Novels by Ibechi

The Bone Sea swallowed them whole. Cold, not freezing, but heavy, pressed in from every direction as Chris plunged beneath the surface. The water wasn’t clear. It was thick with drifting bone fragments, glowing faintly like submerged stars.Chris thrashed instinctively.“No...no...no...!”A hand locked around his wrist. Lira. Her eyes were open underwater, glowing softly as bone-thread symbols flared along her arms. She tugged him downward, not letting him fight the descent.Marco flailed beside them, bubbles exploding from his mouth as he pointed frantically upward, then downward, then at himself.I DID NOT SIGN UP FOR THIS, his expression screamed. Chris tried to scream back. Water flooded his mouth. Pain exploded in his lungs. And then, Something shifted inside him. The pressure eased. The panic dulled.His chest expanded, and he inhaled. Water did not enter his lungs. Instead, marrow-light flowed through him, warm and steady, forming a thin internal sheath that let him breathe.

The Spine Market didn’t celebrate. It braced. The last civilians vanished into glowing passages as the Undercity sealed itself in layers, bone shutters sliding into place, marrow-lanterns dimming to emergency glow.Chris sat slumped against a pillar, breath ragged, sweat soaking his shirt. “I can’t… keep pulling on it like that. It feels like my bones are trying to tear themselves out.”Marco crouched beside him. “Yeah, that’s usually your body’s way of saying please stop before I explode.”Lira pressed two fingers to Chris’s wrist. “Your pulse is erratic. The city responded because you asked it to protect, but it exacted a price.”Chris managed a weak smile. “Of course it did.”A low thrum echoed through the plaza, rhythmic, deliberate.Marco stiffened. “Tell me that’s not more boots.”Lira closed her eyes, listening. “No. That’s… deeper. Older.”The old woman from before stepped forward again, leaning heavily on her cane. “The Watchbones are waking.”Chris frowned. “The what?”“Guar

The city didn’t wait for his answer. Stone groaned. Bone rang. Somewhere above them, metal screamed as ancient mechanisms, forgotten, buried, awake, began to turn.Chris staggered, clutching the wall. “What… what’s happening now?”Marco listened, eyes wide. “That is not panic. That’s… coordination.”Lira closed her eyes, focusing. “The Undercity is opening its arteries. Safe routes. Old sanctuaries.”Chris swallowed. “Because of me?”“Yes,” Lira said. “Because it recognizes you.”Chris shook his head weakly. “I didn’t ask for that.”“No one who leads ever does,” she replied.A deep boom rolled through the tunnel. Dust shook loose. Far-off voices echoed, shouts, confusion, fear.Marco winced. “Okay, so the city’s alive, the nobles are angry, and your wife is definitely plotting something dramatic. What’s the move, Your Bone-ness?”Chris shot him a look. “Don’t call me that.”“Fair,” Marco said. “But we still need a plan before someone drops a building on us.”Lira turned sharply toward

Jenna stared at Chris like she was seeing a ghost crawl out of its own grave.“You broke the seal,” she whispered again, disbelief cracking her composure. “That’s not possible. It was reinforced by the Council.” Chris’s voice came out low. Steady. Dangerous.“Then the Council doesn’t understand bones.” The Undercity answered him.A low hum rolled through the tunnel, not sound exactly, pressure. Memory. The walls pulsed faintly, ancient marrow-lines glowing as if the city itself had opened one eye.Marco swallowed audibly. “Okay… I’m officially voting we never make him angry.”Lira didn’t look away from Jenna. “Chris. Focus. She’s still dangerous.”Jenna pushed herself to her feet, blood smearing across her lip. “You think this changes anything?” she snapped. “You’re one man against an empire.”Chris tilted his head. “I’m not alone.”Behind him, the bone wall reshaped, arms lowering, ribs knitting back into the stone like soldiers standing down but not leaving.Jenna laughed sharply. “

“Come home, darling.”Jenna’s voice slid through the tunnel like a blade wrapped in silk. Chris froze. His heart didn’t race, it stopped.Marco whispered, “Nope. Don’t like that. Don’t like that at all.”Lira stepped forward slightly, bone-thread blade humming. “Chris. Don’t answer.”“I… I know that voice,” Chris said hoarsely. “That’s her. That’s really her.”From the darkness ahead, torchlight flared to life, cold blue marrow-flames lining the tunnel walls. Shadows stretched long and distorted. Then footsteps. Measured. Calm. Unhurried. A woman emerged from the glow. Jenna Oakwood.She wore noble marrow armor, elegant, white, etched with command sigils. Her dark hair was braided neatly down her back, her face serene, almost gentle. Almost. She smiled when she saw him.“There you are,” she said warmly. “You look terrible.”Chris’s breath came shallow. “You… you sent someone to kill me.”Jenna tilted her head, as if disappointed. “Oh, Chris. Must you be so dramatic?”Marco barked, “D

The ceiling came down all at once. Stone. Bone. Dust. Screams. Chris barely got his arms up before Marco tackled him sideways.“DOWN, DOWN, MOVE!” Marco shouted.The chamber erupted, giant slabs of bone crashing around them like falling teeth. Lira threw up a bone-thread barrier, sparks flying as null energy hammered against it from above.Chris coughed through the dust. “Where’s, where’s my father?!”Lira yelled, “His echo shattered, MOVE!”Chris tried to look for Arlon’s fading light, but another explosion ripped through the ceiling, forcing them deeper into the chamber.Marco grabbed Chris’s hand. “Kid! No stopping for ghost parents, we’re in a cave-in!”“I didn’t hear his last words!”“NEITHER DID I, MOVE!”A giant bone pillar cracked in half and crashed where Chris had been standing seconds earlier. The corrupted Bonekeeper shoved them aside, taking the blow across its back. Bone shards exploded from its body, but it remained standing, shielding Chris with a trembling frame.Chri

The motorway stretched north like a scar through the rain. The van’s wipers beat time against the storm, slicing sheets of gray from the windshield.London was far behind now, its flickering lights swallowed by distance and fog. Inside, silence ruled, the kind of silence that comes after you’ve seen too much.Lex finally broke it. “So. Quick recap. We’re fugitives. We’re chasing a ghost lab run by a dead company. And our driver is an electric demigod with insomnia. Did I miss anything?”Maya shot him a look. “You missed the part where we have no plan if we get caught.”“Right, that’s important too.”Rashford’s hands tightened on the wheel. “We won’t get caught.”Maya frowned. “You keep saying that like you can see the future.”He hesitated. “I can’t. But the network can.”“Meaning?”He stared ahead at the endless gray. “Meaning it’s guiding me.”Lex snorted. “Fantastic. We’ve officially gone full GPS-from-hell.”Rashford didn’t respond. The veins on his neck shimmered faintly, that st

Rain drummed against the cracked tunnel roof, slow and steady, like a clock ticking down.Maya stood frozen, eyes locked on Rashford’s face. The faint glow beneath his skin pulsed in rhythm with the flickering lights. “You said it’s inside you,” she whispered.Rashford nodded slowly. “I can hear it… feel it. Every wire, every signal, it’s like the city’s heartbeat’s running through me.”Lex swallowed. “That’s, horrifyingly poetic. And also impossible.”Rashford glanced at him. “You think I’m imagining this?”“I think you’re running on zero sleep, and you just survived a building exploding on your head.”Maya stepped closer, voice low. “Rash, listen to me. Whatever this is, we can fix it. We’ll find a way.”He smiled faintly. “You don’t fix a storm, Maya. You survive it.”They followed the tunnel toward the surface, the scanner in Lex’s hand twitching with every step. “Signal’s jumping again,” he muttered. “It’s reacting to him, not the other way around.”“What’s it doing?” Maya asked.

London woke to sirens and smoke. The Royal Hospital was gone, a skeletal ruin veiled in rain. Fire crews worked in silence, faces pale beneath red flashing lights. The news called it a “gas explosion.” No one believed that.In a flat above an old café in Brixton, Maya sat at the window, eyes hollow from lack of sleep. The city skyline flickered in the distance, half of it still without power.Behind her, Lex typed furiously on his laptop, surrounded by empty energy drink cans and takeout boxes. “Still nothing,” he muttered. “No signals, no data trail, no body.”Maya didn’t turn. “He’s not dead.”“You keep saying that like it’s a fact.”“It is.”Lex sighed. “Maya, the whole substructure collapsed. He was right under the blast zone.”She faced him, jaw tight. “Then tell me why the grid’s still pulsing every thirty seconds.”He froze. “…What?”She tossed him a small handheld meter. “I picked up the signature an hour ago. Same frequency as the Seraph core, only weaker. Like it’s… echoing.

The Royal Hospital rose above the Thames like a sleeping fortress, gray, clinical, silent except for the low hum of electricity that never stopped. Maya adjusted her hood, eyes scanning the gates. “You sure about this?”Rashford stood beside her, face half-lit by a passing car’s headlights. “My father used to say this place was built to save lives. Guess he forgot to mention it could end them too.”Lex exhaled smoke from the energy drink can he’d crushed flat.“We’re breaking into a government medical facility to hack an AI made of living code. I’d rate this a solid bad idea, but it’s too late to vote, right?”“Right,” Maya said, glancing at Rashford. “Once we’re in, how long before they know?”“Seconds,” Lex replied. “Maybe less. Cameras, biometric locks, heat sensors, they’ll see us the second we breathe wrong.”“Then let’s make it count,” Rashford said.The back entrance was a slab of reinforced glass and steel. Lex knelt, attaching a small black cube to the lock. “EMP scrambler. B

The London Underground slept uneasily, rumbling like a giant in its dreams. Metal dripped and hummed; old tunnels breathed damp air and secrets.Rashford and Maya crouched behind a maintenance gate, the echo of alarms fading somewhere above. “Tell me I imagined that,” Maya whispered.“You didn’t,” Rashford said. His hands still glowed faintly, thin filaments of light threading under his skin.“Who, whatever that thing was, it called you Seraph Three.”“I heard.”“You gonna explain that?”“I’m trying to remember.” He pressed his fingers to his temples. “Flashes… labs… glass corridors. I was in a tank. My father’s voice saying, ‘He’s stable, keep him alive.’ Then nothing.”Maya swallowed. “So you’re saying you were an experiment?”He looked at her. “Still am.”They moved along the tunnel, flashlight beam cutting across graffiti and rust. “Lex is waiting at the drop point,” Maya said. “Two stops down. If he’s managed to pull the Seraph data, we’ll know what they built.”“Or who else they

London after midnight looked like circuitry, wet streets sparking under streetlights, the city pulsing with electric veins.Maya led Rashford through an alley that smelled of copper and rain. “Where are we going?” he asked.“Someplace the news never reaches.”“That’s not comforting.”“Good. It’s not meant to be.”She stopped at a metal door half-hidden behind a graffiti-coated shutter and tapped a rhythm with her knuckles, two short, one long. A slot slid open; a pair of eyes stared out.“Password?”Maya hesitated. “Ghost Circuit.”A click. The door opened. Inside, the light was low and blue. Computers hummed like insects. Cables coiled across the floor. A half-finished neon sign on the wall read LOW SIGNAL.At the center sat a man with violet hair and a soldering gun. “Lex,” Maya said, “I need a favor.”“You always do,” Lex replied, not looking up. “Who’s the guy bleeding secrets all over my network?”Rashford frowned. “Bleeding what?”“Metaphor, mate. Sit down before you short-circu

The tunnel widened into an abandoned subway platform, half-flooded and littered with shadows.A broken train car sat derailed at the far end, graffiti covering its rusted sides. Water dripped from the ceiling in slow, rhythmic taps that echoed through the darkness like the ticking of a clock that had forgotten time.Harlan checked the corner with his flashlight. “Looks clear. For now.”Elara leaned against a pillar, her breathing shallow. “How far till we hit the surface?”“Two access ladders up. One’s blocked, the other leads to the river tunnel,” Harlan said.Stephen nodded, scanning the gloom. “We’ll rest a minute, then move.”He turned to Elara, she looked pale, but the faint glow in her skin pulsed steady, synchronized with the flicker in his own pulse. “You’re shaking,” he said.She smiled faintly. “You’d be shaking too if you’d just hacked half the city with your nervous system.”“Fair.”He tried to keep his voice light, but the truth pressed harder with every heartbeat. Whatev

The tunnel opened into a forgotten maintenance chamber, a cavern of rusted steel and dripping pipes. The light from Elara’s skin had faded, leaving only the soft amber glow of a dying emergency lamp overhead.Stephen leaned against the wall, catching his breath. His clothes were torn, his knuckles raw. But his eyes were fixed on her like he was afraid to blink and lose her again.“You’re real,” he said quietly.Elara smiled faintly. “You keep saying that.”“Because it keeps surprising me.”She took a slow step closer. “You saved me once. Now it’s my turn.”He frowned. “You think we can save anyone now?”She looked at her hands, the faint traces of light still threading her veins. “Maybe not everyone. But something happened to us back there, Stephen. When we touched.”“Yeah,” he said, rubbing his chest. “Felt like someone plugged me into a lightning storm.”“It wasn’t just a shock.” Her voice trembled. “It was information. I saw things. Memories that weren’t mine.”He met her eyes. “Wh

The air in the sublevel tasted like rust and silence. Harlan held the flashlight low as they descended the last flight of stairs, the cone of light trembling over pipes and peeling paint.Elara followed, her hospital gown replaced by a maintenance jacket two sizes too big. Her bare feet made no sound on the concrete.Above them, distant boots echoed, Lang’s men sweeping the halls. “Here,” Harlan whispered. He pried open a rusted access door. Beyond it, a narrow tunnel sloped downward into darkness.“This runs under the east wing,” he said. “Connects to an abandoned subway line.”Elara peered inside. “And from there?”“Freedom,” he said, forcing a tight smile.They moved through the tunnel, the flashlight beam catching water dripping from pipes. The sound was rhythmic, steady, too much like a heartbeat.Elara slowed. Harlan turned. “You okay?”She nodded, but her voice was distant. “He’s here.”“Stephen?”She didn’t answer. Her hand brushed the wall, cold, damp concrete, and for a mome

The world went dark at 2:17 a.m. Every monitor in Kingsley Medical died in unison. The hum of machines cut to silence. The city outside went black, a skyline swallowed by shadow.And for the first time since the accident, Elara Kingsley heard herself breathe without the sound of machines.“Backup generators should’ve kicked in by now,” Dr. Harlan said, scanning the hallway with a flashlight. The beam jittered over sterile tiles and lifeless screens.The nurse beside him clutched a clipboard. “It’s the whole block, sir. Not just us.”He frowned. “That’s impossible. The hospital runs on a separate grid.”A metallic echo drifted down the corridor. Then a scream, distant, sharp, and human. Harlan turned toward Elara’s room. “Stay here.”Inside, the dark wasn’t empty. It was alive. Elara sat up slowly, the heart monitor beside her still dead.But she could feel another pulse, faint, steady, outside the room yet somehow inside her chest. “Stephen,” she whispered.His voice came faint, fragm

The first thing she felt was sound. Not a voice, not yet, just the slow, steady rhythm of machines, like a mechanical heartbeat that wasn’t hers.Then came the weight, the strange heaviness of her own body, too still, too foreign, as though it belonged to someone else. Elara Kingsley tried to open her eyes. Nothing.She tried again. A flicker. The faintest flash of light through her lashes. She wasn’t dead. She was somewhere in between. “Elara…”A whisper threaded through the darkness. Familiar. Steady. Her lips moved, but no sound came out. Stephen? “I’m here.”The voice trembled like electricity under her skin. She remembered rain. Tires screeching. A scream. Then- him.The boy who ran toward her when everyone else ran away. The one who held her hand when everything else slipped away. Now his voice was the only real thing left.Monitors beeped softly around her. Dr. Harlan’s pen tapped against his clipboard. “Heart rate’s rising again,” he muttered. “We’ve got neural movement.”A nu

The storm had cleared, but the city felt heavier, like it knew something no one was saying out loud. In the hospital, Elara’s heartbeat steadied into a quiet rhythm. The machines hummed like they were listening.Stephen sat in the interrogation room again, wrists free this time, but the tension was worse. Mara stood by the door, dripping from rain, a flash drive clutched in her fist. “You were right,” she said.He lifted his eyes slowly. “About what?”“About her. About all of it.”She set the drive on the table. “I got footage. Elara whispered your name. Right before they sedated her again.”He froze. “They what?”“They’re keeping her under intentionally. Some program, Project E-13. They say it’s treatment, but it’s control.”Stephen’s voice hardened. “You’ve seen her?”“Not since the night of the accident,” Mara admitted. “But I saw the data. They’re forcing her brain to stay asleep. And you” she exhaled. “You’re the variable they can’t explain.”He rubbed his hands together slowly.