Rain slammed against the windows like the city was trying to drown itself. Inside the archives, fluorescent lights buzzed overhead—half of them flickering, the others casting a cold, greenish hue over towers of unsorted case files.
Detective Calder stood in the center of it all, sleeves rolled up, shirt wrinkled, eyes bloodshot.
A wall in front of him was covered in clippings. Printed surveillance stills. Red string crisscrossing between blurry faces. A single word written in bold at the top of the board:
FIVE.
Photos of crime scenes. Vanished bodies. Kills too clean for the usual gangs. Calder rubbed his jaw, jaw tight, mind spinning.
He pointed at a grainy image of a masked figure dragging a man into a car.
"Mikhail," he muttered. "Finger number four… or maybe five. Doesn't matter. Still no face. No prints. No trail."
He moved to another photo. A rooftop kill. Victim's spine twisted the wrong way.
"Same calling card. No hesitation."
He looked at a shot of a burning safehouse—flames lighting up the alley. A logo on the wall. Painted in ash.
A handprint. Five fingers spread wide.
Then, at the center of it all—Bruce Bloom.
Calder stared at his file. The old photo from when Bruce was just ten. Slick hair. Dead eyes. Then a black marker X across the word "Missing." And a fresh sticker slapped over it: "Alive. Private Citizen."
"Bullshit."
He stepped back.
Five people.
Five ghosts.
And one brain behind it all—The Hand. The one giving orders. The one nobody's seen. Nobody's caught. Not even a whisper of his face.
But Calder had a gut.
And that gut kept circling back to Bruce Bloom.
No, Bruce Dhark.
Ever since he came back to Vyre, everything had shifted. The gangs pulled back. The politicians started dying quieter. Old syndicates got burned. And bodies with military-grade precision started dropping in alleys.
All clean kills. Silent. Surgical.
Five of them.
And one man who disappeared for a decade and came back with no past, no trace, no fingerprints on anything—but somehow had access to things no one else did.
Calder grabbed a marker and circled Bruce's face on the board.
"You're the Hand," he whispered.
He didn't even sound sure.
He wanted to be wrong.
But the math added up.
One, two, three, four… five fingers.
And the Hand that commands them.
DHARK TECH LAB – LATE NIGHT
The room was all glass and steel. Huge screens lined the walls, showing scrolling code, data pulses, live city feeds. Desks were scattered with wires, tablets, keyboards with glowing keys. Somewhere in the back, a robotic arm sparked as it repaired itself.
Bruce Dhark stood in the center, coat off, sleeves still rolled up, same look from earlier—half-tired, half-furious, all focus.
Around him, the HELIOS team worked quietly. Young engineers. Sharp hackers. A few who didn't even have real names, just aliases pulled from message boards and darknet leaks.
One leaned back in his chair, chewing on a stylus.
"We're giving it teeth?" he asked without turning.
Bruce stood behind him, watching a 3D model rotate on the main screen—a neural net in a glowing sphere, shifting like a living thing.
"Teeth?" Bruce repeated.
The hacker nodded. "You want it to just watch? Or bite?"
Bruce didn't answer right away. He walked over to the model, tapped into it, brought up a new layer—security override protocols. Automatic lockdowns. Contingency orders.
"Just a leash," Bruce said finally. "But it pulls back hard if something bites first."
The hacker smirked. "Leash with spikes. Got it."
Further down the row, a girl in a bomber jacket—no older than twenty—spoke without looking up.
"AI's already writing counter-code faster than our best guy."
"That good?" Bruce asked.
"No," she said flatly. "That scary."
He walked to her station. On her screen, HELIOS was stress-testing itself. Throwing cyberattacks at its own systems and neutralizing them in real time. Defense lines shifting like a nervous system. It wasn't just adapting. It was learning.
Bruce watched for a moment. Quiet.
Then, without looking at her— "Give it a limit."
She raised an eyebrow. "Define 'limit.'"
"Stop it from thinking it's God."
"…You built it to be smarter than God."
"I built it to protect this city. That's it."
She shrugged, started typing.
Across the lab, the lights flickered as the servers rebooted. Cooling fans hummed louder. A red line on the wall chart spiked.
HELIOS had passed the firewall simulation.
No lag. No weakness. Just clean execution.
Bruce checked his watch. 3:27 a.m.
He hadn't left the lab in 14 hours.
He stepped away from the core team and walked into the observation booth—glass-walled, dim, quiet. There was coffee on the table. Cold.
From here, he could see the whole lab. The minds. The machine. The weight of what he was building.
He tapped a screen on the wall, switching to external feeds—city cameras. HELIOS was already plugged into the system skeleton. Traffic lights. Transit routes. Hospital alerts. All flowing quietly through its nervous net.
It wasn't alive. But it moved like something that might become alive.
Behind him, the door slid open with a soft hiss.
The woman from earlier—the red trench coat, buzzed hair—stepped in. No cigarette this time. Just tired eyes and a half-crumpled report in hand.
"You know this thing is gonna scare the shit outta people, right?" she asked.
Bruce didn't turn. "Good."
She handed him the report.
"Network bridge is stable. No leaks. It's got eyes in every sector except South Line."
"Fix it."
"We're on it. But Bruce..."
He turned.
She looked at him, dead serious.
"What if it sees too much?"
Bruce looked back at HELIOS, its glowing model rotating slowly on the screen like an artificial sun.
"Then we blind it."
A long silence.
Then she gave a short nod, turned to leave.
"Oh," she said over her shoulder, "your friend Calder's been poking around again. Something about 'The Hand.'"
Bruce raised an eyebrow. "How close is he?"
She paused. "He knows there are five. Knows one of 'em is named Mikhail. Thinks your name is Bruce Bloom. That's all."
Bruce smirked. "Let him chase ghosts."
She left.
He sat down, rubbed his eyes, then looked up at the screen again.
The name HELIOS pulsed softly in the dark.
Below it, a system prompt blinked to life.
> [TEST SCENARIO: CITYWIDE GRID FAILURE – RUN?]
Bruce tapped once.
"Run it."
And just like that, the city's digital veins lit up. Buildings flickered. Traffic rerouted. Hospital generators flipped on. Drone patrols activated in low-traffic zones.
All within five seconds.
No lag. No panic. Just movement.
Like the city itself had taken a breath.
Bruce leaned back in the chair.
"Good boy," he muttered.
Outside the glass, Vyre was still soaked in night.
But something new had just woken up.