hunting her," Ren explained, pointing to a rotating 3D model of a DNA double helix on the screen. "They're trying to replicate her. The synthetic soldiers? They're failing. Their cellular structure breaks down after five years. They get 'The Rot'."
"We knew that," David said. "That's why they want fresh blood."
"It's not just blood," Ren said, his voice trembling. "They want the Source Frequency. They believe that the Chiropteran Queen emits a specific bio-resonance that stabilizes the cells of her Chevalier. It's like a wi-fi signal for immortality."
Ren tapped a key. A video file opened. It was grainy footage from a lab. It showed a Chimera soldier twitching on a table, his skin turning gray and cracking. Then, a recording of a sound was played—a high-pitched hum. The soldier stopped twitching. The cracks healed.
"They want to turn Saya into a broadcast tower," Ren said, horrified. "They want to hook her up to a machine and amplify her signal to stabilize an army of millions."
"Monsters," Isolde muttered from the doorway.
"There's more," Ren said. He hesitated, looking toward the edge of the clearing where Saya was keeping watch. "The weapon they used on Hagi. The Sonic Blade."
David stiffened. "What about it?"
Ren pulled up the schematic. TYPE-Z RESONANCE EMITTER. TARGET: CRYSTALLINE STRUCTURE.
"It doesn't destroy matter," Ren read from the file. "It forces a rapid state change. It locks the cells into a dormant crystalline lattice. It's instantaneous preservation."
The silence in the shrine was heavy.
"Preservation?" David repeated slowly.
"He's not dead," Ren whispered. "I mean... biologically, he's inert. He has no brain activity, no heart rate. He is dust. But the cells aren't necrotic. They're just... paused."
"Frozen," Isolde said.
"If they get the dust..." Ren swallowed hard. "If Chimera gets the case, they can't bring him back. But they can use the dust. It's concentrated Chevalier DNA. It's the raw material for their next generation of soldiers."
David looked at the cello case resting against the wall. It wasn't just a coffin anymore. It was a gold mine.
"Does she know?" Isolde asked.
"She suspects," David said. "That's why she talks to him. She feels the bond is still there, faintly."
"Should we tell her?" Ren asked.
"Tell her what?" Isolde scoffed. "'Good news, your boyfriend isn't dead, he's just a pile of magical sand that the bad guys want to turn into super-soldiers'? That will break her, kid."
"Or it will give her a reason to fight," a voice said from the darkness.
They all jumped.
Saya was standing at the entrance of the shrine. She hadn't made a sound approaching them. Her sword was sheathed at her hip. Her face was unreadable.
"How much did you hear?" David asked.
"Enough," Saya said. She walked into the shrine, the firelight catching the hollows of her cheeks. She looked at the screen, at the rotating DNA helix. "They want to use us. Like parts."
"Yes," Ren said, shrinking back slightly.
Saya looked at the cello case. For the first time since Hagi's death, she didn't look at it with despair. She looked at it with calculation.
"He is paused," Saya repeated Ren's words. "If he is paused... can he be played again?"
Ren blinked. "I... I don't know, Saya. The science is theoretical. Reversing the crystallization process would require a massive energy surge and a biological catalyst that doesn't exist yet."
"Yet," Saya said.
She reached out and touched the case. Not a caress this time. A pact.
"They want the Source," Saya said, turning to David. "Where is their headquarters? Where is the machine?"
David looked at the map on the screen. "The data log indicates a central hub. Not here. Not Japan."
Ren zoomed out on the map. A red dot pulsed in the middle of a frozen wasteland.
"Coordinates confirm," Ren said. "Sector 9. The Siberian Exclusion Zone. Russia."
Russia.
Saya's eyes narrowed. "We were there. In 1918. The Rasputin incident."
"It seems Chimera has built their castle on the ruins of the past," David said. "It's a fortress, Saya. We can't just walk in."
"We aren't walking in," Saya said. Her voice was terrifyingly calm. "We are going to let them take us."
"Excuse me?" Isolde stepped forward. "Did the grief fry your brain, Princess? You want to surrender?"
"They want the Queen," Saya said. "They want the Frequency. If I run, they will chase me forever. They will kill you. They will kill Ren."
She looked at Ren, and for a fleeting second, the cold mask slipped, revealing a glimpse of the sisterly affection she held for his father.
"I won't let them touch my family again," she said.
She turned back to Isolde. "We go to Russia. We find their machine. And we burn it down from the inside."
"That's suicide," Isolde stated flatly.
"No," Saya said. She picked up the cello case and slung it onto her back. The weight seemed to settle her, to ground her. "It's a requiem."
She walked back to the entrance of the shrine, looking out into the misty dark.
"Ren," she called back.
"Yeah?"
"Find us a route to Russia."
Ren looked at David. David looked at Isolde. The sniper sighed, shaking her head, but a small, sharp smile played on her lips.
"Well," Isolde said, chambering a round into her rifle. "At least she has a plan. A stupid plan. But a plan."
David looked at Saya's back. He saw the tension in her shoulders, the way her hand rested on the sword hilt. She wasn't the girl who had cried in the van. She wasn't the monster who had slaughtered the soldiers in a rage.
She was something new. Something colder.
"Ren," David said. "Plot the course."