The world was shrouded in darkness. The ambient grey and blue of the windows stained in the fog of New York's heavy rain, Kung Jin watched the lights of the cars and the living night desperate to peer into the base of the Special Forces.
A large, almost warehouse like room stuffed wall to wall with what looked like lockers, most sealed with equipment perhaps eternally stuck in storage. Each painted black and stained with time as the maintenance and money dried out of the Special Forces.
A wall of fogged glass, he stood before the world on the fifth floor and locked out to a blur of lights dim and dreary until a strange though trickled like a water droplet into his head.
Is it possible?
Takeda and Jacqui would be out at the gym, he had received a call regarding their meeting with the government, rather impromptu and disturbing, but it made him think of things impossible before this moment that just might still be within the realm of hopeful dreams.
From where he stood he could turn and face the right side of the wall, the tenth storage down was wide, and deep enough to enter like a walk-in closet. It was an entrance to a secret room that stored one of their fallen comrades.
Inside he struggled to find the light as it struggled to flicker on and he moved through the rabble of boxes and must to the next door to the next room to the next moment where his mind struggled with whether they had done something rather important or if like the rain that drained down the tall windows did it all just wash away in a fleeting moment?
Click!
Unlocked and ready to open, the last door was a room they hadn't entered since the the week they returned from the Battle of Armageddon. Here he could almost feel the ghosts of time claw at the back of his neck and pull on the hairs that stood up along his arms.
BANG!
Thunder roared in the dark abyss of New York outside and not a single strike of lightning could ever illuminate the shadows of this forgotten storage room. Only the dim ambience of the thin corridor behind him ran through like a clogged vein into the storage unit where even its lightbulb had gone out long, long ago.
Here in this decrepit world tucked away from even the shell of the Special Forces, Cyrax waited for him.
The broken remains of metal, silicon, carbon, you name it, wires and rubber all welcomed him with a quiet, cold past that stared back at him with dead eyes blackened by the absence of life.
The helmet remained intact, but much of the remaining body parts, especially the human bits had been destroyed when Cyrax had perished in the battle. Yet, for all these pitiful remains, it wasn't in any way shape or form what Kung Jin sought for.
Where are you?
He pondered as the boxes behind the crumbled mess topped by the dusty helmet provided little to no answers when he began to sift through them.
Four of them in total and one by one he pulled out clothing, black attires that would cover the cyborg form, wires, replacements, and even microscopic fragments of the man that once inhabited that machine. Even through the LED lights and the impulses of electricity, there lived a ghost in the shell.
The second to last box was nothing but wires and usb sticks, thumb drives and an external hard disk drive. That's what he wanted to find.
The information stored on that drive was what he hoped to obtain, but it wouldn't be until he got home that he could discover if Sonya had left anything on it for them.
For him.
"She was the only one that took care of you." He turned to the rubble, the ruins of a man and machine now left in a mess against the wall of a storage unit.
He grabbed the helmet, the now empty cavern where a head once permanently nestled was an almost frightening feeling to clench his fingers into as he pulled Cyrax's helmet from the grave.