Part 1: Skin Doesn't Grow Back
The frost ate his footprints faster than he could leave them.
Kairo stumbled across the frozen plain like a corpse half awake. His legs moved only because his spine hadn't yet given up. His ribs were open to the sky. Each breath whistled through cracked cartilage and shredded nerve bundles. His jaw hung in two pieces. His arms twitched out of sync.
Whatever was left of him wasn't a body. It was remnants.
Ahead, through a curtain of low cloud, something flickered. An old Paragon relay tower. A rusting communications spire, buried in snowdrift and silence. Beneath it, the bunker. Black metal, half collapsed, its security lights still pulsing weak red.
He dragged himself through the threshold. The scanner blinked once.
[ACCESS GRANTED - ASSET ZERO]
Then the door opened.
Inside, heat. Artificial and sour. The reek of bleach and rotting protein clung to the walls. The lights stuttered as he passed, his presence interfering with every circuit.
He collapsed onto the surgical slab. Sensors unfolded.
The AI activated.
"Welcome back, Asset Zero. Initiating repair protocol."
No sedative. No scalpel.
Just needles.
Dozens of them.
They slammed into him like stakes, piercing through skin, muscle, bone. Injecting synthetic stabilizers, tissue scaffolders, necrofoam, gene suppressors. His back arched. Blood geysered from his neck.
"Stabilization in progress."
What it didn't say was what it was really doing, rewriting.
New veins bloomed beneath his skin—black and wet. One of his lungs liquified and reformed into something that pulsed on its own timer. His eye regrew around a lens. His vocal cords split. Then doubled.
His mouth opened.
And out came a sound that didn't belong to anything alive.
A scream? A signal? A death rattle?
No one was there to hear it.
But something in the deep server chamber responded.