The sapphire darkness in the Fortress wasn't silent; it hissed. It was the sound of cold water hitting the super-heated metal of the siphoning beetles, the machines Arkan had sacrificed his last biological reserves to melt. Arkan lay on the cold, slime-coated floor of the central cavern, his chest heaving like a bellows on the verge of snapping. His left arm—the crystallized limb—flickered a dull, necrotic grey, the violet bio-sync energy exhausted into the circuitry of the floor.
"Internal... core... temperature... thirty... degrees..." a digital whisper buzzed in Arkan’s mind. It wasn't his father’s voice this time. It was his own, echoed through the failing hardware of his nervous system.
"Arkan? Arkan, talk to me!" Maya Sato was there, her iridescent eyes dimmed, her face covered in
