White walls. Red curtains held open by black strings, an evening suspended in time.

Faint breathing.

This wasn’t my corner.

In a dazed fugue, I stumbled around on stubby legs I still hadn’t gotten used to. Bumped into the walls, rammed against the locked door.

Somebody moved me. That I was sure of.

Tapio created an adapter that let me take over one of Owl’s drones. That much I remembered.

“The sensors went off. Are you awake?”

A voice projected into my container. That much I could process.

“...Am I?”

I lay at the base of the door, viewing myself through the reflection of the room’s mirrors.

The body I had interfaced with was a walking rectangle. While the interior mechanisms and built-in hydraulics may have been impressive, it looked like a toolbox with stubby legs strapped to each corner.

“You are,” Tapio said. “We’re alive, thanks to you. You can relax now — you’ve been acting… erratic since you got back. If you have anything you want to talk to us about, feel free.”

“Uh huh.”

“Really, thanks. If you can spend some time in there and supervise Owl’s condition. I think she still needs your help in more ways than one.”

My hard work paid off. That was good to know.

Though I sustained no physical wounds this time, my head was a mess. But now that I knew these two were alright, I had to get a hold of myself.

There was an escape from impenetrable darkness. Lyra showed me the way, back then.

It took a while, but I was alright now. No need to worry about me — I’ll carry on, just like she wanted.

I needed to finish the job, no matter the cost.

So this was Owl’s room? For somebody who dressed up like a reaper and cursed like her life depended on it, the room she stayed in was uncharacteristically plain. Her clothes were plain as well: in her dresser were two dozen sets of blue jeans, white socks, and black shirts. I avoided Owl’s combat equipment and undergarments for the sake of privacy, but there wasn’t anything that looked like a wake-up drug stashed around.

“Are you... looking around in there? Something catch your eye?”

“You can’t stop me.”

That came out a little more harshly than I intended, but it got my point across. I needed to take stock of my situation and environment to know what to do next.

There was a long pause as I rummaged around. Then Tapio cleared his throat and said, “Right, do whatever you wish. I’ll be in the workshop.”

He terminated the call, leaving me trapped in a room with one unconscious Owl.

Did he think I was a doctor? I wasn’t even qualified to be a bandage.

—Wait, call?

While I was in my quasi-catatonic state, it seems he attached the Nexus device Nina gave me to the drone’s mechanical nerves. I was familiar enough with the existing technology to just brush it off and focus on what he asked me to do. Maybe that would help me get my mind straight.

I hopped up to her bedside and gave her a once over, though I already made a diagnostic and mental listing of her body’s state when I last kept her on life support. The only new information I received was what she looked like behind all the mist and shadows.

Owl was a creature cursed with inky hair, translucent pale skin, and eyes like shallow pools of blood. Even in their half-lidded state, I could make out white, fragmented pupils that jittered in their sockets, the blood-soaked altars of some macabre ritual contained entirely within her irises.

Jiangshi. A zombie from the mythos of my oldest and only memory. Slap a paper talisman on her forehead and I would’ve believed she had just hopped out of the grave, ready to feed upon the living’s qi or steal somebody’s rice right from their steamer.

I knew firsthand that her blood and muscles were as red and alive as everyone else’s, but the reactionary part of my mind told me that she was already dead. Then again, nobody seemed to regard Jaxl — an actual lizard on legs — with any real reaction, so maybe I was the one stuck in the past thinking everybody had to look human.

Tapio had cat ears. There were people on the street with even more outlandish traits, and that bloodstained woman—

Half-crescent smile. Fountains of crimson.

Think about something else.

There were normal people in the street, I recalled. Nina was the only non-mutated human I had any personal connection to, which seemed unreasonable at the time.

Did Project STAR’s deployment really influence humanity’s evolution that much? There couldn’t have been that much genetic drift in a mere three hundred years, but it also only takes two or three generations to form a new species. Three hundred years was about nine generations, so I suppose it was possible. Not like I could go and perform a global case study as I was.

Brushing off the intrusive thoughts, I focused on Owl. I hadn’t forgotten about that syringe she jabbed herself with; I could tell by the colour alone that it was bad news. Perhaps the coma was the end result of those drugs, a way for her body to recover from overexertion.

That’s how I justified slacking off, anyway.

Deciding that it was a good time to sleep in, I curled up against her back and hoped my stored Ether would do my job for me.

Owl rose late in the evening and stumbled out of bed, taking half her bedsheets with her. Alerted to her sudden return to consciousness, I hid underneath her bed and watched her go about her business.

She put on a shirt. Coughed up a little blood. Dug up a bottle of water and slammed back a handful of mystery pills. Then she moved to one of the room’s corners and stood there, staring at her reflection in one of the many mirrors placed around the room.

Two seconds later, her head smashed against the wall.

There was no mistaking the sound of a skull hitting wood. I poked my head out from underneath the bed, confirming what I was seeing and hearing with both my pseudo-clairvoyance and new robotic senses.

Thunk.

Two scarred hands braced against the wall, maintaining a steady posture for the act.

Thunk. Thunk.

There were no words. No expression. An unfathomable act.

Cr—ack.

Owl stood still against the wall, having left a red stain against the white walls. She staggered back a few steps and sunk to her knees, clutching her ears with grit teeth.

“Not yet. Don’t open. I’m still here,” she muttered to herself, “I’m here. I’m here. Here. Still here. Here…”

I saw something that wasn’t there. It wasn’t in my clairvoyance or my camera vision, but I saw something growing out of her back.

Keys.

Black keys. Red keys. Blue keys. White keys.

Square, circle, simple and complex. Impaling Owl were countless keys dripping with black ink, forcing open a lock that wasn’t there.

“—Good morning, everyone.”

With a crisp declaration from Owl, the hallucination disappeared. She stood up and grabbed a towel, cleaning up the wall and herself. Abandoning her casual wear, she slipped into her black combat gear and spent some time inspecting her rifle. Deeming everything to be in order, she pulled out a black box, took four orange syringes and slid them into a bandolier, then unlocked the door and went on her way.

I dared not to make a single noise as the scene played out before me. This wasn’t what normal people did, much less a person who just woke up from a four-day coma.

Slowly, I crawled out from underneath the bed and looked around. A tiny dent remained in the wall from her outburst, one of a hundred spread across the room.

I didn’t know Owl well enough to even approach her about this, lest she shoves a grenade in my new port hole. Tapio’s approach of mutual privacy suddenly made sense to me: I wouldn’t want to be the target of whatever the hell just happened. To that end, I didn’t want to know what would happen if she knew I was watching her.

Logically speaking (and accounting for unknown factors), the best route for my continued survival was the approach of nothing heard, nothing said. Didn’t see anything, don’t know anything. Let her save face and reputation, and everybody comes out happy.

Owl had taken a left into the hall, the direction of the bathrooms. I picked the opposite direction and ran.

It was nearly midnight when Tapio called a meeting between the three of us. I stumbled in last, having spent a majority of the day wasting time on the modern-day equivalent of the internet.

“I’ll get straight to the point,” Tapio said, pouring a latte for Owl, “We still have a chance. It’ll take some time to make new combat drones, but we’ve got the next best thing right here — Vivian has a firm grasp on communication technology and has successfully integrated into your old recon drone. Think you can work with her?”

“No. Piss off.”

Without looking at me, Owl took a small sip from the cracked porcelain cup she was handed and focused on Tapio. “I can make do without a rangefinder,” she continued. “You’re not using me to gain its trust.”

Gaining my trust? What was this about?

“It’s a matter of conservation,” Tapio said, nonplussed. “It’ll take me three weeks to make a new one. The Rings are on the move — we don’t have time to wait.”

“Wait? We nearly died over a single scrap of intel telling us where those bastards are going to be.” Owl scowled into her cup. “You really think a single Relic is going to swing things in our favor?”

“Jack’s our gamechanger. And I’m sure the Relic he brought along has some insights into why the Rings are after Whitelight.”

There wasn’t anything labelled Whitelight in Project STAR’s repository, but it could’ve been a derivative work that I didn’t know about. Samson couldn’t have been the only jackass who thought to make backups of the data he stole — any megalomaniac with enough resources could replicate the research they were doing back then.

“You took some pretty bad hits back there,” he continued. “I don’t think you’ll make a full recovery, but you should be able to do what you wanted.”

That got him some side-eye from Owl. “Mind your own damn business. I’m fine. Plus, you’re the one dragooning another one besides him — Why don’t you ask the Relic and see what it thinks?”

Somehow, their conversation came back to me. I shirked away from the sudden attention I got from both of them and said, “I don’t understand anything going on right now.”

“Of course it doesn’t. Fucking hell. Figure this out yourselves — this has nothing to do with me.” Owl picked up her cup and abruptly took her leave, shooting Tapio a look of distaste.

...Did I say something wrong?

“Thanks for the coffee,” she called over her shoulder on her way out. “I’m going shopping for equipment. The Night Market just opened.”

“Got it,” Tapio said, waving her off. “Take your time.”

Was that considered normal interaction? I looked at Tapio expecting some sort of explanation, but he shrugged and gave me an expression that said business as usual. “If you have any questions or want to back out, now’s the time to do it. We’re not going to have much time to relax soon.”

I did have questions. A lot of them. Without any delay, I rewound the cassette tape of my mind and played back the cryptic conversation that just happened before me.

They were talking about something that sounded like a life-or-death mission. While I did understand crumbs through their conversations and what I’ve observed so far — namely there being some sort of superweapon called Whitelight hidden away somewhere in Granport — I didn’t really feel like it was any of my business.

Discovering my past self and the truth of those memories were luxuries reserved for a future me that didn’t have to worry about finding a place to stay or getting turned into a collector’s item. The opposing desire for safety and security was vastly more tantalizing, especially having tasted the warmth of friendship after so many years of isolation.

“There is a mercenary, hunter ranking system in place,” I wondered out loud. “If the situation really is that bad, can you ask one of the people at the top for help?”

“The situation is a little complicated,” Tapio replied. “If this went to the Bureau, then yes, it would probably be taken care of in just a few hours. But then Whitelight would be in their possession, a Relic that will certainly lay out the foundation for a future tragedy.”

That didn’t make any sense. From what I’ve learned about the Oracle Bureau, they had already catalogued many artifacts and Relics of incredible power — they’ve even got an online museum for people to search through. If they could handle their current inventory and keep a leash on a thousand super-powered mercenaries, then one more couldn’t hurt.

“How do you know?”

To that, Tapio merely nodded and looked out the window. “Well, to put it bluntly, it’s because I’ve seen the results with my very own eyes.”

When I asked for further explanation, he told me something I couldn’t deny. Just as I witnessed something that never happened to Owl earlier, Tapio witnessed a future that hadn’t come yet and recorded it in his mind with perfect clarity.

In three sentences, he told me how this world would end.

The entrance to the Night Market was a dark alley shrouded in stolen shadow, a conspicuous inconspicuous pocket placed square between a golem-operated laundromat and extra spicy curry bar. There was no way to miss it if you were looking for it, but if you weren’t — or the people in charge didn’t like you — all that would happen when you stepped into the cloak of darkness was a fall into a comically placed garbage can.

An invitation fell onto me as I was walking in the street towards it.

The Night Market knew what you wanted. Where you wanted to be. Who you wanted to see. Nobody knew where it came from or who operated it, but everybody in Hadron knew the basic rules.

1) Do not offer blood to the Night God.

2) Expect a detour. It will not deliver you precisely to your destination.

3) Rent and passing fees must be paid in silver. One coin per eye, per day.

4) Do NOT offer blood to the Night God.

The penalty for breaking any of these rules was instant annihilation. You would cease to exist in a blink. If you were especially disrespectful, everybody else would forget that you existed as well.

I pushed through the void with a single silver coin taped to my chassis. When I emerged, falling directly onto a plush red stool, it was gone.

After Tapio’s conversation with me about the end and what to do next, I asked, “Why would anybody put up with those rules?”

He looked at me sternly and said, “Never underestimate the lengths men will go to have a free drink.”

I couldn’t see anything past a few feet around me, even with my Ether-based clairvoyance. The only things I could make out was a marble countertop, a single pint of bubbling blond beer placed in front of me, and the vague form of Owl and Nina beside me.

Out of sheer curiosity, I hopped onto the counter and nudged the glass. Nothing happened. Lifted myself up and dipped a little drone leg in. Still nothing.

I don’t know what I expected.

Nina leaned back and waved at my antics, smiling in the dark. “Heya! Didn’t expect you of all people to drop in, Vivian! How’s the new body? Everything working properly?”

“Good,” I said, staring back at the pair. “This body is satisfactory. Thank you very much.”

“It was the best I could do on super short notice. And!” Nina stepped over and picked me up in the same manner one would treat a new puppy, her green eyes practically sparkling as she waved me around and hugged me to her chest. “Cute! Cute, cute, seriously cute! If you were actually a stray, I’d take you home and take you apart!”

“Take... me apart?”

“Yeah! There must be a miracle of Etherite cabling in there — I want to copy it all down. Hehehe, Ehe…”

I knew it. Even the most normal person had a few screws loose, though she didn’t seem actively malevolent.

Owl simply looked on, hands pressed against cold misted glass. “The deal,” she said. “Your end of it.”

Nina blinked. “Ah, right, right, the deal. My bad, my bad — here’s your order.”

Placing me back on the counter, she dug something that looked like a black cigarette case out of her jacket’s inner pocket and placed it on the table. Flipped the cover open to reveal three thick cartridges tied together with a black ribbon.

“Three Blackouts,” Nina said. “Arts loaded in the tip that’ll forcibly apply the concept of ‘Decay’ to anything they hit. Good for taking out those regenerative Husks.”

“Yeah,” Owl said, slipping the case into her cloak. “Insurance.”

“Anyway! As much as I’d like to hang around, I’ve got other clients to see.” She tapped her watch and gestured to her empty glass, saying, “Always busy this time of day. Er, night. Even so, feel free to reach out — the wonders of the internet means we can always be connected! Later, Owl, Vivian!”

Nina stepped back, allowing the shadows to swallow her up. I watched her leave, listening to the fading beat of her boots against hardwood.

Her absence hung in the air like a fog. Eventually, Owl raised her glass to her lips and said, “Annoying.”

I followed Owl’s heels as she navigated the stalls and shops, staying silent as she picked out new armors and trinkets that looked useful.

She grabbed grenades. New knives. A whole medical kit of new suspicious-looking drugs.

When we got to the waiting room of a stainless-steel Nexus clinic, she finally acknowledged my existence with a hiss:

“Why the fuck are you following me around? You a dog or something?”

Yeah, that’s about the amount of verbal elegance I’ve come to expect from Owl.

I didn’t like the flagrant verbal abuse, but what could I do about it? Like it or not, we were going to work with each other for the next little while.

“I’ve been instructed to work as your assistant,” I said. I performed my best bow, hoping she wouldn’t blow up at me.

“I don’t need you,” she immediately replied, “nor do I wish to speak to you. Piss right off.”

I observed the check-up through the wrong side of a one-way mirror, cheating with my clairvoyance. After running scans and checking her Meridians, the Bureau-sponsored doctor gave her the same news that I already knew:

She was a walking corpse.

It wasn’t an exaggeration. Cassandra used a Heretical Art to ruin Owl’s Meridians, leaving her incapable of both sorceries and using the Nexus system. If that wasn’t enough, her body would begin to fall apart without proper Qi flow.

“Think of it as another evolution to the mankind you once knew,” Tapio explained during one of our many conversations thus far. “Blood and Qi circulation are equally important. With the acceleration of Qi circulation reverting to antiquity’s equivalent, taking care of your Meridians has become more important than ever. Here, have you ever tried Dragon’s Egg Soup?”

He then offered me a selection of weird canned foods from a secret drawer, before realizing that I didn’t have a mouth. Or a body, per se.

Owl’s expression remained blank through the diagnosis and prognosis of her condition. The advice for an early retirement and perhaps finding a different career. A recommendation for various medicines.

She thanked the doctor, faked a smile, and left.

She disappeared the moment she passed through the door; I stumbled into vague darkness after her, with the footsteps of faraway passerbys scraping around me. But as much as I bumped into people’s ankles and kept searching, I couldn’t find her.

Giving up, I went ahead and asked Tapio over comms for her location.

“Bad call,” he said. “She needs some time alone. Let her be.”

His response was instantaneous and manufactured, a canned response. Making my way out of the Night Market, I asked, “Why not?”

“Owl doesn’t like people interfering with her business. I’d almost call it pathological aversion to social contact.”

“A sociopath?

“Well I wouldn’t go that far—”

“Just tell me where she is. I have no interest in small talk.”

Tapio sighed. Moments later, coordinates and a map filled up my camera eye. “Don’t pry too much. Can’t guarantee your safety out there.”

I thanked him and took off towards my objective, resolving to do what I could with my newfound agency.

I felt like an idiot, running through the streets as frantically as I did. I was a dog searching for its owner, trailing a digital scent to an unknown location.

But I had my reasons.

Tapio’s words broke the thin scar congealing over my first memories of stone. He gave me a terrible gift and a beautiful curse, a horrible thing known as context.

Two thousand years ago, a heretic whose name was erased from history smashed one of the pillars holding up the heavens and brought the arcane to the common man. The aftermath brought about the Northern Celestial Apostles, a divine theocracy focused on religion and culture.

Three hundred years ago, a cataclysm shattered the skies and burned the NCA to the ground. From the charred corpses of the nation rose the Husks, sometimes humanoid, mostly incomprehensible beasts with unknown goals and desires.

I knew these already. But these events were history — they couldn’t be changed, no matter how much I learned about them.

Two hundred fifty years ago. During the third venture into the new Frontier, the first Stigmata develops: the power to control and create lightning at will. Explorers come in droves, seeking new riches. Something like a society develops over time; the Frontier develops its own miniature city-states while the people of the NCA attempt to rebuild their home. The first Frontier era.

Twenty years ago. A tree of golden light touched down from the sky and broke apart, an aftershock of the first cataclysm. The first Qliphoth awakens outside of the Frontier, the spontaneous corruption of a person into a Husk. A three day rampage leaves half a city dead.

After that day, the Oracle Bureau deployed their Hunters worldwide, yet incidents are hard to predict. To counter this, the world rapidly militarizes.

The Light War breaks out. Relic Hunters pick their sides and fight alongside machines and weapons of war, establishing their presence on the global stage.

“It’s a Celestial Seed,” Tapio explained. “An object that calls directly upon the powers of the constellations above us. If another one blooms, we’re all screwed and another cataclysm will hit. You should already know — I believe you were situated at Whitelight’s initial testing grounds and got to see the effects first hand.”

This world would end with another Celestial Seed. He saw it in a premonition, a vague dream, an answer in the stars outside of this place: should another one be allowed to blossom, the logic holding this world together would crumble and give way to the unspeakable. Though he didn’t know about Project STAR, the degradation of the laws of nature he described was eerily similar to the effects of those experimental weapons of old.

“The first thing that will disappear from the world will be its Qi.” He grimaced. “Then, the people’s minds will corrupt and break, spawning waves of abominations that will make ordinary Husks look like rats. After that, gods save us all.”

It was his duty to do what he could. It was mine to try to help those who helped me in the past.

Even then, I chased after heels instead of preparing myself for the road ahead.

Perhaps one day I would truly care about something as abstract as the world’s salvation, but that day wasn’t today.

What I remembered was a pitiful, lonely death. The cries of the righteous drowning in blood.

A hand slipping from mine.

The keys.

It couldn’t have been a coincidence, the similarities between what happened between Lyra and Owl. I didn’t want to see that tragedy repeat itself if I could help it.

After all, how could I save the world if I couldn’t save a single person in front of me?

Owl was on a walkway that extended beyond the veil of misty countryside, backed by a lonely view of a metallic pink sky. A long unlit menthol cigarette hung off her lip, the matching lighter nowhere to be seen.

She saw me coming. Scowled. It looked like she was going to take a boot to me and punt me off the walkway, but she didn’t. She kept looking at me with a mean face until she gave up, opting to instead stare at the horizon with an inscrutable gaze.

I didn’t know how to place that expression of hers. Sad? Confused? The only thing lodged in my head were techniques and various sciences — people were another mystery I’d have to learn to decipher again.

“Hey, bathtub toaster,” she eventually said, “Got a light?”

I did, thank you for asking. I wiggled one of my legs and out popped Samson’s plasma pistol, stripped down to a singular rod of metal. I aimed and pulled the Ether trigger.

The shot was a little off, burnt a needle-sized hole just short of the end. Owl seemed to be satisfied, puffing until the ember became even.

“Dropped my fucking lighter,” she said, sneering at her left hand. “Me. A marksman. Dropping something. What a shitshow.”

“It happens,” I offered.

“I’m talking to myself, not you.” She dragged her cigarette, blowing out her frustrations in a blue-grey wisp of smoke. “And you. You don’t have a reason to be here. Anybody with a lick of common sense would’ve jumped ship by now. Have jumped ship. What, are you fucking stupid?”

Owl hung her head. Choked on her smoke, flicked the barely burnt remnant away.

“You were there,” she mumbled, bracing against the wrought iron safety rail. “You saw everything. The two of us are willing to die to snatch that Whitelight from the Rings, make no mistake. That’s all it is. That’s the price we’re willing to pay.”

“I want to help—”

She cut me off with a sneer. “I know how your type thinks. Do you think your sympathy is worth something? Don’t try to fucking jump after lemmings — you’re only getting yourself killed.”

The keys flickered in and out of existence, a haze superimposed over her figure.

I stood silent, baffled by what she was saying, baffled by the phenomena manifesting in front of me.

An active rejection of the one who saved her life. Both gratitude and scorn were absent from her suddenly manic eyes, a panicked look pried out of an otherwise still expression.

“Don’t you get it? Just fuck off already.”

A voice searching for an answer.

“Run. Go live a happy life somewhere far away from here.”

That last word came out caustic and strained. Her blood-coloured eyes boiled in their sockets, slowly cooling as she realized the extent of her sudden outburst.

She turned her back on me, a scowl hidden by her hood. “According to the new plans, we’ll be moving out in four days. This is your last warning. If you’re around by then, you’re stuck with us ‘till the end.”

Owl hopped up on the railing, rifle still slung over her shoulder. I started after her, but she looked back with this unreadable expression tinged with sadness as she balanced on the thin metal. “Don’t follow me. Please.”

She looked away and took a deep breath, facing the sunset locked in place. The air around her distorted, then she vanished.

Her words lingered long after she left.

I pondered the meaning of her words while waiting for a sun that would never set.

Four days, Owl warned. In four days, the last two soldiers to a cause would begin their last march.

The realization came slow and steady, like droplets of rain filling a wide basin. Water flowing to the ocean.

A wave crashed against the shore, spraying white on rusted sand.

The story I had intruded on wasn’t a noble sacrifice to stop a tragedy in progress. If the situation spiralled out of control or was really desperate, somebody much more capable would swoop in over the corpses and claim the prize. Tapio revealed that much by admission.

Whitelight meant something to them. Otherwise, they wouldn’t go through all the trouble of keeping it to themselves.

Realizing that fact, my fragmented perception crystallized into understanding.

They didn’t fight for justice or to save the world. Those goals were only tangential.

They fought because this was their only hope.