Harper didn’t remember falling asleep, but she remembered waking up.Her body ached like it had been split apart and stitched back together in the dark. There was something foreign missing—an absence deep in her chest that left her both relieved and afraid. The hum of old medical equipment surrounded her. A faint antiseptic tang clung to the air. It was too quiet.Then came the voice.“Vitals are holding. But we’re not out of the woods yet.”She knew this voice… it was Dr. Evelyn Harrow. Still alive, and as cold as ever.Harper forced her eyes open.She lay in a makeshift surgery suite, dimly lit and lined with analog monitors salvaged from some forgotten era of science. The padded cot beneath her smelled faintly of mothballs and sterile gauze. Her chest was bandaged, the skin beneath sore and humming with memory.She turned her head.Nathan was sitting beside her, jaw clenched, elbows on his knees. His ring glowed faintly against the side of her arm where his hand gripped hers.“You

The snow was a blanket of silence.Red Hollow loomed in the distance—half-buried under ice, crumbling on the edges, yet pulsing faintly with power beneath its rotted surface. A mausoleum with a heartbeat. Nathan crouched on the ridge, goggles tracking heat signatures below. Nine guards on rotation. Three at the perimeter. One at the central tower. Two underground.And one subject.No movement from her cell in the last twelve hours.He exhaled, breath fogging against the inside of his mask. “I’m going in.”Dr. Harrow’s voice crackled in his ear. “Be precise. Their uplink refreshes every seven minutes. That’s your window to breach the firewall.”Nathan adjusted the bio-scrambler on his wrist and launched into motion, sliding down the slope between trees. Snow crunched under his boots in rhythmic bursts, muffled by layered noise-cancellation tech. At the fence, he clipped a signal disruptor onto the grid. The hum of surveillance cams dipped for five seconds—just long enough.He vaulted o

There are places the world forgets.And there are places the world tries to forget but fails.Red Hollow was the latter.The road to it wasn’t paved—it was buried. An old coast road, eroded by time and salt, disguised beneath layers of moss and dead leaves. The three of them stood at the perimeter, watching the fog roll over twisted fencing, skeletal guard posts, and the collapsed ruins of what once masqueraded as a government psychiatric facility. Only Nathan, Harper, and Harrow knew what it really was.“I’ve been here before,” Harper whispered, more to herself than to them. Her voice was faint, tremulous. “But they made me forget. They scraped it out of me like a tumor.”Nathan turned to look at her. She hadn’t spoken the entire drive except to mutter the coordinates like a mantra. Now, she was visibly trembling, not from cold, but from memory.Harrow stepped forward, rifle slung low across his chest. “It’s quiet. Too quiet. No power signature, no live feeds. Looks dead.”Harper’s l

Smoke coiled around the lab like the breath of some slumbering beast. The walls were scorched. Consoles flickered erratically, data loops frozen mid-stream, as if time itself had braked to a crawl. A soft hiss broke the silence... pressurized air escaping a ruptured valve. Somewhere, a warning klaxon tried to reboot but failed with a dying wheeze. Then came the sound of bare feet stepping onto the steel floor. One girl stood amidst the wreckage. Hair damp with sweat. Skin flushed with exertion. Wires still trailed from her arms, sparking weakly before going dead. Her breath came in short gasps, eyes scanning the room in a slow, mechanical sweep—until they caught a reflection. She turned. A broken mirror lay half-buried in debris. Shards scattered like fractured versions of herself. She stepped closer and peered in. The face was familiar, but subtly wrong. The angle of the jaw. The furrow in the brow. A thin scar traced a crescent just above the left temple—like a seam between

For two days, Nathan moved through Tokyo like a shadow with a mission.Every morning began with meetings, and every evening ended with closed-door talks, tech demonstrations, or silent walks through humming server farms. Most of the companies he visited blurred together; names, pitches, ambitious CEOs trying to charm the American investor rumored to turn failing projects into gold.But only one name stayed sharp in his mind: Miko Tanaka.Or more specifically, her silence.Not verbal, but mental.She remained the one person he couldn’t read. No thoughts. No flickers. Not even emotional bleed. Every time they spoke, Nathan’s ring responded like it was staring into a mirror—reflecting only what he projected outward.On the third visit to her headquarters—Tanaka Neural Systems—he gave up trying to pry into her mind and started watching her instead.She moved like someone aware of surveillance. Her eyes missed nothing. She never interrupted but always spoke second, choosing her words with