The rain came down in a steady whisper, slicking the steel skin of the HexGate research tower until it gleamed like a blade. From the shadow of a neighboring scaffolding, Jace watched the building breathe—security lights pulsing, cameras rotating, guards moving with mechanical rhythm. HexGate's logo—a silver helix curled around a burning core—glowed from forty stories up, reflected in the puddles at his feet.
Nineteen years old, and already he had learned the city's oldest truth: everything in New Syndralis was for sale, except escape.
He adjusted his gloves. Each fingertip clicked softly as the magnetic nodes warmed up, faint blue arcs crawling across the polymer fabric. His boots did the same, thrumming with low static. The gloves and boots were his own work—patched together from junkyard circuits and stolen parts. They didn't look like much, but they had carried him across half the corporate skyline.
His reflection wavered on the wet steel wall across from him—gray hood, masked lower face, eyes like black glass. No insignia, no crew tag. Just another ghost working the night.
He whispered to himself, "One climb, one vault, one payday."
The words steadied him. Beneath them, though, something else stirred. A pulse that wasn't quite adrenaline. He'd been chasing this job for weeks—HexGate, the company whispered about in the undercity, the same name that kept showing up in old fragments of memory he didn't trust. Screams, heat, blue light. Nothing clear. Just noise.
He pushed the thought away and looked up. Time to move.
---
The Climb
He stepped from the scaffold to the tower's maintenance plating, fingers magnetizing instantly. The gloves locked him in, the boots humming against the steel. Jace began to climb, one silent meter after another.
Wind pressed against him, carrying the taste of ozone and industrial smoke. Below, the city sprawled—streets like veins, lights pulsing in patterns he'd memorized long ago. The undercity was somewhere beneath that glow, the maze that raised him, the place that taught him how to steal, run, vanish.
The Kuroth Syndicate had taken him in when he was barely ten—taught him how to breathe between alarms, how to hear the difference between a lock and a trap. They'd called him Ghosthand. They said he was born for this.
He reached the fourth floor and paused beneath a sweeping camera. Its red light blinked in rhythm, scanning arcs through the rain. He counted the interval.
"One… two… three…"
He moved on the half-beat, sliding past its vision like a thought slipping through a dream. When he reached the rooftop vent, he knelt, tools already in hand. The sensor grid shimmered faintly under his light—infrared threads like spider silk.
He smiled beneath his mask. "Still using these antique patterns…"
The knife in his glove handle sparked as he touched the right node. The grid flickered, then went dead. In seconds, he had the cover unscrewed and slid into the duct, metal groaning under his weight.
---
The Ductwork
The ventilation tunnels were narrow and cold. Air whispered through them, carrying the sterile scent of filtered oxygen and disinfectant. Every movement echoed like a breath in a cathedral.
Jace crawled on elbows and knees, guided by the faint map flickering on the screen strapped to his forearm—an AI scanner he'd modified from an old courier bot. It drew blue outlines of the structure in real time, projecting corridors and blind spots. The deeper he went, the more complex it became—a labyrinth of vents and machine arteries.
Below him, faint mechanical sounds pulsed—hydraulic arms moving, server fans spinning. The building had a heartbeat. He could feel it through the metal.
After twenty meters, the duct opened onto an elevator shaft. He looked down. Blackness. The faint hum of movement far below.
Jace anchored a line and began to descend, boots clicking against the steel wall. Each drop felt longer than the last. When he finally reached the lowest level, he found the target vent—a small hatch marked Sub-Lab 9B. His intel had been right. Project Hermes was here.
He steadied his breath and opened the grate.
---
The Vault
The lab beyond was an ocean of white light and machinery.
Polished floors. Rows of suspended drones, like frozen insects. Screens glowing with unreadable data. In the center stood the vault—titanium casing, digital keypad, fingerprint pad, and a low hum that spoke of redundancy and paranoia.
"Beautiful," Jace murmured. "Ugly kind of beautiful."
He scanned the room with his wrist device. No cameras, no motion sensors—too confident in their vault security. That arrogance would pay for his meal tonight.
He knelt by the door, unfolding his toolkit. Every piece was worn, marked by years of use. A fingerprint scanner the size of a lighter. A combination cracker built from repurposed med-drone logic chips. Tools from a thief raised by other thieves.
"Let's see whose skin you're wearing," he whispered to the vault.
He pressed the scanner against the panel. It hummed softly, cycling through spectral layers until it found something—three overlapping prints. One glowed stronger than the rest.
"That's the boss," he muttered, saving it.
He loaded the data into the holo-emitter and aimed it at the pad. The air shimmered—an illusion of a finger suspended above the scanner. Then he connected the combination cracker and tapped run.
The digits began to flicker.
4-1-6-6-9-3.
He keyed it in. The machine responded with a deep mechanical sigh. Bolts unlocked one after another, a low hiss spilling from the edges.
The vault opened.
---
The Crystal Device
Inside, lights shimmered across a display of strange prototypes—crystal cylinders, compact neural cores, metallic vines pulsing faintly with blue fluid.
But one thing drew his eyes immediately.
At the center, hovering slightly above a pedestal, was a small crystalline object, clear as glass but filled with rotating symbols of blue light. It hummed softly, the tone resonating in his chest.
Jace hesitated. The hum reminded him of something—faint, impossible, buried in the static of childhood memory. The smell of ozone. A scream. A flash of light.
He reached out.
The instant his fingertips brushed the surface, pain detonated through his arm, ripping across his body like fire. His vision exploded in blue. The world convulsed.
He fell.
---
The Capture
When consciousness returned, alarms were screaming.
Guards flooded the lab—boots pounding, guns drawn, voices shouting. Jace couldn't move. His body was locked, nerves still sparking from the shock. Someone's hand grabbed his shoulder, flipping him over. Cold metal cuffs clamped around his wrists.
"Kid's alive," one of them said. "But he fried the circuit."
"Unbelievable. He's just a thief. Sixteen, maybe nineteen tops."
They dragged him across the floor. His head swam in static. Through the haze, he heard one guard make a call—voice trembling slightly.
"Sir, we've got a situation. Someone breached Vault 9B. He didn't steal anything. Just… touched the core."
The reply came through the radio—calm, cold, precise.
"Do not move him until I get there."
And then silence.
---
The Awakening
When Jace opened his eyes again, the alarms were gone.
He was sitting in a metal chair, wrists still cuffed, in a small room with a single flickering light. The hum of machinery outside the walls was steady now—like breathing.
His head throbbed. Every muscle felt heavy. Then, through the fog, something else spoke.
A voice. Not human. Glitching between tones.
[System booting… connection established.]
[Stealing System now online.]
[Rank: Novice–Epsilon]
[Skill Grade: Debug]
[Skills detected: 2]
[Steal Count: 0]
[Attributes – Strength: 1 | Speed: 1 | Agility: 1 | IQ: 1 | Sneak: 1]
Jace froze.
The words weren't coming from any speaker. They were inside his head. Sharp, synthetic, clean—too much like the AI voices used in HexGate command terminals.
His pulse spiked. "What the hell did you do to me?" he whispered.
The voice ignored him.
[Swipe skill used.]
[Cooldown: 20 minutes.]
[Steal Count: 1. Ten uses required to unlock Level 2.]
Something cold clinked on the desk beside him—a key. Real, solid metal.
The cuffs dropped with a dull clink, and the sound snapped him back into focus. The office was small, windowless, humming faintly with the rhythm of servers behind the wall. A keypad guarded the only exit.
"Great," he muttered. "Out of one lock, into another."
He tried the door — sealed tight. The same coded pad glowed red. His head throbbed. The room tilted faintly, a side effect of the electric shock or the adrenaline or… something else.
Then the voice again, low and distorted:
[System: Swipe on cooldown. Skill unavailable.]
Jace's pulse spiked. "Of course you are," he whispered.
He paced once, twice. Then stopped.
Something flickered behind his eyes — a picture, uninvited.
A hand entering a code.
6-3-1-2-0-4.
The movement felt familiar.
[Memory skill used on subject: Sam Wilks.]
[Steal Count: 2.]
He blinked. "Wait—"
His fingers moved before he could think. He typed the sequence, fast, fluid, practiced.
The keypad light flashed green. The door clicked.
He froze, hand hovering. He didn't know that code. Not consciously. But the pattern had lived inside someone else — Sam Wilks.
When the System stole his memory earlier, it had taken more than access codes. It had taken instinct.
He eased the door open a crack and peered through.
Two guards stood in the hall, mid-conversation, relaxed. Not alarmed — not yet. One shifted his weight slightly; the other scanned the monitors beside the checkpoint.
Jace adjusted his posture. Straightened his back. Stepped into the hall like he belonged there.
Neither man looked up.
He walked past them — deliberate pace, no hesitation, one hand brushing the ID badge still clipped to his borrowed jacket. He didn't remember taking it. Maybe it had been on the desk. Maybe not. The details blurred.
His body knew what to do.
He reached the stairwell, turned the corner, and only then did his breath catch up with him.
He pressed his back to the cold wall and exhaled. His hands trembled, not from fear — from dissonance. From being inside someone else's reflexes.
[Skill: Memory Echo in effect.]
[Duration: Temporary residual transfer from "Memory Steal."]
The text burned briefly in his mind and vanished.
He didn't know if it was warning him or congratulating him.
Either way, he was already running down the stairwell, the sound of boots above him too late to matter.
Outside, the rain washed over his face — sharp, cold, real.
He looked back once, the HexGate tower glowing behind the fog, blue veins of light running up its surface like circuitry through flesh.
[System integration stable.]
Jace muttered under his breath, "You're part of them, aren't you?"
The city didn't answer.
He slipped into the dark.