The town of Altai Fringe was less a settlement and more a scab on the border of Mongolia. It was a chaotic sprawl of corrugated metal, repurposed shipping containers, and scavenged solar panels clinging to the side of a frozen valley. The air smelled of burning plastic, unwashed bodies, and roasting synth-meat.
To the team, it smelled like survival.
They entered the town just as the pale sun dipped below the peaks, blending in with the drifters, smugglers, and corporate deserters who populated the fringes of the 2065 map. David kept his hood pulled low, his limp more pronounced after the grueling trek. Ren walked with his hands shoved deep into his armpits, shivering violently. Isolde took point, her rifle wrapped in dirty canvas to look like a bundle of scrap pipes.
Saya walked in the center. The cello case was still strapped to her back, concealed beneath a frayed tarp they had scavenged from the wreckage of the train. She moved stiffly. The puncture wound in her side—a gift from the dampener-beast in the ravine—was closed, but the flesh was tender and bruised a deep, unhealthy purple. Without the immediate regenerative snap of her Queen's blood, her body was forced to heal like a human's. It was a slow, exhausting process that left her feeling hollowed out.
"Keep your heads down," David muttered over the comms earpieces Ren had distributed. "This place is a hive for Chimera bounty hunters. We buy medical supplies, we find a warm room for six hours, and we vanish."
"I know a broker here," Isolde said, steering them down a narrow alley choked with snow and garbage. "Name is Kael. He deals in black-market biotics. If anyone has clean blood packs and frostbite stims, it's him."
Kael's clinic was hidden behind a butcher shop that sold highly questionable meat.
Inside, it was surprisingly sterile, humming with the sound of portable generators and air scrubbers. Kael was a massive man with cybernetic arms that ended in delicate, surgical fingers. He didn't ask questions. He only asked for payment.
"Credit chips are tracked," Kael rumbled, looking at David's offered currency. "I take hard trade. Tech, weapons, or information."
David frowned, reaching for his pistol, but Isolde stepped in front of him.
She reached into her tactical vest and pulled out a small, velvet-lined box. She opened it and slid it across the steel counter. Inside rested a pristine, pre-war optical scope. It was an antique, purely mechanical, immune to EMPs and digital jamming.
David looked at her in surprise. "Isolde, that's your backup."
"I don't miss," Isolde said flatly. She looked at Kael. "Three bags of O-Negative, whole. A medical staple gun. Broad-spectrum antibiotics. And whatever you have for stage-two frostnip."
Kael examined the scope, his cybernetic eye whirring as it magnified the glass. A greedy smile split his face. "Deal."
Ten minutes later, they were locked inside a windowless rented room above a noisy tavern. It was cramped and smelled of mildew, but the heavy iron door had a deadbolt, and the walls were lined with lead insulation. It was safe.
Ren immediately collapsed onto the only cot in the room. David knelt beside him, applying Kael's frostnip salve to the boy's blackened fingertips. Ren hissed in pain, but the color slowly began to return to his skin.
Saya sat on the floor in the corner. She unbuckled the cello case and set it down gently. She didn't open it. She just rested her hand on the lid.
Isolde tossed a plastic bag of blood into Saya's lap. It was cold and heavy.
"Drink it," Isolde ordered. "Your core temperature is dropping. You look like a corpse."
Saya stared at the bag. She hated the taste of bagged blood. It was dead. It lacked the vital spark, the resonance of a living thing. It was fuel, nothing more.
But she remembered the feeling of the dampener-beast's limb tearing through her side, and the terrifying realization that her immortality was no longer guaranteed.
She bit off the corner of the plastic pouch and drank.
The blood was thick and metallic. It hit her stomach like a lead weight, but within seconds, a dull warmth began to spread through her veins. The throbbing in her side eased slightly. She closed her eyes, leaning her head back against the damp wall.
"How is the wound?" David asked, glancing over from where he was bandaging Ren's hands.
"Sealing," Saya said softly. "It is... slow."
"You did good today, Princess," Isolde said, sitting on an overturned bucket and field-stripping her pistol. "You fought smart. You didn't lean on the crutch."
Isolde didn't look at the cello case, but the implication was clear. Saya had faced down a monster designed to kill her, and she had done it without using Hagi's dust.
"It is not a crutch," Saya murmured, though there was no real anger in her voice. Just a profound, aching fatigue. "It is a bond. But... you were right. If I use it to escape pain, I am disrespecting him."
Isolde paused her cleaning, looking at Saya with a rare expression of respect. "Pain keeps you sharp. Remember that."
In the center of the room, Ren was sitting up, his newly bandaged hands resting on his laptop. He had connected the computer to the room's hardline, bouncing his signal through a dozen proxy servers to mask his location.
"I'm decrypting the last data packet from the Citadel," Ren said, his voice tight with concentration. "When Director Vale and Dr. Aris evacuated, they sent an encrypted burst-transmission to their off-site command. I managed to clone the header before the reactor blew."
David stood up, leaning heavily on his cane. "Can you read it?"
"Just broke the cipher," Ren said. The screen bathed his pale face in green light. Lines of text and topographical maps scrolled rapidly. "The Citadel in Siberia... it wasn't their headquarters. It was just a farm. A testing ground."
"If Siberia was the farm," Isolde asked, "where is the butcher?"
Ren tapped a key. A map of the world appeared, zooming in on Western Europe. A red icon pulsed over a city.
"Neo-Paris," Ren read aloud. "Sector 4. They call it the 'Spire.' It's a massive corporate arcology. That's where Commander Vale fled. That's where the Chimera Board of Directors sits."
David stared at the map, his face turning ashen. "Paris. Of course. It always comes back to Europe."
Saya opened her eyes. The name of the city sent a cold spike through her chest.
Paris. The city of lights. The city where she had danced with Hagi in the 19th century. The city where the Red Shield had fought some of its bloodiest battles. It was a graveyard of memories.
"There's more," Ren said, his voice dropping to a whisper. He opened a sub-file attached to the transmission. "It's a manifest. Cargo being shipped from the Citadel to the Spire prior to our attack. They were moving their most successful experiments to protect them."
"What kind of experiments?" David asked.
Ren turned the laptop around so they could see the screen.
It was a photograph of a stasis pod, being loaded onto a transport plane. Inside the pod wasn't a monstrous, plated beast like the one they fought in the ravine. It was a boy. He looked no older than fourteen. He had pale skin, silver hair, and delicate features.
But his eyes were open, and they were glowing a fierce, unnatural blue.
"File name: Project Schiff-Resurgent," Ren read. "They've managed to stabilize the Schiff genome. They bred a new generation. Faster. Stronger. And completely loyal to Chimera."
David swore under his breath, gripping his cane until his knuckles turned white. "The Schiff. They cloned the Schiff."
Isolde looked at the screen, her tactical mind already analyzing the threat. "If they have a localized army of stable Chiropteran hybrids in the middle of a populated city like Paris, a frontal assault is impossible. They'll tear us to pieces before we even reach the lobby of the Spire."
Saya stared at the boy in the stasis pod. She remembered the original Schiff—the tragic, short-lived warriors who had fought against their own decay. Chimera had taken their tragedy and weaponized it.
They were twisting everything the Chiropterans were into tools of corporate control.
First Hagi. Then her. Now the Schiff.
Saya stood up. The movement was rigid, masking the lingering pain in her side. She walked over to the laptop and closed the lid with a soft click, plunging the room back into the dim, yellow light of the overhead bulb.
"We go to Paris," Saya said.
"Saya," David reasoned gently. "It's half a world away. We are traveling on foot, through hostile territory, hunted by things that can track your very biology. We don't have an army. We have a sniper, a hacker, a crippled old man, and you."
"We go to Paris," Saya repeated. Her voice wasn't loud, but it possessed a gravity that made the air in the small room feel incredibly heavy.
She turned to face them. Her brown eyes were clear, focused, and utterly devoid of the madness that had gripped her in the cabin days ago. The Cold Soldier had evolved into something else. The Queen.
"They are trying to play a song they do not understand," Saya said softly, looking at the cello case in the corner. "They are stealing the notes. They are corrupting the instruments. I am going to break their stage."
Ren swallowed hard, nodding. "Okay. Paris. How do we get there?"
Isolde picked up her reassembled pistol, sliding a magazine home with a sharp clack. "There's a smuggler rail line that runs from the Urals straight through the Eastern European dead-zones. It's dangerous. It's full of scavengers and Chimera checkpoints."
"Can you get us on it?" David asked.
Isolde smirked, sliding the weapon into her thigh holster. "Old man, I can get us anywhere. As long as you don't mind a little turbulence."
Saya walked back to the cello case. She knelt beside it. She didn't trace the latches or whisper to the leather. She simply checked the straps, ensuring it was secure for the long journey ahead.
"Rest," Saya commanded the room. "We leave at midnight."
Outside the heavy iron door, the wind howled through the slums of the Altai Fringe, carrying the scent of snow and rust. The journey across the wasteland was about to begin. The ghosts of the past were waiting in Paris, and Saya Otonashi was finally ready to meet them.