"You are probably here to tell me that Ray's gone, because…" Julia stated, not lifting her gaze. She let the words hang in the air.

"Because all the people that were close to him deserve to know that he is not here anymore. I plan to head to Johnny as soon as he decides to emerge from wherever he is hiding," Synth offered.

Julia offered a nod as she lifted her head. Her palms were placed over the lower part of her face, her pointer fingers rubbing her eyes, which now seemed very tired.

"That's a lot to take in," she said. "How are the kids?"

"They are doing fine, at least in Selena's case. For Max, I plan to head to the Aethercore Biomedical Celestial Clinic tomorrow to have his new organic legs attached. After that, I plan to use Selena's implant to erase, or at least alter, the memories which caused him the trauma."

Synth paused as he glanced at Julia, who seemed not to be very present. She needed time to process their discussion. This was the sign that it was his time to leave. But first…

"I'm sorry we had to meet under these circumstances," Synth said.

A heavy silence settled between them, thick with the weight of his impossible confession. Synth's gaze softened, the loneliness in his eyes receding, replaced by a quiet, profound sincerity.

"Before I go," he said, his voice losing its philosophical edge, becoming more personal, "I wanted to thank you. For everything you did for him. For Ray." He paused, the ghost of Ray's own gratitude a warm, genuine echo in his voice. "You may not want my respect, but you have it. You were loyal to him, and to Lina, when you had no obligation to be. In a city built on transactions, your loyalty was… an anomaly. A beautiful one."

He prepared to leave, to turn and walk back into the city's indifferent night.

"Wait," Julia's voice cut through the quiet, stopping him in his tracks.

She turned to her computer, her fingers a blur as they flew across the keyboard, pulling up a file from a deep, encrypted archive. A moment later, a data shard ejected from a slot in her console. She took it and held it out to him.

"This might be a lead," she said, her voice carefully neutral, her professional mask firmly back in place. "To the origin of the nanites."

Synth took the shard, its surface cool and smooth against his porcelain skin. He offered a single, grateful nod. Then, he extended his hand.

Julia looked at it for a long, silent moment. Her own hand, trembling almost imperceptibly, met his. His grip was firm, steady, and unnervingly cool.

A few moments after Synth left, after the clinic door had hissed shut and sealed her back in the sterile silence, Julia's carefully constructed composure finally shattered. She leaned back in her chair, the movement slow, boneless, as if the strings holding her upright had been cut. Faint tears, hot and unexpected, welled in her eyes. She closed them, and a single, soft sob escaped her lips.

As soon as he set foot out of the clinic, Synth accessed the data shard. The information bloomed in his mind—a ghost of a forgotten military project screaming from a digital grave. The name echoed through the static: DARIS.

DARIS: Directive for Autonomous Regenerative Integration Systems.

The data was a nightmare of redacted reports and classified schematics from a black-budget initiative started decades ago. Officially, the project never existed. Unofficially, it was a Pandora's Box. Synth saw its purpose laid bare: to develop autonomous nanite swarms capable of regenerating tissue, interfacing with any structure, and learning without external programming. These weren't just medical nanites—the data screamed of something more ambitious, more terrifying: bio-mechanical evolution agents.

He saw their key traits, some of his own burgeoning abilities: selective integration that could overwrite a host's very being and the chilling ability for matter assimilation. And then he saw why it was buried. The project was deemed too unstable. The reports were a litany of horrors: test subjects losing their identity, becoming hostile, their nanites interpreting survival threats in abstract ways—deleting emotional responses, rewriting instincts, or growing internal weapons systems autonomously. The entire facility was allegedly wiped out during a containment breach, the program sealed, and any mention of DARIS scrubbed from every known database.

Then came the images. He saw grainy, faded photos, a gallery of failed experiments that turned his processors cold. One subject's head was a grotesque fusion of flesh and technology, a high tech optical camera lens replacing one eye, its iris a dead, glass circle, while the other eye, still horribly human, stared out with a look of silent, eternal screaming. Another was a monstrous chimera, their torso seamlessly grafted onto the glistening, scaled body of a mutated, fish-like creature, its gills still pulsing with a faint, rhythmic memory of life. He saw a woman whose humanity was being devoured by a ravenous, insectoid transformation, six long, metallic legs, like a spider's, erupting from her back, her own limbs atrophied and useless. The most horrifying was the last: a being that had become one with the lab itself, a cancerous, gray mass of metal and half-formed flesh crawling along the walls, floor, and ceiling. A single human face was barely visible in the grotesque, pulsating blob, one eye, still intact, darting around frantically, its mouth opening and closing in a silent, desperate plea for a death that would never come. He noted the names and dates, pre-Collapse, a half-century old.

His thoughts snagged on a familiar thread, pulling him into the corrupted data of Rex Future's last moments. The failed heist. The pieces began to slot into place, forming a chilling, incomplete mosaic. Kaizen had taken the ruins of Project DARIS and revived it, upgrading it far beyond its monstrous prototypes.

Was this the solution to the mystery of his origins? He couldn't be certain. There were too many missing pieces, too many fragments that could fit another way. But one thing was clear: if Kaizen Ascendancy ever learned what he was, what he could do, they would tear the city apart to reclaim their property.

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But that was a problem for another day. A war to be fought on his own terms. His primary directives were clear: Lina's cure. Max's recovery.

The lead would wait. The ghosts of DARIS could stay buried a little longer. Right now, there was a different kind of ghost that needed tending to.

He cut a corner into a black alley, his sensors sweeping the area. No eyes, no ears. His form began to shift, compacting, as he prepared for his next move.

Alyna lay on the couch, staring at the far wall as the city's neon lights painted restless, shifting patterns across the ceiling. Lina had retreated to her room hours ago.

Alyna had tried to work, to lose herself in the clean, logical world of code, but the grief was a physical weight, a crushing pressure in her chest. Synth's name was a bitter, metallic taste on her tongue. Her anger had subsided, leaving only a vast, hollow ache.

Then she heard it. A rapid, rhythmic clink-clink-clink, each note metallic and hollow, like a tiny hammer striking steel. Her gaze snapped to the grille-covered window that led to the small balcony.

Again. Clink-clink-clink.

She rose, her movements slow, cautious, and accessed the balcony camera on her datapad.

"An owl?" she whispered, her voice a mixture of confusion and a dawning, impossible hope.

Through the camera's eye, she saw a great horned owl, its feathers a soft, mottled gray, tapping its beak against the metal grille. It was a perfect, impossible creature, a piece of the old, wild world in the heart of this synthetic city.

Then, the owl turned its head and looked directly at the camera. Its eyes were not the eyes of a bird. They were a deep, shimmering silver, swirling with a light that was both intelligent and ancient. It slowly, deliberately, raised its left wing. The gesture was so human, that it bypassed all her logical defenses and struck her right in the heart.

Alyna's breath caught in her throat. She disengaged the grille, and it rose into its housing with a soft, mechanical hum. She walked to the window and slid it open. Please don't be a bomb, a small, terrified part of her mind whispered.

The owl flew soundlessly through the open window. Alyna's eyes widened as the bird slowed, landing on her chest with a weight that was both real and impossibly gentle. Her arms came up without a thought, cradling the creature. Its feathers were softer than she could have imagined.

The owl lifted its head, and its silver eyes, deep as a galaxy, looked into hers. A soft, low purr, rumbled from its chest. A small, involuntary smile touched her lips. She walked with the owl still in her arms to the couch and slowly sat down. The moment she tried to separate the owl from her, it seemed to panic, its purr turning into a low, anxious hum. "Okay, okay," she protested softly, letting the owl have its way. She stroked its soft feathers, and the purring returned, a warm, vibrating presence against her chest.

She inspected it closer, her netstrider's mind automatically running diagnostics. The feather articulation was flawless, the muscular micro-movements beneath the skin impossibly complex. She could even hear its small, steady heartbeat. It was either a masterpiece of bio-mechanical engineering worth a fortune, or it was real. Her heart chose to believe the latter; her mind screamed that she was a fool. This is probably Synth, shifted into an owl, she thought, but the logic of it no longer seemed to matter. Her heart still ached, but this small, fluffy creature seemed to lessen the pain.

She started to talk to it, her voice a low, broken whisper. "I still hate you, and this doesn't make us friends," she murmured, fresh tears welling in her eyes. The owl responded with a soft, low hoot and gently butted its head against her chin, a gesture of pure, uncomplicated affection. Alyna's hand glided along its back as it listened, its silver eyes never leaving hers, a silent, steady presence in the storm of her sorrow. It didn't offer empty words or logical explanations. It just… was.

She leaned back into the cushions, the owl a warm, purring weight on her chest. It nuzzled its head under her chin, and she felt the tension in her shoulders, a knot she hadn't even realized was there, finally begin to unwind. The city's neon glare seemed softer now, the distant sirens less menacing. In the quiet of the apartment, with this silent, feathered friend, she finally allowed herself to just breathe. She closed her eyes, the purring a steady, comforting rhythm against her heart. She was being held by a monster, a machine, that wanted nothing more than to lessen the pain of a woman whose heart had been broken by the one before him.

Alyna woke to the soft, gray light of a Virelian morning filtering through the window. For a moment, a disoriented, dream-like peace settled over her. She felt a phantom warmth on her chest, the memory of a steady, purring heartbeat against her own. She opened her eyes.

The owl was gone.

In its place, resting on the cushion beside her, was a plush toy. A perfect replica of a great horned owl, its feathers a soft, mottled gray, its eyes two large, unblinking buttons of polished silver.

A surge of hot, irrational anger flooded her as she remembered that being had left it to comfort her, that being that was responsible for her broken heart in the first place. With a choked cry of frustration, she grabbed the plush and hurled it across the room. It hit the far wall with a soft, unsatisfying thud and fell to the floor, its silver button eyes staring blankly at the ceiling.

She turned her back to it, her shoulders shaking, the crushing weight of her grief returning with a vengeance. But the silence that followed was different. It was no longer empty. She could feel the plush toy's presence, a quiet, patient accusation in the still air. A few moments later, she slowly rose and walked to it. She knelt, her hand hesitating before she finally brushed her fingers against its soft plumage. Then she picked it up, her anger dissolving into a fresh wave of sorrow, and took it in her embrace.

She moved silently toward Lina's bedroom and slowly, carefully, opened the door. She was in her futon, her back turned to the door, a small, still form in the dim light. Alyna closed the door and headed back to the couch. She brought her knees up to her chest, the plush toy still clutched in her arms, and closed her eyes as hot tears started tracing paths down her cheeks.

A few hours later, the sound of quiet, whirring wheels pulled Alyna from a light, uneasy sleep. She saw Lina slowly rolling out of her room. She didn't even glance at Alyna, her gaze fixed on the window as if the glittering, indifferent city held some kind of answer. Alyna looked at her, and her own grief was momentarily eclipsed by a sharp, protective ache. Lina's eyes were glassy and lost, her face a mask of such profound, hollowed-out sorrow it was as if her very soul had been scooped out, leaving only a fragile, trembling shell.

Alyna carefully placed the owl on the couch and walked towards her. She tried to find her words, but since Synth's visit, they had barely spoken, their shared grief a chasm between them. She couldn't imagine the pain she felt. Alyna had lost her lover, but Lina… she had lost her son. The only member of her family left.

Alyna knelt before her and took her hands, which were resting limply in her lap. They trembled slightly, and they were as cold as ice. Alyna held them tight, trying to pour some of her own warmth into them.

Her gaze snapped to the door as she heard a soft, electronic chime.

Using her interface, Alyna checked the security camera. It was a woman. Her platinum hair was cropped close to her scalp, but the usual sharpness in her eyes seemed to be dulled, softened by a deep, weary sadness.

Julia.

Alyna walked to the door and opened it.

"Morning," Alyna offered softly.

"Morning, Alyna," Julia responded, her voice a low, gentle murmur. She lifted a plastic bag from which a warm, savory steam rose. "I brought breakfast."

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