The Ronin moved like a shadow across a sea of diamonds.
The Glass Desert—officially designated as the "Silicate Exclusion Zone" in the Synapse archives—was a haunting expanse of fused sand and pulverized architecture. Fifty years ago, this had been a sprawling network of suburbs and transit hubs. Now, it was a smooth, undulating mirror that reflected the indifferent glow of the moon. The tires of the interceptor didn't hum on this surface; they chimed, a high-pitched metallic ringing that echoed through the chassis as the kinetic chains crushed the brittle ground.
Inside the cabin, the silence was its own kind of pressure.
Ren was staring out the window, his forehead pressed against the reinforced glass. To a man who had spent his entire life under the flickering neon and heavy, humid smog of Sector 4, the sheer scale of the horizon was nauseating. There were no walls. No ceilings. No boundaries. Just a terrifying, endless more.
"My chest hurts," Ren whispered, not looking away from the stars. "Every time I breathe, it feels like I'm drinking ice water. Is that the radiation? Am I dying?"
"That's just oxygen, Ren," Elias said, his hands steady on the yoke. He checked the radiation sensor on the dash. It was pinned in the green. "Your lungs are used to breathing recycled carbon and filtered sweat. Clean air has a bite to it. It'll pass."
Elias was struggling with his own set of ghosts. As a Sifter, he had spent years diving into the memories of the wealthy—curated, polished recollections of vacations they never took or childhoods they wished they'd had. He knew what "nature" was supposed to look like according to the fabricators: lush, green, and loud.
This world was none of those things. It was monochromatic, crystalline, and utterly still.
"The beacon is shifting," Elias noted, tapping the amber crystal. It sat in a custom bracket he'd jury-rigged to the nav-com. The light within the shard was no longer a steady pulse; it was flickering in a complex, rhythmic pattern, like a lighthouse warning ships away from a reef. "It's not just a location. It's a broadcast. The closer we get to the coast, the more data the crystal is pulling from the air."
"From the air?" Ren turned, his eyes wide. "There's no grid out here. No satellites. Synapse says the orbital layers are cluttered with Kessler-debris."
"Synapse says a lot of things," Elias grunted. "Look at the HUD."
He flicked a switch, and the windshield's display shifted to a long-range lidar scan. The desert wasn't empty. Buried beneath the glass were the bones of the Old World—the twisted steel skeletons of skyscrapers, the collapsed ribcages of stadiums. But weaving through these ruins were thin, translucent lines of fiber-optic cables, glowing with a faint, residual energy.
"The Old World didn't die," Elias said, a realization dawning on him that made his skin crawl. "It was buried. Someone kept the lights on beneath the surface. Someone kept the data flowing while we were locked in the nursery."
Suddenly, a sharp, piercing chirp erupted from the rear-facing sensors.
"Contact," Elias snapped.
On the rearview display, three heat signatures blossomed against the cold grey of the desert. They weren't drones. Drones had a high-pitched, electric whine. These signatures were larger, heavier.
"Seekers," Elias cursed. "Synapse ground-units. They must have been stationed at the Perimeter Outpost. They're using magnetic-levitation sleds. They don't have to worry about the glass."
"How did they find us so fast?" Ren panicked, fumbling with his harness.
"The crystal," Elias said, glancing at the pulsing amber shard. "It's a beacon for us, but it's a flare for them. Every time it talks to the hidden network, it pings their satellites."
The Seekers were closing the gap. They were low, wide vehicles that hovered inches above the glass, kicking up a rooster-tail of shimmering dust that looked like a wake of silver. A red light flashed on the Ronin's dash—a lock-on warning.
"Brace yourself!"
Elias slammed the yoke to the right, steering the Ronin toward a cluster of jagged shadows on the horizon—the "Skeleton City" of old Los Angeles. If he stayed on the open flats, the Seekers would pick them apart with long-range kinetic bolts. He needed cover. He needed a maze.
The interceptor roared, its chemical thrusters coughing out a blue flame as Elias pushed the engine to its limit. They hit the outskirts of the ruins at a hundred miles per hour. The "streets" were canyons of shattered concrete and rusted rebar. The Ronin bounced violently, the suspension screaming as it took the impact of half-buried debris.
THOOM.
A kinetic bolt slammed into a nearby pillar of a collapsed overpass, showering the car in concrete dust.
"They're firing!" Ren screamed.
"I noticed!" Elias shouted back. He performed a handbrake turn around a rusted bus frame, the Ronin sliding sideways through a narrow gap. "Ren, get into the back. There's a manual override for the rear chaff-dispenser. When I say 'now,' you pull the lever."
"I don't know how to use a weapon!"
"It's not a weapon, it's a distraction! Just pull the damn lever!"
Ren scrambled into the cramped back seat, his hands shaking as he found the heavy iron handle Mags had pointed out.
Elias watched the Seekers in the mirror. They were agile, weaving through the ruins with a grace the heavy Ronin lacked. They were splitting up, trying to flank him.
"Targeting lock in five... four..." the computer voiced.
"Now, Ren! Pull it!"
Ren yanked the lever.
Instead of smoke or flares, the back of the Ronin ejected a cloud of highly pressurized, pulverized industrial magnets—remnants from Mags' workshop. In the low-gravity, high-static environment of the Glass Desert, the magnets didn't fall. They expanded into a shimmering, invisible cloud of electromagnetic interference.
The lead Seeker, relying on magnetic levitation to stay above the glass, hit the cloud and vanished into a chaotic tumble. Its stabilizers short-circuited, and the sled slammed into the ground at high speed, shattering into a thousand pieces of burning composite.
"One down!" Elias yelled, but there was no joy in his voice. The other two Seekers didn't slow down. They simply adjusted their path, their turret-mounted lasers tracking the Ronin through the dust.
Elias swerved into what used to be a subway tunnel entrance, the Ronin plunging into total darkness. He killed the headlights, relying entirely on the amber crystal's glow to guide him.
The tunnel was narrow, the walls scraping against the car's armor with a sound like a giant's fingernails on a chalkboard. Elias kept his foot on the gas, praying the tunnel didn't end in a dead-end or a cave-in.
Then, the tunnel opened up.
They weren't in a subway station. They were in a massive, underground vault. Row after row of black server towers stretched into the darkness, their cooling fans silent, their status lights blinking in the same rhythmic amber pattern as the crystal.
Elias slammed on the brakes. The Ronin skidded to a halt in the center of the silent cathedral of data.
"What is this place?" Ren asked, his voice barely a whisper.
Elias stepped out of the car, the amber crystal in his hand. The air here was warmer, smelling of ancient electricity and ozone. As he walked toward the nearest tower, the lights on the servers shifted from amber to a steady, calm blue.
A holographic projection flickered into existence in the center of the room. It wasn't the woman from the memory. It was a map. A map of the Shield, and the dozens of other Shields scattered across the globe like a pox.
"It's the brain," Elias realized, his voice hollow. "Synapse didn't just build the Shield. They hijacked the world's neural network. They're processing the collective memories of everyone inside the domes to power their AI."
The crystal in his hand vibrated. A new timestamp appeared on his retinal display.
TIMESTAMP: 36 HOURS FROM NOW.
OBJECTIVE: UPLOAD.
"We aren't just going to the coast to see the sun, Ren," Elias said, looking at the billions of blinking lights. "We're going there to wake everyone up."
From the tunnel behind them, the low hum of the remaining Seekers echoed. They were coming.
"Grab the shotgun," Elias said, his face hardening into a mask of grim determination. "We're going to have to fight our way out of the library."