The underground thinned gradually, like a wound closing the closer she came to the surface. The tunnels beneath Sector Six were older than the ones she had passed through before, less deliberate, less sanctified by machines pretending to be gods. Here, the walls were raw concrete and rebar, clawed open by time and neglect. Old maintenance markings still clung to the surfaces, arrows pointing nowhere, warnings written for workers long dead.
The Fox moved carefully, counting steps, making turns in her head. She had learned to do that while travelling with M.A.R.S., learned it the hard way. He had always known where to go. She had never needed to. Now, every decision felt heavier without his guidance pressing against the back of her mind. Quieter, too.
Weeks underground changed a person. She felt it in the stiffness of her joints, in the way her thoughts drifted slower, more inward. Her reflection in a dark panel barely looked like someone who belonged aboveground anymore, dust ground into her clothes, dried oil at the seams of her prosthetic harness, eyes sharp and sun-starved behind the fox mask.
She stopped when the air changed.
It was subtle, almost imagined, but she knew it instantly. Less stale, Less recycled. A whisper of moisture that didn't come from pipes. The surface was close.
She followed the sensation until she found it: a crawl space half-hidden behind a collapsed utility cabinet, its panel warped outward as if something had once tried very hard to escape through it. The opening was barely wide enough for her shoulders. Old bolts littered the floor beneath it, snapped clean.
Someone had been here before. Long ago.
She slung her rifle tighter, crouched, and pulled herself inside.
The climb was miserable. Rust flaked off onto her hands. The shaft angled upward at a cruel incline, forcing her to wedge her boots against the walls and push inch by inch. Muscles screamed in protest. Her pack snagged twice, and both times she froze, heart hammering, convinced the sound would echo up into something waiting for her.
But nothing came.
At the top, light bled through a fractured grate. Real light, pale and polluted, but unmistakably from the surface. She shoved hard, ignoring the way her arms trembled, and the grate gave way with a dull metallic groan.
She collapsed forward onto solid ground.
For a long moment, she didn't move.
She lay there, chest pressed to the dust, breathing in air that tasted wrong but felt right all the same. Above her, the sky was a dull grey, broken by the underbellies of structures stacked too tightly together. Sector Six's outskirts, low traffic, low attention. Exactly where she had hoped to surface.
After weeks underground, after gods and machines and impossible promises, she was back.
But not home.
She pushed herself up slowly and brushed the dust from her clothes. Her hands moved to the fox mask, adjusting the strap, pulling it tighter against her face until the world narrowed into something manageable again. The mask always helped. It reminded her who she was supposed to be.
She didn't let herself look toward the sector proper.
She couldn't stay. That much was clear. The Church would be watching, if not here specifically, then everywhere eventually. And if they weren't, others would be. The bounty that had once followed her like a shadow might still be active. Or worse, it might have grown.
And even it it hadn't—
She thought of Jorell, the one person that treated her human.
The thought came uninvited, sharp and fleeting. She pushed it down immediately. Thinking about it would only low her down, and slowing down was how people died. She didn't care about Sector Six, not really. Not the vendors, not the scavengers, not the half-lit alleys filled with people pretending they weren't afraid of tomorrow.
But she cared enough not to stain it with blood.
If she lingered, someone innocent would pay for it.
So she turned away from the sector's lights and headed for the outskirts, toward a strip of forgotten infrastructure where the city thinned into ruin. Her hideout waited there, tucked into the bones of a collapsed transit spur, hidden behind scrap and sloth and the assumption that nothing valuable could still exist in a place like that.
The walk felt longer than she remembered.
Every sound make her tense. Every shadow felt too deliberate. She kept her pace steady, unhurried like someone with nowhere important to be. That, too, was a skill she had learned.
When she finally reached the hideout, it looked exactly as she had left it. And that unsettled her more than if it had been disturbed.
The makeshift door was covered with a heavy sheet of polymer-fabric reinforced with scrap metal, painted over with grime and tags to blend into the surroundings. She lifted it carefully, just enough to slip inside, then let it fall back in place behind her,
The interior smelled faintly of ozone and food packs. Familiar. Safe, in its own way.
For a moment, she just stood there.
There was so many things she wanted to take.
Tools lined one wall, each modified to her specifications. Spare plating hung from hooks, labeled and catagorized. Data drives sat in a sealed container beneath a workbench, each one holding fragments of plans, maps, half-finished ideas she'd told herself she would come back to someday.
Someday wasn't now.
She was only one person. One body. And she needed to move.
Her eyes went immediately to the turret arms.
They rested against the far wall, folded and dormant, their frames compact but unmistakably lethal. She crossed the room and ran a hand along one of them, fingers tracing familiar seams. These weren't like her other limbs. They didn't pretend to be human. They were honest about what they were built to do.
She powered them up briefly, just long enough to confirm they still responded. Soft mechanical whirs answered her touch. Good.
She grabbed the charging deck next, hefting its weight with a grunt before sliding it into her pack. A couple of heavy-duty cables followed. She hesitated at the ration packs, then took more than she thought she needed. Hunger had a way of arriving early.
Everything else stayed.
She packed quickly, efficiently, muscle memory guiding her hands. When she was done, she attached the turret arms to the exterior of her backpack the same way she had attached the other limbs. The weight pulled at her shoulders, but it was a good weight. Familiar. Reassuring.
She took one last look around her hideout.
Not goodbye. Just acknowledgement.
Then she slipped back outside, lowered the sheet behind her, and turned away without hesitation.
Her destination loomed ahead, invisible but ever-present: the Arcwater Ribbon, that vast, dangerous artery where the city's refuse and secrets flowed side by side. It was a bad place to travel.
Which meant it was perfect.
She adjusted her pack, checked her rifle one last time, and began walking, leaving Sector Six behind without ever stepping back into it, carrying what she could, and moving forward into a future that refused to be quiet or kind.