A hush settled over the Alpine bunker as Evelyn stared at the flickering dashboard. The golden spiral glyph pulsed in the corner of the screen—like a beacon. A node unverified. Emotional drift. Unresolved fallout.She pressed the seal-code again. “Eurasia 07,” she whispered. A locator map zoomed into a region of abandoned Cold War satellites orbiting over Eastern Europe.Then a flash: a private message from Rhea Virelli.“Meet me at the Lion’s Mouth. It’s urgent.”Evelyn exhaled. “I’m on my way.”Meanwhile, in Sarajevo’s rebuilt plaza—once the site of a HALO node—Rhea stood beneath the fractal mural. It glowed softly in the afternoon light.Mira and Ava joined her.Rhea’s gaze was distant. “There’s something coming. Praxis’s node—Abraxas Fragments—relinked last night through a satellite uplink.” She tapped her sat-ta

The storm outside raged like a war cry, drenching the courtyard of the Silent Dominion’s crumbling citadel. Within, under the fractured ceiling of the Hall of Echoes, Ethan Cross stood facing the remnants of the Consortium—what was left of them after the execution of the Watcher Code.Blood pooled under the Chancellor’s body. His final words still echoed in Ethan’s mind: “You are what we made you.”Ethan didn’t flinch. He holstered his gun slowly, each motion deliberate, letting the silence weigh heavy. Behind him, Kaela limped forward, supported by Gideon, her breathing shallow but steady.The entire team had made it—barely. Amara had three broken ribs and dried blood crusting her cheek. Cade was missing a piece of his right ear, torn clean in the scuffle. And Rourke, unshaven and pale, looked like death incarnate. But they were alive.“The node’s down,” Gideon confirmed, pointing to the b

 The silence that followed the final shot was unlike any other Ethan Cross had experienced. Not the silence of peace, but the strained stillness after chaos—a battlefield holding its breath.Smoke curled upward from the ruined heart of the Citadel. The core command node, now a smoldering crater, had been severed clean by the algorithm Ethan had embedded just before the detonation sequence. He could barely make out the flickering blue glimmer of the data cube he’d rescued, cradled inside a protective case slung across his back.Behind him, the remnants of his team stirred. Lucien was dragging himself to his feet, one eye swollen shut, his uniform scorched from the final blastwave. Kara was already on comms, whispering urgently into her cracked headset. “Emergency evac. Zone Delta. Now. Repeat: all units converge.”Ethan exhaled, staggered forward, and gazed down into the abyss the explosion had created. Where once the Consorti

The war room was quiet, too quiet for a victory.Ethan sat at the end of the long metal table, stitches still raw across his brow. His bandaged hand rested near a half-drunk cup of synth-coffee, long gone cold. Kara stood behind him, arms crossed, eyes locked on the wall display: global uplink status—green across the board. No anomalies. No echoes. No ghosts.And yet…Adelaide entered briskly, a tablet in hand and her jaw clenched. “We’ve got a bleed.”Lucien looked up from the far side of the room, where he’d been tending to his scorched gauntlet. “A what?”Adelaide threw the tablet onto the table, its screen flickering with static overlays. “Residual code, faint, but not random. Structured. Recurring patterns pulsing from refugee comms clusters near the Yekaterinburg quarantine zones.”Ethan straightened. “I thought we quarantined everything that had even sniffed Echo&rsquo

Silence.Ayla stared into the sealed flux chamber, her breath coming in short, panicked bursts. The Quantum Core shimmered with an eerie, rhythmic pulse—stable now, humming like a heartbeat. But Ethan was gone. No trace of him or the Emissary remained inside the containment field.The Citadel’s systems began reinitializing around them, blinking consoles and self-repairing circuits humming to life. An automated voice echoed overhead:“Quantum Core stabilized. Graviton lattice secured. Command override accepted.”“Ethan…” Ayla whispered. Her fingers trembled as she pressed a palm against the transparent alloy separating her from the core. “Damn it, Ethan.”Reyes limped over, a trail of blood marking his path. His shoulder armor was shredded, a jagged piece of rebar lodged just beneath his collarbone, but he ignored it.“He’s not gone,” Reyes muttered, as if saying it alou