A flashback to a softer world. To the sister who believed in monsters with glowing hearts, and the boy who once believed too.
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The Undercore slept uneasily that night.
Steam hissed from cracked junction valves like breath from slumbering giants. Pipes pulsed faintly with power, echoing the artificial heartbeat of a world stitched together by survival. Somewhere far above, sirens mourned over a dying skyline, their wails long and thin like the voices of ghosts.
Shane stood alone in an echo chamber of memory.
He'd found her old data-sketchpad in one of the sealed crates from the lab evacuation. Liora's name was etched on the back in uneven lines, carved by a hand that hadn't yet learned control but overflowed with imagination.
He sat at the bench beside Aegix's dormant frame. The panther's curved armor reflected the blue glow of the pad as he powered it on.
Lines danced across the screen, animated scrawls of wolves with blades for tails, serpents with luminous spines, and armored heroes too tall to be real. They moved with a child's confidence, jagged but joyful. Shane's throat tightened.
Liora had drawn one of him. A boy with glowing arms, a metal heart in his chest, and fire where his eyes should be.
"You thought I was a hero", he whispered. "You always saw what I couldn't."
The flickering light painted phantom shadows of the past across the walls. Shane closed his eyes.
---
A Memory Reborn
They were in the old garden, before it had been scorched by the riots.
Liora, six years old, danced between wind-flicked flowers, a holographic dragon trailing her like a loyal kite. Shane, fifteen, watched from the bench, half-annoyed, half-amused.
"When you leave", she asked, "will you forget me?"
"No, dummy", he replied, tossing a pebble. "You're my annoying little sister. You're unforgettable."
She stuck her tongue out, then ran up to him, cupping his cheeks with impossibly small hands.
"Promise you'll protect people. Even if you get super metal arms and fly away."
He laughed. "Deal."
"And you'll name your robot after me."
"Liora", he groaned, "that's a terrible name for a robot."
"Then name it after something I love." She looked up. "Like cats. Or stars. Or... Shane."
He smiled and ruffled her hair.
---
Flickers of Purpose
Back in the present, Shane sat still, letting the memory finish bleeding through him. The sketchpad dimmed.
He looked over at Aegix.
"Stars and cats", he murmured. "That's what you are. Grace and fire."
He touched the dormant panther's brow. A moment passed, then another, until a single blink of faint blue light shimmered in the optic slit.
Not active. Not yet.
But listening.
And Shane, for the first time in weeks, whispered not to the machine, but to the memory beside it.
"I didn't forget you, Liora. I promise."
Outside, in the arteries of the Undercore, the lights flickered in rhythm with an unseen pulse.
Something was beginning.
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