The Blackwood Tower was silent—eerily so. The kind of silence that wasn’t empty, but listening.Isabelle stood near the wide glass window, the city’s dying neon glow painting her reflection in fractured color. The storm outside was rising, thunder crawling over the horizon like something alive. She’d heard nothing from Damien since the previous night—not a message, not a sound. Only the faint buzz of the encrypted communication feed that Jayden had left open for her, a digital lifeline in case the Ghost made a move.Her hands were trembling, but not from fear. From anticipation. Something was coming. She could feel it in her bones.Behind her, the elevator gave a soft chime. Isabelle turned.The doors opened—slowly.Damien stood there.He looked… human again. His suit was unbuttoned, his shirt streaked with dried blood, his eyes—those eyes—no longer red but heavy with exhaustion. Yet something about him still didn’t fit the man she knew. The rhythm of his breathing. The unnatural c

The silence was a scream that wouldn’t end.Isabelle’s eyes widened in disbelief as the truth sank in. The man beside her—the Damien she’d fought with, bled with, loved—wasn’t breathing. His body had gone still, his head tilted forward, eyes blank and unfocused. The faint mechanical hum that had been echoing under his skin since the tower… was gone.She froze. “Damien?”No answer.Her voice cracked. “Damien!”The sound of her cry bounced off the walls, swallowed by the mechanical heartbeat pulsing from the cocoon ahead. That was when the figure suspended in the light began to move. Slowly. Deliberately.The clone—no, the echo—opened its eyes. They glowed a deep, unnatural red, twin embers of intelligence and malice. The shape was perfect—same face, same scars, even the same faint trace of weariness around the mouth. But there was no warmth there. No humanity.When it spoke, the voice wasn’t entirely the Ghost’s, nor entirely Damien’s. It was both.“You brought me home.”Isabelle stum

The storm had passed, but the silence it left behind felt heavier than thunder.Rose City stretched out in the distance, a graveyard of steel and shattered glass. The sky hung low and bruised, the air humming faintly with residual static—the aftertaste of the Ghost’s fall.From the rooftop of an abandoned transit tower, Nova adjusted the antenna array she’d scavenged from one of the surviving drones. Each pulse that came through the receiver made her frown deepen.“It’s fragmented,” she muttered. “Whatever’s left of the signal—it’s not behaving like data anymore.”Damien stood a few paces behind her, his arm bound in a makeshift sling. Isabelle had insisted he rest, but he refused. The faint red glow beneath his collarbone still pulsed, though slower now, subdued.Jayden leaned against the edge of the roof, scanning the horizon through his scope. “If the Ghost’s mainframe is gone, what’s still transmitting?”Nova turned, brushing a strand of silver hair from her face. “That’s the thin

The rain had not stopped for days.It fell in cold, unrelenting sheets over Rose City, washing crimson reflections across the glass towers that still stood. The storm clouds hung low, heavy with electricity, as if the sky itself were watching.Inside the underground command center, silence reigned. The power hummed faintly through backup generators, casting everything in the dull glow of emergency lights. Jayden Knox stood before the central holomap, his eyes fixed on a single pulsing red signal.It came from the heart of the city — the Blackwood Tower.“I thought we fried that core,” Nova muttered, moving beside him. Her hair was damp, her expression grim.“We did,” Jayden said. “But something came back online twenty minutes ago. A fragment. Weak signal, but… familiar.”Nova didn’t need to ask whose.Across the room, Damien leaned against the wall, his body still bearing the marks of the neural extraction. The scars glowed faintly in the dark — faint circuitry under skin, fading but

Months had passed since the skies above Rose City burned red.The world had changed, but not in the way anyone hoped.The towers still stood, though most were hollow. The digital grids that once pulsed with the Ghost’s dominion now flickered intermittently — fragments of a broken god scattered through silent circuits.On the surface, peace had returned. But to Jayden Knox, peace felt like the pause between breaths — a waiting, not a healing.He stood on the western balcony of the reconstructed command spire, watching the horizon shift in slow colorless dawn. The city below moved in half-life: drones patrolling, scavengers rebuilding, children learning to play again in streets that once screamed. Nova Benoit joined him quietly, her footsteps soundless on the steel. She carried a data-slate tucked beneath her arm, the edges glinting with pale blue.“You’re awake early,” she said.“Couldn’t sleep,” Jayden replied without looking at her. “The silence’s too loud.”Nova leaned against the