Rain still poured over the fractured skyline, but it did little to cool the fire that had ignited across the world. Luka stood inside the remains of a forgotten church in Old Marrow, its stained-glass windows shattered, its pews long burned and buried beneath ash. Lightning arced through the cracked dome overhead, illuminating the map Vesper had drawn across the altar in chalk and blood."We've got less than 48 hours," Vesper said, pointing to three glowing nodes on her screen. "After the broadcast, O.S.A.'s shadow networks went into kinetic fallback mode. That means live retribution, sleeper activations, and fragment migration.""Fragment migration?" Arden asked, pacing nearby with a reloaded rifle strapped to his back."They splintered their command protocols into pieces and sent them to various war proxies," Vesper explained. "Private contractors, digital militias, A.I.-controlled insurgents. Whoever grabs the pieces gets the leverage."Luka clenched his jaw. "So we lit a match in

The night hung heavy in the air, thick with the stench of smoke and the faint remnants of the battle that had raged just hours before. The city felt different now. It wasn't the same place Luka had fought to control—no, this city was wounded, its veins exposed. The war wasn’t just an echo in the streets anymore. It was a pulse, quickening with every new secret revealed, every power shifted.Luka stood at the center of the safehouse, his fingers brushing across the edge of a steel desk. His eyes flicked between the array of monitors that flickered in front of him. Vesper’s information, the encrypted data from the Foundation, and what they had learned from the fallen O.S.A. operatives—it was all starting to connect, but the pieces weren’t fitting neatly. Each new development only tangled the threads further.Alessia leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed. Her gaze was piercing, watchful, but with something else—a flicker of doubt that hadn’t been there before. The silence between th

The storm outside had not ceased. Rain hammered the bulletproof windows of the O.S.A. ruins, now lit only by emergency lights flickering like distant stars. In the war room, Luka Gale stood at the center of the table, his coat soaked and fingers stained with blood and ink from torn documents.Around him: Marco, pale and furious; Vesper, silent but alert; Alessia, her arms crossed, jaw clenched tight; and Arden, dragging a data cable from a black steel box marked with the words PROJECT EIDOLON – RESTRICTED.“Tell me that’s not what I think it is,” Luka said, voice low.Arden didn’t look up. “It’s worse. This isn’t a program or an archive. It’s a seed.”Alessia stepped forward, her heels echoing on the concrete. “Define ‘seed,’ Arden. Use short, non-apocalyptic words.”Arden sighed and connected the cable to a manual port on his terminal. “Project Eidolon was a fail-safe. A backup personality framework. Designed to mimic high-value operatives… down to memory, speech patterns, tactical r

The hum of servers had stopped.In the Foundation’s abandoned substation bunker beneath the East Rail terminal, silence settled like dust. Screens still glowed with half-decoded strings, flickering algorithms trying to make sense of fractured systems. Vesper stood amid the wreckage, arms folded, her pale eyes tracking the final lines of code shutting down. Luka sat on the edge of the long steel table, staring at the fragments of Mirelle’s old world.“No more ghosts,” he muttered. “She can’t pull strings from this far down anymore.”“She’s dead,” Arden said quietly, seated nearby with a dataslate balanced on his knees. “But ghosts don’t need to be alive. They just need echoes. And O.S.A. has plenty.”Footsteps echoed in the hallway. Alessia appeared, gun still holstered, coat open, eyes narrowed.“I just got word. Westbridge burned,” she said. “Not a fire. A virus. Digital. Thousands of hospital records purged. Transit hubs collapsed. They hit the civilian systems—again.”“Collateral c

The silence beneath Blackridge was not silence at all—it was resonance.It hummed in the bones.It breathed through the walls.Luka stood in the pale green light of the chamber, his eyes fixed on the obelisk that had once been Threnody. No longer a mere construct, no longer a machine. It pulsed with something old, sentient—not alive in the human sense, but aware. Waiting. Listening.Alessia stepped to his side. “It’s not just a program,” she whispered. “It’s something else. I can feel it.”Vesper, pacing with a restless kind of tension, frowned. “Feel it? I hear it. It’s talking. Or... something is. Like echoes trying to fit into words.”Arden was the last to approach, rifle lowered but hands tight on the grip. “It’s not language. It’s resonance. Frequencies interacting with the nervous system. Look at the way the walls are reacting—see that shimmer? That’s not projection. That’s interference.”“Interference with what?” Luka asked, voice low.“Us,” Arden said.They turned to face the