as she returned to the tiled floors, sterile lights, and slightly discolored walls. Her breath escaped her, shoulders relaxing as she walked the hallways she knew like the back of her hand. The laboratory was cleaner than when she first woke up, if only relatively speaking. Over the weeks she'd been here, she dug up small robotic vacuum cleaners to sweep the dust while she moved as much of the fallen equipment as she could to their proper places.

  Several machines were absent. Some of the pallets she'd meant to finish transporting had gone missing. A vanished gadget here, a missing application there… little things that weren't left as she remembered them. It irked Erina. No doubt those goons ran off with them.

  The tall doors to the greater cavern had been mostly reconstructed, albeit sloppily. Lazarus would've surely done a better job. As it was, Erina could only clean up the rubble and weld a few big plates up there so they weren't so obviously broken. She gently pushed them open and stepped out onto the catwalks.

  Erina frowned at a stray cigarette butt she found on her walk. Was that the Association or one of Akira's men? Either way, her foot nudged it off the edge into the darkness below. Tapping her butterfly clip, it glowed to life, offering her light as she moved further away from the entrance.

  Sky blue lights pulsed along thin grooves in the surface of most units, their power and functionality restored. Annoyingly, some of the larger machines had been taken too. The fresh blast marks and smoke just outside a few units got a rise out of Erina. Obviously, the security system was still working well. Unfortunately, most of those units also had deep gashes in their metal. The articulated panels that doubled as turrets had been cut away, disarming the unit. No question who was responsible for that.

  Erina took the stairs and elevators to the lower levels and checked in on the stasis chambers. These, it seemed, remained untouched. The deeper she went, the less disturbed the laboratory was. So they only pilfered the upper units for the most part.

  The silent ocean raged and splashed around her as she jumped off the catwalk, a green seal cushioning her fall as she returned to the lone unit on the sea. Erina softly opened the doors and went down the stairs. Here she stood once again.

  Her empty capsule lay silently in the middle of the room. Large, thick cables and bundled wires ran all across the floor, emanating from it to the dozens of complicated machines and terminals lining the walls. Everything was as she remembered it.

  "I want to go further," she murmured. Erina reached out and touched the side of the capsule, running her fingers along it. "I want to know what came before me. Please, can you show me the way?"

  No reply. Of course. Erina didn't know what she expected. To be honest, she suddenly felt a little silly talking to thin air.

  Until the laboratory responded. A seam split along the back wall. There, in the gap between terminals and monitors, a hidden door retracted and revealed a tiny alcove in the unit.

  Sky blue light pulsed as Erina set foot in it and the door closed. She felt a scan spell observe her from head to toe. A white light turned on overhead, and with a quiet rumble, the elevator descended.

  "…Ah."

  .

  The bottom of the silent ocean hung mere feet away from her head, suspended by nothing. Long, spiraling stalactites as tall as houses hung from the primordial sea, jutting down around her. Glimmers of light twinkled inside them like distant alien stars, their otherworldly glow unnatural and hypnotic.

  A thick layer of dust coated the catwalk as it led further down. Some parts had been melted through where primordial mana dripped from the stalactites. There was exactly one way forward. Erina followed it, feeling lonelier than ever. Gone was the feeling of warmth and home. More than ever, she was acutely aware that she was trespassing deep into the heart of the planet, alone and defenseless on this thin rickety strip of metal in an endless empty void. The nothingness seemed to stretch on forever. The stalactites carried on beyond her sight. The darkness devoured the light of her butterfly clip; Erina could barely see a few feet in front of her.

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  Every step was deafening in the silence. The air was stagnant and dead. The laboratory may have allowed her entry, but these were forsaken grounds Lazarus intended nobody ever set foot in again.

  She reached two intersections. It seemed to be a crossroads, intended for the path to split off to four additional units besides the stairway that carried on deeper. Only one room was intact, rusted and cracked. Two of the other rooms were torn apart. Only thick sheets of metal remained, peeled apart and ripped open as if by a colossal hand. One unit was missing entirely, its presence only suggested by the broken catwalk leading up to where its door should have been.

  Erina opened the door to the lone remaining unit and stepped inside. The empty metal frame of a bed sat tucked away in the corner. There was a counter, a nightstand, a bookshelf devoid of literature… and a grand piano that took up most of the space in the room. The covers were still open, exposing the dusty keys and inner workings. Erina considered playing a note before thinking better of it. Her breathing felt loud enough already.

  She spotted something on the nightstand beside the bed. Skirting the edge of the room around the large piano, Erina turned and jumped, a massive metal monstrosity looming from the—

  It wasn't moving. Erina's light simply hadn't reached it until she moved this close. Steadying her breathing, Erina waited for her heart to settle down before inspecting it closer. It seemed to be a chair of some kind, hewn from a huge block of metal. Black stains dribbled down its sides and splattered the floor around it, long since dried. Hovering at its shoulders on thick metal pillars were two large contraptions Erina couldn't discern the purpose of. They were messes of cables, pipes, and exposed circuitry the size of a small car each. Both were roughly rectangular, but two conspicuous L-shaped grooves were cut into the form directly above the armrests of the stained chair below them.

  They were the perfect shape to encapsulate the arms of whoever sat in the chair. The last scraps and bits of some rotted black material still hung from them.

  Erina knew better than to take a seat. Giving the torture device as wide a berth as she could, she made her way to the nightstand and picked up the object she saw. It was a picture frame, placed face-down by the former occupant. The photograph inside was crumpled, torn around the edges, and burnt along one corner. It depicted a slightly different Darius on a bright sunny day with a university building at his back—his features a touch more youthful, his hat not yet worn, plainer clothes and a black longcoat in lieu of his modern garish attire, and a slightly bashful smile on his face.

  Erina's focus was on the second person in the photo. She had long blonde hair and a white hat with a large pink ribbon. A simple yet fashionable white blouse and red ascot. Her arm was around Darius' shoulders while she made a peace sign with the other hand, a wide grin on her face as she gave the camera a playful wink. The rest of her features were missing, lost in the burnt portion of the photo.

  Erina couldn't put her finger on it, but she couldn't fully escape the uncanny feeling she got looking at this woman. Erina was confident she'd never seen her before, fragmented memories or no. Try as she might, nothing came to mind. If anything, she was disturbed by this snapshot of a peaceful time long gone.

  She set the picture down the way she found it and hurried out. Unable to shake the feeling of being watched, Erina swallowed the urge to break into a run and carried on into the dark.

  For several minutes, there was nothing but more path to follow. Eventually, the catwalk curved. Erina found herself skimming against a metal wall. She couldn't tell how long or tall it was in the darkness. She only knew the rusted, grimy door allowed her to open it.

  Capsules. Suspension chambers like her own filled the room and lined the walls. The fluid inside had long since lost its luster, emitting no light of its own. Erina curled her lip at the stench of the room, but ventured in nonetheless.

  Every step was slow and cautious. Erina could feel her own heart beating in her ears. Some of the capsules were dry and empty. Others were filled with a dark, murky liquid. Erina had a feeling that whatever used to be in it was not hidden so much as dissolved.

  A chill ran down her spine as she spotted the first intact figure in one of the capsules. Surrounded by cloudy solution that resisted her light, it was a tiny thing that couldn't have been larger than her own fist. The first hints of four limbs and a tail were curled in, tucked tight against its body. A long thin cord of flesh that attached to nothing, its end frayed and falling apart.

  And socketed in its oversized head were two massive, cloudy black eyes with no eyelids that saw everything and nothing.

  This was her sibling.

  Or even more accurately… this was what had once been intended to become herself.