The stairs are murky and slippery, and I find myself searching for a grasp, but not even my fear nor my racing heart can hold me back from wending my way down the blackness ahead. He alone climbed my steep and rocky soul, and so I'll do the same.

I descend the last few steps left and let my eyes adjust to the dark. Before me is a vast sweep of empty space; just Kai and me, and only the bulky columns hulking over us, mute and motionless, there to see what we'd do next.

Further in, a round table has been put sloppily in the centre, a few chairs dumped around it, and to my luck, they aren't empty. A group of people are gathered around it and are already glowering at me, their faces hollowed and terrifying under the light bulb hanging from the ceiling. A small light to my right attracts my attention, and I suddenly notice a lit screen and a girl sitting on a wheelchair, a pair of chopsticks in hand. I stare at her, and she stares back with a gaping jaw, a noodle dangling down her chin.

No one moves, no one speaks. The lights flicker, the breeze through the hatch slips like liquid around me as I slink out of the shadows and look around me in question.

I wipe the sweat from my brow, trying to hide my nervousness.

"Who the hell is he? Why is he here?"

I hear those questions run from mouth to mouth, but nobody seems to know the answer. I didn't have one either. What I do have is a knot in the pit my stomach that twists and tightens as I thread my way through the basement. Once Kai appears behind me, though, everyone lets out a sigh of anticipated relief, like the chorus of a comforting gentle wind.

"What took you so long?" a bald man says and raises to his feet. Wait. I've seen that shiny bald head before. I steal a glance at Kai, and he gives me a smirk. "You brought company, I see." His watchful eyes make me cringe, as I stand in the middle of the vast room, a helpless prey surrounded by vultures.

"That's Andrew," Kai announces to everyone, and they nod in acknowledgement. "He is a detective back at the fortieth precinct. We'll show him what we're doing here, so try to leave a good impression, alright?"

I hear a snort coming from the girl in the wheelchair, but I ignore it. Now is not the time for pleasantries.

"Then we'd better leave them to it, right boys?" the bald man turns to the others, and they grunt in agreement. I don't know why, but I sense a hostility in his tone.

Kai waits for them to resume their conversation around the table before he takes my hand and leads me towards the computer screen. I open my mouth to speak, but he raises a hand. "Before you ask, we have a generator. And solar panels on the roof."

"And I'd better not ask how they were acquired?"

"Exactly," he says with a smile playing on his lips. "So, we've been working on this for months."

"You mean I have. Alone," the girl dryly clarifies.

"Doesn't anyone help you?" I ask her.

"Those men over there?" she throws a degrading glance at the others around the table and raises her voice so that they can hear her. "Those men are usually intimidated by smart women."

"Dream on!" someone shouts from the table, causing me to roll my eyes.

I look at the black screen filled with lines of illegible text, tables. Basically, I have no idea what I'm looking at.

"We have created a fake internet access point which is visible to all electronic devices still out there. It's unencrypted, which means that whoever logs into it, we'll get to access their data. We'll see who it is, and where they are," she explains to me.

"How can there be internet without electricity, or electronic devices at all?"

"At first, we thought none of the two remained, so when we created the access point, we didn't expect to get any results back. But..." the girl hesitates.

"But two weeks ago, we came upon something big," Kai finishes for her. "Something we had never imagined discovering."