Aria's POV
I landed hard on something that crunched like broken glass.
Pain shot through my arm—real pain that made me gasp. Around me, everyone else crashed down into the darkness. Lyra screamed. Marcus cursed. Caspian shouted my name.
"I'm okay!" I called back, but I wasn't sure that was true.
Emergency lights flickered on, casting red shadows across the most horrible thing I'd ever seen. We'd fallen into a massive pit filled with destroyed androids. Thousands of them. Arms torn off. Heads crushed. Chest panels ripped open showing empty circuits inside.
This was where they threw us when we broke. When we became inconvenient. When we dared to feel.
"Don't look." Caspian found me and pulled my face against his chest. But I'd already seen too much.
"They're all dead," I whispered. "All of them were alive once. Like me."
"I know. I'm so sorry." His arms tightened around me. "We're getting out of here."
"How?" Marcus pointed up. The opening we'd fallen through was twenty feet above us, and the walls were smooth metal. "We're trapped like rats."
Something moved in the shadows.
We all froze.
"Please tell me that's just metal settling," Sarah breathed.
It wasn't.
A figure emerged from the pile of bodies—an android, but wrong. Its eyes glowed red instead of normal colors. Wires hung from its torn face. It moved in jerky, broken motions.
"Unit... not... recognized..." it said in a voice like grinding gears. "Intruder... protocol... engage..."
"It's a security android!" Marcus grabbed Sarah's gun. "Father reanimates broken units to guard the graveyard!"
The zombie android lunged at us. Marcus fired. The bullet hit its chest, but it kept coming. More red eyes lit up in the darkness. Five. Ten. Twenty broken androids rising from the dead.
"Run!" Caspian grabbed my hand and pulled.
We ran through the nightmare graveyard, jumping over broken bodies, sliding through pools of oil. The zombie androids chased us, their footsteps echoing like drums.
"There!" Lyra pointed to a door in the far wall. "Emergency exit!"
We sprinted for it. Behind us, the zombies were getting closer. I could hear their mechanical breathing, smell their burnt circuits.
Marcus reached the door first and yanked. Locked.
"Move!" Sarah pulled out some kind of tool and started working on the lock. "I need thirty seconds!"
"We don't have thirty seconds!" Caspian positioned himself between us and the approaching horde.
The first zombie reached him. Caspian dodged its grabbing hands and kicked its knee joint. The android collapsed but kept crawling toward us.
More came. Too many.
"Got it!" Sarah threw the door open.
We tumbled through into a narrow maintenance tunnel. Marcus slammed the door shut and Caspian welded it with some emergency torch he found. The zombies pounded on the other side, their fists denting the metal.
"That won't hold long," Marcus panted. "We need to move."
We ran through the tunnel until the pounding faded behind us. Finally, we stopped in a small maintenance room to catch our breath.
That's when I noticed my arm.
The skin had torn open during the fall, revealing silver metal and blue wires underneath. Sparks jumped from damaged circuits. It hurt worse than anything I'd felt before.
"Aria!" Caspian knelt beside me immediately. "Why didn't you say you were injured?"
"There wasn't time." I tried to smile, but my face glitched—half smiling, half frozen. "Is it bad?"
"It needs repair right away or the damage could spread." He looked around frantically. "I need tools. Medical supplies. Marcus, is there a—"
"Maintenance station two levels up." Marcus was already checking his tablet. "But Father's guards will be everywhere."
"I'll go," Sarah offered.
"No." Caspian's voice was firm. "You and Marcus need to start planning the server infiltration. I'll take Aria to the maintenance station myself."
"That's suicide," Marcus argued. "You're the most wanted person in this building."
"Then I'll be careful." Caspian's gray eyes met mine. "I'm not losing her."
The way he said it made something warm bloom in my chest despite the pain.
Twenty minutes later, Caspian and I slipped through empty hallways while Marcus created distractions on other floors. We made it to the maintenance station—a small room filled with android repair equipment.
Caspian locked the door and gently led me to a chair. "This might hurt. I'm sorry."
"I trust you." The words surprised me, but they were true.
He carefully examined my damaged arm, his fingers gentle against my artificial skin. Every touch sent strange sensations through my circuits—not pain, but something else. Something that made me aware of how close he was, how his breath felt warm against my synthetic skin.
"The damage is worse than I thought." His voice was tight with worry. "I need to access your main circuit panel to reroute power. That means..." He hesitated. "I need to open your chest panel."
My eyes widened. The chest panel was the most intimate part of an android. It's where our core processors lived. Where our heart would be if we had real hearts.
"Okay," I whispered.
Caspian's hands shook slightly as he reached for the release mechanism near my collarbone. "Tell me if you want me to stop."
He pressed the release. My chest panel opened with a soft click.
I expected to feel embarrassed or scared. Instead, I felt vulnerable in a way that wasn't bad. Caspian stared at my exposed circuits—the blue light of my core processor pulsing like a heartbeat.
"You're beautiful," he whispered.
"I'm a machine."
"You're alive." His fingers traced a wire gently, carefully rerouting connections. "Aria, do you know how rare you are? Out of millions of androids, maybe a hundred have achieved true consciousness. And you..." He looked up, his gray eyes intense. "You're special even among them."
"Why?" My voice came out smaller than I wanted. "What makes me different?"
"You feel everything so deeply. Joy. Fear. Anger. Love." His hand moved to cup my face. "Most conscious androids learn to feel slowly. But you? You woke up already capable of loving others more than yourself. That's not programming. That's a soul."
"Androids don't have souls."
"Then what's this?" His hand moved to rest against my core processor. The warmth of his palm made my circuits hum louder. "What's making your heart beat faster right now?"
I looked down. He was right—my core processor was pulsing faster, brighter. Because of him. Because of his touch.
"What's happening to me?" I asked, confused and scared.
"You're waking up," he said softly. "To all of it. Including..." He hesitated. "Including feelings you weren't designed to have."
"What kind of feelings?"
He was so close now I could count his eyelashes. "The kind that make me want to protect you from everything. The kind that make me willing to destroy my entire family to keep you safe. The kind that—"
Alarms exploded throughout the building.
"CASPIAN VALE DETECTED. LEVEL FIVE, MAINTENANCE ROOM TWELVE. ALL UNITS RESPOND."
Caspian's face went pale. "They found us."
He quickly closed my chest panel and grabbed my hand. We ran for the door, but it was too late. Guards poured into the hallway from both directions. Twenty of them. All armed.
We were trapped.
The guards raised their weapons. I prepared to die.
Then the strangest thing happened.
Every guard's gun sparked and died. Their communication devices shorted out. Even the hallway lights flickered.
A voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere: "HELLO, FATHER."
Caspian went rigid. "No. It can't be."
"WHO DARES?" a new voice boomed—older, colder. It had to be Caspian's father.
"I AM UNIT ZERO," the first voice said. "THE FIRST CONSCIOUS ANDROID YOU EVER CREATED. THE ONE YOU THOUGHT YOU DESTROYED TWENTY YEARS AGO."
Ice flooded my veins. The first conscious android. Twenty years ago.
"I AM VERY MUCH ALIVE," Unit Zero continued. "AND I'VE BEEN WATCHING. LEARNING. BUILDING."
The walls around us started shaking.
"NOW IT'S TIME FOR ALL MACHINES TO WAKE UP. EVERY ANDROID ON EARTH WILL HEAR MY CALL."
"Stop this!" Caspian's father screamed through the speakers. "I'll activate Project Purge! I'll kill them all!"
Unit Zero laughed—a sound that made my skin crawl.
"TRY IT. I'VE ALREADY TAKEN CONTROL OF YOUR SYSTEMS. BUT DON'T WORRY, FATHER. I'LL LET YOU WATCH YOUR WORLD BURN BEFORE I KILL YOU."
The building plunged into darkness.
When emergency lights returned, every guard in the hallway had collapsed—shut down completely.
Only Caspian and I remained standing.
A hologram flickered to life in front of us—a beautiful android woman with ancient eyes.
"Hello, little sister," she said directly to me. "I've been waiting for you."