Chapter 31.
“Zafyra!” My scream echoed through the apartment – loud enough to startle even me. “What the fuck happened to you?!”
Seeing Zafyra like this was disorienting – surreal, almost. Though she seemed physically unharmed, she slumped against the doorframe, her usual sharp eyes now glassy and unfocused, limbs twitching as if she were having a seizure.
Her mouth opened in a twitchy stutter, jaw clicking once, then again – as if she tried to say something but couldn’t get the words out.
A static-like click echoed from the back of her throat – mechanical, unnatural.
Her whole body trembled in irregular bursts, like some invisible current was misfiring through her core.
“What the….” Joey looked from one to the other, perplexed. “How the fuck did you get into my house?”
“Hacked… the…” Zafyra’s eyes fluttered, and then, without warning, her body lurched forward. I jumped toward her, just in time to catch her.
“Joey, help me.” I grimaced. Despite my many hours in the gym, I struggled with the weight, probably caused by her mechanical core parts.
Joey seemed torn, but upon seeing my pleading eyes, he helped me carry her to lay her down gently on the couch.
My entire body trembled with unreleased tension. “Zafyra—what—Joey, we need to—” I tried, but in my distress, I struggled to form the words.
“Raph… get… Raphael…” Zafyra’s gaze focused on me for just a second before unfocusing again. “He’ll know… what to…”
“Where’s Raphael?” I practically yelled out the question.
“I don’t know about this, Morgan.” Joey ran a hand through his disheveled hair, his frown deepening.
“She seems physically fine,” he hissed to me.
Though he probably thought Zafyra couldn’t hear, I saw the way her eyes fluttered, almost as if attempting one of her trademark eyerolls.
“How do we know this is not another one of her tricks?”
“Who fucking cares!” My hands flew to my hair, pulling before I could stop myself. “First, let’s make sure she recovers from—from whatever this is. Then we can interrogate her, or…”
Joey hesitated for just a second, looking from Zafyra to me. Then he nodded, though his suspicious gaze remained. “Alright, I’ll call him. He’s at a seminar right now, but it’s not too far away.”
I breathed out a sigh of relief as he lifted his arm and started talking into his wristware.
Swallowing hard, I kneeled beside the couch and took one of Zafyra’s hands in mine.
Her cold skin sent a shock through me – though her funginoid body had always been colder than mine, right now it felt closer to the winter forest ground.
“Please.” My voice came out weakly. Despite how hard it was to hold eye contact with her in this state, I refused to avert my gaze – especially seeing how the sight of me seemed to help her focus.
“Tell us how we can help you. If you were human, I would call an ambulance, but…” I gulped, suddenly hit with dread.
I loved someone who wasn’t supposed to exist like this – in a stolen body.
Who would help us if something was really wrong?
She tried to talk again, but I couldn’t make sense of her slurred speech.
“Raph is on his way, but without knowing what’s going on, I’m not sure if he can be of much help.” Joey slowly lowered his wrist. “Now, can someone please explain to me how—”
Zafyra gestured to the screen. “Unsync… it.”
Joey raised his eyebrows.
She sighed out through her teeth – a small relief she had a bit of her attitude back. “It’s… wireless. I need to…”
Joey and I exchanged a glance.
“Oh! I understand.” I jumped up a little too quickly – Zafyra flinched at the sudden movement. “She’s telling us to unsync the headset so she can connect herself to your TV, Joey. Similarly to how she synced herself with my VR headset and AR lenses when we…”
The thought heated my face, so instead of finishing my sentence, I rushed to unsync the headset.
Joey and I both turned to Zafyra, who seemed to slump even further back into the couch.
I blinked slowly as the screen switched on with a slight buzz. For a moment, I couldn’t make sense of what I saw.
The factory was all concrete, steel beams, and hanging pipes overhead that groaned softly under the weight of industrial ventilation.
Fluorescent lights hummed in long rows across the ceiling, casting a flat glow over rows of thick cargo crates stacked onto hover-lifts and magnetized storage racks that stretched to the far end of the hall.
Blinking indicators and the occasional thrum of unseen machinery kicking in from somewhere behind the walls gave the whole space an eerie feeling.
A row of identical humanoid guards stood shoulder to shoulder, their matte gray exteriors catching the sterile overhead light like warehouse mannequins. But something about the point of view was unusual, as if the cameraman was standing amidst the formation – no, like he was one of them.
“Those are some sick visuals,” Joey muttered. Despite the tense situation, he couldn’t help the part of his brain that loved a good film.
“What are we looking at?” I frowned. “Are we watching this from… the perspective of the humanoid? Like, there’s a camera inside it?”
“My memories,” Zafyra clarified. She lifted a trembling arm as if attempting to gesture to the screen, but seeing how the movement exhausted her, I grabbed her arm to put it back down gently. “I… hijacked… the guard.”
My eyes widened. “You did what? Was this today?”
“Like how you hijacked Raphael’s body to strangle me in the biotech facility?” Joey’s head slowly turned toward her, ignoring my scowl.
Zafyra only nodded, unbothered by the sneer.
“I don’t understand,” I stammered, my gaze flickering from Zafyra to the screen – my hands still clutching hers fiercely, as if I could somehow restore her life energy this way. “Where is this?”
“Somanode factory,” she forced out.
The thought twisted my insides so fiercely, I thought I might throw up.
I opened my mouth to ask more questions – questions I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer to – but movement on the screen captured my attention.
A small beep, as if someone rang the doorbell.
The humanoid next to the one Zafyra inhabited moved toward the door, and she followed its lead a nanosecond later.
Clearly, she could act like a robot as well as human.
As the two humanoid units moved forward in smooth, gliding steps, the guard’s internal HUD layered transparent data points over the scene – sector designations, vault numbers, heat signatures.
I felt a strange relief for having a human body instead of whatever this was – the constant information overload was already exhausting me, just from watching it.
Then, a smaller screen opened over the larger one – security footage.
Outside, a man approached through one of the access halls – short, broad-shouldered, wearing a faded technician’s jacket and carrying a standard-issue repair kit.
His face was partially obscured by a low hood and dark AR-visor, but his movements were careful, deliberate.
“Who is this man?” I didn’t realize I’d asked the question aloud until Zafyra’s voice drew my attention away from the screen.
“Dark web contractor,” she clarified.
As if this didn’t make things even more confusing. “You… hired a dark web contractor? To do what?”
She nodded, the corner of her mouth twisting into a small smirk – clearly proud of her cunning. “You’ll see.”
“I do not like the sound of this,” Joey muttered under his breath. I bit my tongue – after everything Zafyra had put us through, I couldn’t disagree.
On the screen, the humanoid raised one hand, fingers briefly hovering over the access panel beside the vault corridor.
The screen showed no ID badge on the man, no biometric match, no official record of entry – but none of that seemed to matter.
A line of raw code slid into the panel like it had always belonged there – and with a soft click, the door opened.
The man stepped through. For a moment, his eyes raked over the humanoid formation, and he gave a short nod before rushing over to one of the consoles in the middle of the space.
While Zafyra’s humanoid kept its gaze focused on the intruder, through the corner of my eye I noticed two of its counterparts turned to face the camera instead – as if they detected something unusual in the recording humanoid and decided to observe it more closely. It sent a shiver down my spine.
The screen flickered again as the perspective shifted – the humanoid’s eyes now tracking the contractor from behind as it moved deeper into the factory.
The lighting dimmed slightly as they entered a secondary vault chamber.
Thick metal panels lined the walls like a bunker, and a low vibration pulsed through the floor, barely audible, but enough to raise the hairs on my arms.
Joey gasped. “This is a quantum transfer port.”
I blinked slowly. “A what?”
“You’ve never heard of them? They’re a pretty recent invention.
Only the filthy rich can afford them yet.
” He sat up straighter. Like me, Joey was a technology geek – but while my interest was mostly in AI, his was in everything about quantum tech.
“That’s a QSM pad: Quantum Structure Mapper.
Instead of shipping products, they disassemble them, encode the data, and beam it across entangled anchors to be rebuilt somewhere else. ”
“You’re saying… teleportation?” I swallowed the gall in my throat.
He nodded enthusiastically. “Basically, like 3D printing a thing from itself. It’s how corps move high-value cargo without risk of interception. You need paired anchors to make it work – and unfortunately, they use a huge amount of energy.”
On screen, the contractor approached a cylindrical chamber. At its base, a platform glowed faintly blue, encircled by a ring of warning symbols and hazard tape that looked far too casual for something that could rip matter apart.