Reign steel hatch groaned one final time before Reign kicked it open. A jagged creak echoed behind them as sunlight pierced through the dust-choked exit, blinding after hours of underground shadows. They stepped into the open.The outskirts had nothing like the city behind them. No high-rises. No drones. Just scorched sand stretching endlessly.“This was the Ashblood perimeter,” Reign said, pausing beside a twisted pylon. “Where we were trained to survive. Or die.”Andrew’s eyes swept the terrain—cracked glass scattered across sun-bleached concrete, the remains of a half-buried drone twitching in the sand. Everything felt suspended in time.Behind him, Elsa stumbled slightly, her legs not yet steady.Andrew caught her elbow without hesitation, voice low. “Are you okay now?”She blinked, as if just remembering where she was. “I… I think so." “Who are you? This is not your real face, is it?”Andrew tensed.“Your face,” she said quietly. “The energy doesn’t match. I can see it now. Some

Andrew didn’t know what to do as he heard those voices. The realization hit him: Hannah wasn’t by his side, and she was the one person he couldn’t bear to see hurt.His jaw tightened as he glared at Taylor. "Where is Hannah?""She’s at her father’s." Taylor responded. "She’s safe?""Yes." There was a pause. "But the unexpected can happen.""You weren’t exactly stable yourself," Taylor muttered. "Go easy."Andrew sighed, his gaze drifting to the warm-lit windows of the house across the street."Keep an eye on Reign and Elsa. No one moves until I say so.""Copy that," Taylor replied. "You sure about this?""No," Andrew admitted. "But I’m tired of being too late."With that, he opened the door to the safe house and leaped from the ground, adrenaline surging through him.*************The cold air wrapped around Andrew as he levitated slowly as his fit touched the ground. He was still wearing the black skin face he had used to stay hidden.But as he neared Nelson’s house, his expression

Taylor tossed Andrew a black compression shirt laced with neuron-thread filaments. “Put this on. You’re gonna be our transmitter.”Andrew caught it midair. “I don’t even know what that means.”“It means your blood and neural pattern are the strongest among us. You touched the node. It tuned itself to you. You’re our anchor. We build the spine around your Ashcore frequency.”As Andrew pulled the shirt on, Taylor flicked a switch. The central conduit cracked open, revealing a suspended chamber filled with flexible synthetic nerve bands, each one throbbing faintly like a living artery.Andrew stared at the mess. “That looks like a jellyfish having a seizure.”Taylor grinned. “Meet the Core Membrane. It’s made from hybrid tech—nerve-tissue grown in artificial nutrient cells, wrapped around silver-thread transmitters. I hacked it from an old KAIROS mindbridge and rewired it for our frequency. Think of it as a sympathetic nervous system for every Ashblood within range.”Andrew whistled soft

Andrew knelt at the center of the network anchor as crimson filaments were glowing in circles around him as Taylor tweaked stabilizers and neural feed rates.The Ashgrid had adapted since the first connection; it now responded faster, syncing Andrew’s biometrics with deeper psychic frequencies.He held a neural mantle in both hands—a high-sensitivity headpiece of fused alloy, ashglass threads, and fibered roots from the original Ashcore spire. It looked like a crown of roots and circuits."You ready for another run?" Taylor asked, eyeing him."No," Andrew replied honestly, then slipped the headpiece onto his head. It clicked against his temples. The lines embedded in the floor responded immediately—arching upward in strands of fire-light as his body synced with the grid.Taylor frowned as he adjusted the focus coils. "We're pinging dozens of unstable signals now. Most are background noise—scraps from failed batches. But there are still living ones. Candidates."Andrew gritted his te

The grip around Hannah’s throat tightened. “Andrew!” Reign shouted, lunging from the other side of the med bay. Taylor’s chair skidded back. “He’s seizing again—!” Frederick slammed into Andrew first, trying to pry his fingers loose. But Andrew’s strength was unnatural. Frederick hit Andrew full force, shoulder first. “Rrgh!” he grunted, trying to wedge between Andrew and Hannah. “Let go of her!” His eyes glowed—pale, blue-white—and his arms shook with violent power. The ash along his skin shimmered, warping like a mirage. “Help me!” Frederick shouted. Leon pulled Hannah free as Elsa blasted a low-pulse kinetic burst, THUMP! A low-pulse kinetic blast struck Andrew in the side, launching him backwards like a cannonball. Hannah fell, coughing and gasping for air. “Ah—gah!” she cried, dragging herself backward as Leon shielded her. Leon and Elsa were already in motion. It flung him across the med slab—his back slamming into the wall with a guttural snarl. Andrew landed on