The Chime District had once been Altaran's beating heart — a marvel of brass spires, glass bridges, and precision-engineered timepieces that stretched skyward like monuments to human arrogance.
Now, it was a graveyard.
Rust choked every gear, glass facades cracked like spiderwebs, and the great clock towers stood frozen — their massive hands stuck at meaningless hours. Smog coiled low to the cobblestones, turning the fractured rooftops into jagged silhouettes against the dull sky.
I moved through the ruins in silence, coat tight to my frame, the data-chip Ravel had given me pressed to my palm. The shard pulsed faintly beneath my ribs. The hum had grown stronger the deeper I pushed into the district.
It was guiding me.
The Chime District wasn't abandoned entirely. Drifters lingered in broken plazas. Half-ruined workshops glowed faintly with contraband power cells. I passed a group of mercenaries, faces hidden behind rebreather masks, stripping copper wire from a collapsed transit rail. One of them glanced at me — sharp, calculating — but thought better of it.
Good. I wasn't here for distractions.
Ravel's coordinates led me beneath one of the central towers — the remnants of the old Apex Chronometer, its upper gears seized in rust, clock face shattered, inner mechanisms exposed like the skeleton of some long-dead giant.
An access hatch waited at the tower's base, half-concealed by rubble. I knelt, pried it open, and descended into the forgotten maintenance levels.
The undercroft smelled of old grease, burnt circuitry, and something metallic beneath — blood, maybe. My boots clicked softly along metal grating as I moved through narrow tunnels webbed with forgotten wiring and corroded pipes.
Deeper still, the shard's hum quickened — like a heartbeat pressed to my palm.
Finally, I reached it.
A chamber, circular, lined with decommissioned automaton frames — humanoid shells, limbs dismantled, visors cracked, their memory cores long scavenged by the desperate. But one unit stood apart — untouched, intact, propped against the far wall like a sentinel left to decay.
I approached cautiously.
Its chestplate pulsed faintly with the same blue-white glow as the shard buried under my coat.
It's in there.
I drew my neural scalpel, slicing through the chest casing with steady precision. The metal gave way, revealing a crystalline core — fractured, flickering with fragmented memories etched along its surface.
A shard — the second piece of me.
But I wasn't alone.
The hair on my neck prickled. A shadow shifted behind the automaton frames.
I turned, scalpel raised — too late.
A figure lunged — cloaked, masked, fast. A whirring hum preceded a wicked wrist blade pressing cold against my throat.
"You're not supposed to be here," the masked attacker hissed — voice distorted through a vocal modulator.
I twisted beneath them, driving my knee up. The blow cracked against their ribs; they staggered back. I surged upright, drawing my sidearm — but the attacker was already a blur, dissolving into the lightless tunnels like smoke. Giving chase in that maze would be suicide, and losing the shard wasn't an option.
I didn't follow.
Priorities.
I pried the fractured core free, tucking the second shard beside the first. The hum intensified, two pieces resonating in tandem — fragments of my forgotten self, reunited.
But the masked figure — their speed, their precision, that distinctive hum of their weapon — they weren't scavengers.
Someone else was hunting these shards. Hunting me.
I slipped back through the tunnels, pulse steady, mind racing.
By the time I emerged from the undercroft, Altaran's faint sun had begun its descent, casting the ruined Chime District in bruised purples and greys.
I held the twin shards close, feeling the weight of unfinished truths pressing against my ribs.
Twelve pieces of memory.
Twelve fractures of identity.
And now — two recovered, ten to go.
But the city was stirring. And so were its predators.
The hunt wasn't just mine anymore.
The race had begun.