The first rule of the Labyrinth Market: never look lost.
Aeris pulled her hood lower over her brow, shoulders squared as she stepped into the heart of the city's most dangerous underlayer. Around her, chaos pulsed in neon and static. Makeshift stalls crowded one another in spirals that obeyed no architectural logic—half-digital, half-physical. Vendors shouted code fragments like they were auctioning meat. Someone beside her traded a counterfeit biometric identity for a bottle of clean air.
The Grid barely reached this place.
And that made it lawless.
Perfect.
This is where the Data Architects whispered about impossible keys. The kind Aeris needed to unlock the rest of her memory core. The spike she carried—the Echo Spike—was only one piece of the puzzle. To awaken the virus fully, she needed the Obsidian Patch, a code fragment said to have been smuggled out of a dead zone long before the Collapse.
And the only person who could get it?
An information broker called Nyx.
Nyx was a ghost in the system, rumored to be a former Grid enforcer who'd gone rogue. Some said Nyx didn't even have a face—only a rotating avatar that adjusted to the buyer's fears. Aeris wasn't sure what to believe anymore. But she had coordinates, and a name.
Solara trailed beside her, quiet and coiled, ever since the incident at the skyport.
Aeris hadn't forgiven her betrayal. Not yet.
But she'd saved Aeris from the trackers back in Sector 19. That counted for something.
"Are you sure this is worth it?" Solara asked, eyes flicking to a mechanical monkey that scurried across a neon beam overhead. It barked something in binary and dropped a flash drive into a buyer's hand.
Aeris nodded. "If I want to remember what I did… I need the Patch."
The path led them through a collapsing digital archway into a narrow alley lit by pulsating graffiti. Script in ancient coding languages blinked in and out of phase—some warning, some welcoming. At the end, a figure waited in a shifting cloak of fractal mirrors. No face. Just flickering shards of what might have been expressions once.
"Nyx?" Aeris asked.
The voice that answered wasn't male or female—it modulated between tones.
"You came alone," it said.
"Almost."
Solara narrowed her gaze. "We're not here for games."
Nyx tilted their head. "Everyone's here for games. That's what the Grid was built on. Gamifying thought. Monetizing memory. And now you—Aeris Calderon—want to undo all that."
A cold silence.
"You know who I am?"
Nyx chuckled. "I remember who you were. Before the purge. Before you erased yourself."
Aeris stiffened.
Nyx continued. "You were the one who taught us how to break the system. And then you vanished. The Patch you seek is dangerous. It doesn't just restore memory—it resurrects truth. Even the parts you buried deliberately."
Aeris held out the spike.
"I want the truth," she said.
Nyx laughed again. "Careful, Calderon. Some truths fracture the soul."
Nyx stepped forward, reached into their mirrored cloak—and produced a small, obsidian chip with circuitry glowing faintly violet.
"The Patch," they said.
Just as Aeris reached for it—lights exploded overhead.
An EMP pulse rippled through the market, frying several vendor stalls in sparks.
Screams erupted.
"Ambush!" Solara shouted.
Drones dropped from the ceiling.
Nyx vanished.
Aeris clutched the chip just as three armed figures in white Grid armor surrounded her.
"You're under reclamation order," one growled.
Aeris's eyes burned with fury.
Not again.
She threw down a smoke pulse and grabbed Solara's hand.
They ran into the digital maze—
—carrying the Patch,
—and the key to remembering why she had once chosen to forget everything.