The journey to Nimos-Kai took six hours in hyperfold, but Kairos barely felt the time pass. His mind remained focused, already preparing for the next encounter.
Where Vael Sarn had been a weapon—precise, honed, lethal—Raya Quill was something different.
She was a key.
Not to a door, but to an entire forgotten archive of information, technologies, and forbidden secrets no one else dared touch. Rumors called her the "Dream Diver," a rogue archivist who could break into any data-vault, biological memory, or neural web—living or dead.
She was also dangerously unstable.
Kairos stared at her last known coordinates on the display screen.
Nimos-Kai.
A quarantined moon swallowed by a rogue AI years ago. Deemed a Class-7 Cognitive Hazard Zone, it was now cordoned off from most galactic navigation routes. A "dead mind" world. The entire surface existed inside a closed-loop thoughtscape—somewhere between simulation and reality.
