The Iron Keep

Consciousness returned in fragments.

* Pain.* A headache, localized in the frontal lobe.
* Smell.* Rust. Mold. Ozone.
* Sound.* The grinding of heavy machinery.

Aris opened his eyes. He was not in a sterile white room. He was in a cavernous industrial bunker. The walls were reinforced concrete, stained with decades of grime. Cables hung from the ceiling like vines in a metallic jungle.

He tried to sit up and found his movement restricted.

He wasn't in handcuffs. He was lying on a cot, and a heavy metal collar was clamped around his neck, just below his Clarity chip.

"Don't struggle," a voice said from the shadows. "The collar is a neural dampener. It scrambles your connection to the City grid. Try to hack it, and it will knock you unconscious."

Aris turned his head. The Warlord sat on a crate across the room, stripping down a pulse rifle. Without the bulky armor, he was even more intimidating. His arms were thick with muscle, covered in scars and tattoos that marked him as one of the Deadlands' "Discarded."

"Kidnapping a Level 5 asset triggers a planetary manhunt," Aris said, testing his voice. It was dry. "Your survival probability is zero."

The man looked up. The tremors in his hands were worse now. He dropped a spring, cursing softly.

"My survival probability was zero the day I was decanted," the man said. "Name’s Kael."

"I did not ask for your designation."

"Kael," he repeated, harder. "And you’re Aris."

"Dr. Thorne."

Kael stood up and walked over to the cot. The sheer heat radiating from him was overwhelming. Aris felt that strange pull again—a magnetic buzzing in his blood that the Clarity chip couldn't filter out.

"You’re a genius, right?" Kael asked, leaning down. His gray eye searched Aris’s face. "The architect of the Clarity 4.0 update."

"I am."

"Then fix me."

Kael tapped his own temple, right next to the glowing red cybernetic eye.

Aris blinked. He looked closer. Now that he wasn't being tranquilized, he could see the pathology clearly. The cybernetics were rejecting the host. The neural pathways were burning out. It was a slow, torturous suicide.

"You are suffering from acute cyber-neurosis," Aris diagnosed coldly. "Your hardware is incompatible with your wetware. You need a clean room, a surgical team, and a replacement cortex. I have none of those."

"You have a brain," Kael snarled. "And I have a bunker full of salvage. Make it work."

"Why?" Aris asked. "Why capture me? There are field medics in the Deadlands."

Kael looked away. His jaw clenched. "Because they can't stop the noise. You... when I touched you in the lab. The noise stopped."

Aris analyzed the statement. *Subject reports symptom alleviation upon physical contact. Illogical.*

"That is a placebo effect," Aris stated.

"It’s biology," Kael growled. "Something the Ivory Zone forgot about."

He unlocked the collar, but kept a heavy hand on Aris’s shoulder. "You fix me, Dr. Thorne. Or I let the decay take over. And when a Chimera goes feral, they destroy everything in a five-mile radius. Including you."

Aris looked at the man. He saw the desperation behind the aggression. This wasn't a ransom. It was a dying animal asking for help.

"I require tools," Aris said. "And coffee. Black."