5. Cassia
CASSIA
Two days after a certain Kraaj enforcer drops a crate of stolen medical supplies through my ceiling and tells me to stay indoors, the power grid across three sectors fails simultaneously, and I stop pretending any of this is going to blow over.
The blackouts hit during peak hours with lights cutting out mid-surgery and ventilation systems choking to a halt in corridors packed with civilians.
Two maintenance droids in Sector Four attacked a repair crew without provocation, killing one tech and maiming another before someone managed to sever their power lines with a cargo axe.
A security bot in the lower market went haywire during a food distribution and fired its crowd-control charges into a line of starving families.
Three children are hospitalized, with one still critical.
The district is fraying, and the threads are pulling loose faster than anyone can tie them back together.
That is why I'm standing in the mouth of an abandoned maintenance tunnel below Sector Nine at an hour when sensible people are behind locked doors, watching Junia pry open a rusty access panel with a stolen multi-tool and a vocabulary that would make a dockworker blush.
"Hold the light higher," she grunts, wedging the tool between corroded bolts. "I can't see the relay coupling."
I adjust the handheld lamp and angle it into the gap where she's working.
The tunnel stretches behind us into darkness so complete it feels solid, a suffocating weight ramming against the edges of the light.
Stale, metallic air fills the space down here, carrying a faint chemical undertone that coats my throat.
These tunnels were sealed after the occupation, decommissioned infrastructure from the original Kraaj military installation, supposedly barren of anything useful, and left to rot while the city grew over them.
"Remind me again why we're crawling through tunnels that have been condemned for thirty years," I mutter, sweeping the lamp across walls streaked with mineral deposits.
"Because I've spent the last three days cracking open every fried droid circuit board I could get my hands on, and they all tell the same story," Junia replies.
She pulls at a corroded panel. "Besides, Fen's crew vanished down here last month.
And the Vasari brothers two weeks before that.
Everyone thinks it was just syndicate turf wars...
" She glances at me, her usual bravado slipping.
"But seeing these deranged droids, I'm starting to think whatever is down here is taking prisoners. "
She pulls a portable scanner from her belt—cobbled together from salvaged parts, held together with solder and optimism—and plugs it into the relay junction exposed behind the panel. Numbers scroll across the cracked screen, and Junia's brow furrows deeper with each line.
"This relay has been active for months, maybe longer.
" She taps the screen, cycling through data feeds.
"Someone patched into the old military grid and started pushing corrupted code through the maintenance network.
It's depending on legitimate power signals, hiding inside the infrastructure itself.
When a droid connects to the grid for a recharge cycle, it downloads the corruption along with its standard updates. "
A cold weight settles in my gut. "That's how the droids are turning. They're being infected through the power grid."
"And nobody notices because the code mimics normal operational protocols until it activates.
" Junia unplugs her scanner and tucks it back into her belt, eyes bright with the manic energy she gets when a puzzle starts clicking together.
"Come on, the signal gets stronger further in.
If we can find the broadcast source, we can figure out who's behind it. "
We push deeper into the tunnel system. The corridors widen as we move past the initial maintenance sections into older infrastructure with cavernous chambers lined with deactivated machinery and junction rooms where military equipment was once staged before being stripped and abandoned.
An oppressive silence blankets the tunnels, broken only by our footsteps, the whir of Junia's scanner, and the occasional distant groan of settling concrete.
Then we round a corner and I forget how to breathe.
An enormous former equipment staging area stretches ahead of us, converted into a grotesque spectacle defying rational explanation.
Dozens of machines crowd the space, but they're wrong.
Maintenance droids, cargo loaders, security units, and construction bots—all dismantled and reassembled into grotesque hybrid configurations that blur the line between individual machines and a single interconnected organism.
Wiring runs between bodies like veins, pulsing with faint light.
Limbs from different units have been grafted together and fused by unidentifiable heat sources.
Optical sensors from a dozen different models blink in erratic, asynchronous patterns across the mass, and at the core of it all, a sputtering holographic projector flickers with distorted light, casting warped shadows that make the fused machines look like they're breathing.
"Holy shit," Junia whispers beside me. She already has her scanner out, readings cascading across the screen.
"Cass, this is Legion code. Full-spectrum subverted AI architecture, the same signatures that show up in historical databases from the occupation-era outbreaks.
Something down here is rebuilding itself. "
The words rebuilding itself fall into my chest like a punch.
This is Legion, the rogue AI that nearly consumed entire worlds during the Centuries War.
It is the plague that killed my father twelve years ago when emergency systems failed and aid never arrived.
The Legion stories of our youth served as ancient warnings about technology slipping beyond control; my generation, however, lived through that nightmare firsthand.
And it's here underneath our feet. Buried in the belly of District Seventeen, the AI plague that killed my father, the digital predator that nearly consumed entire worlds, is quietly rebuilding itself under the streets where I treat patients and children starve in alleys.
"We need to go," I breathe. "Juno, we need to go now."
"Just let me get a full scan of the—" She freezes mid-sentence, scanner still connected to the relay junction.
The optical sensors in the chamber snap to a single point—us—and the fused mass of hybrid droids lurches into motion with a sound like grinding metal and screaming servos.
Limbs extend, reconfigure, and reach. A cargo loader arm the length of my body swings toward Junia, and I tackle her sideways right as it smashes into the wall where her head was half a second ago.
Stone chips explode outward, stinging my face and arms.
"Run!" I haul Junia upright and shove her toward the corridor. "Run, run, run?—"
We sprint away as the chamber behind us erupts into chaos, with machines pulling themselves apart and reassembling on the fly to adapt to the tunnel geometry while squeezing through corridors that should be far too narrow for their mass.
An unbearable cacophony of shrieking metal and whining servos pushes beyond operational limits.
A force crashes into the ceiling ahead of us, and a section of tunnel collapses, sending rubble cascading across our path.
Junia vaults over the debris, her stride unbroken.
I scramble over behind her, tearing my jacket on a twisted piece of rebar, and we burst into a junction room with three branching corridors.
Behind us, the tunnel fills with the grinding advance of machines that should be bolted to factory floors and instead are hunting us through the dark like predators.
"This way!" Junia grabs my arm and pulls me into the left corridor. "This connects back to the Sector Eight access point; we can?—"
A combat drone drops from the ceiling directly in front of us.
Military-grade and shielded, the craft bristles with weapon mounts that swivel toward us with mechanical fluency.
Its optics burn with the same sickly, tainted light described in reports from the market exchange.
The vehicle hovers in the corridor, blocking our only exit, while behind us, the grinding mass of fused machines fills the junction room to seal off our retreat.
We’re trapped underground with Legion-infected machines on both sides and a pulse pistol that might as well be a toy against military-grade armor plating.
I grab Junia and pull her behind me, drawing my pistol with hands that are shaking badly enough to compromise my aim.
The combat drone's weapon mounts cycle through targeting configurations, locking onto us with the calm, methodical precision of machinery that has never once doubted its superiority over organic targets.
Temperatures spike, hitting me like a wall of sudden, suffocating heat.
Moisture evaporates from the tunnel air, leaving my lungs raw and burning with each inhalation.
Even the combat drone’s optics flicker, its sensors momentarily blinded by the sheer intensity of the thermal surge.
Behind us, the grinding advance of the fused machines stutters and stalls as the surge of thermal energy sucks the moisture from the tunnel, turning the air suffocatingly dry.
Rhykor crashes through the tunnel ceiling like a meteor wrapped in rage.