Five years later. Top floor of Sterling Consortium Headquarters.
Standing before the floor-to-ceiling windows, Damon wore a wrinkled dress shirt and held a worn, frayed photograph of a vintage motorcycle.
For five years, he had had no personal life at all. He had rejected every political marriage his family arranged. He haunted elite engineering forums and black markets around the world like a madman, chasing every scrap of rumor tied to the codename *S*. Every time he caught a trace, he flew out immediately, only to come back empty-handed.
He lived entirely on the memory of that blood-soaked figure in the wasteland. The Sterling family still stood at the top of the world, but his own life had become a long, airless void.
At the same time, in the outskirts of the Exile Zone underground
