"Hey, wake up." Kiara's voice echoed in the background.
The morning sun bled across the orange sky. Heavy clouds filtered the light like frosted glass.
"Thought you were gonna sleep forever." She chuckled.
Drowsy, I rubbed my eyes. The view outside woke me completely.
We were flying above a highway connecting southeastern Brasil. Nanobarriers surrounded São Paulo's border, keeping the corrosive air of the surrounding regions out.
The Aether Network, Brasil's ruling militia, and the country's three main sponsors—Sessota, UNITED, and Kokusai—invested little in smaller cities. Only the capitals mattered. They scarcely considered the other airways in Greater São Paulo routes at all.
Ruined buildings, broken scaffolding, glass falling from aging walls. The dense air carried yellowish particles. Chemical grains, rough as sand. Ground stained with repulsive filth. Mountains of trash, tall as buildings, contorted into grotesque sculptures.
Among the wreckage, enormous rats and surveillance nanodrones competed for space. And the armed groups were even more disturbing. Gas masks, painted bodies, war tattoos. One group surrounded two kneeling men facing a wall stained with slime.
I stifled a scream.
Two women raised their laser weapons, which began to glow. Two beams cut through the air. The bodies fell, with no time for screams.
The woman in black looked up. Stared at us at her own pace. Then signaled to another. Their gazes fixed on the car, assessing it with restrained alertness.
"They'll leave us alone." Kiara's voice cut through the silence, as though she had guessed my thoughts. "This car has a signal."
I swallowed hard. "What signal?"
"They're mercenaries under Netheria's command. This car means 'keep your distance.'"
Mercenaries?
My body trembled. My worst thoughts fell brutally short of reality. At some point, my eyes caught a pile of bodies. A crack opened in my heart. I had witnessed many things in my medical career. Situations that would destroy the sanity of the most resilient minds.
But this? This was far beyond anything I could have imagined. Beyond bearable. That much rawness definitely made me feel vulnerable.
"W-why are things like this? What happened?"
"These are the Nobody's Lands, where mercenaries live. Why are things like this?" She grinned. Cold. Icy.
I waited for her to say more. The silence stretched on.
I tried to make conversation. "Are you a mercenary?"
Kiara's gaze hardened. Her lips, which had moved so easily before, sealed shut. A silence of steel hung between us.
A vein throbbed in my forehead. Great. Another presence falling silent before my questions. I kept the thoughts from taking over. Forced myself to look at the surface of Maia's world.
The yellowish atmosphere dissipated. Abandoned houses. Scattered trees.
Takashi kept his gaze fixed on the landscape. An android from the Una generation. He held knowledge of the world, limited but deepened with each new access.
Kiara, however, was on a level I did not know.
"Takashi tried to track you. You appeared as a deactivated android. Even when androids are deactivated, we can still access their data. Why was he blocked?"
"Maia disconnected me from the Motherboard. The restrictions vanished. I'm untraceable, too."
"Any nanospecialist could infer that you're an extraordinary android."
Kiara frowned and changed the subject. "You're a doctor? That could be useful."
Why would it be useful?
We reached a city.
Low, broad buildings, their rough lines a preserved legacy of earlier times. People in dirty clothes unloaded cargo from boats.
The salty smell of the ocean entered the closed car. The brownish sea rippled against the coast to our right. The zephyr hissed melancholy whispers. The car swayed over the uneven nanoelectromagnetic waves.
"Where are we?"
"Santos." Kiara slowed down. "First time seeing the sea?"
"Yes. I'd only seen it in pictures."
But they were insufficient to capture this; the vastness, the salty smell, the sea's endless dance in rhythm with the world.
"When we're done with what we came to do, I can take you to the coast. It's a preserved area." She shrugged.
I smiled as we flew.
The Port of Santos.
Houses stacked upon one another. Ships, freighters, and submersible boats moored at the docks.
We stopped before an old black house of cracked concrete.
I coughed at the smell of decay.
"Santos is the city where Maia spent her childhood. In this very house. Ready?" Kiara stared at me.
My heart pounded. I parted my lips, uneasy.
Perhaps it was the mention of Maia. Perhaps it was the weight of history condensed in that cracked concrete. Or perhaps, just perhaps, it was the certainty that the paths had finally opened.
The first step on the journey into her world.
And by the time I realized… I was already inside.