The wind howled as they emerged from the Citadel.Snow whipped across the mountain ridge, biting at their cheeks and soaking through their clothes. But none of them complained. Not after what they had just done.Behind them, the Citadel sealed itself, its eye closing once more, silent, inert and powerless.Leah adjusted the strap of her rifle and glanced at Nick. “So… we just killed a ghost city.”Nick didn’t answer. He looked down the valley, toward the horizon where the first signs of dawn flickered. His mind was still buzzing—residual code, faded memories that weren’t his, shadows of commands still echoing faintly in the back of his skull.Anna stepped closer, wiping a smear of blood from her temple. “You still with us?”Nick blinked. “Yeah. For now.”Anna’s voice lowered. “What you did in there… It should’ve killed you.”“It didn’t,” he said simply.“But it changed you,” Leah added, her tone cautious.Nick didn’t argue.He could feel it, something dormant now breathing beneath his

The silence didn’t last.Three days after the broadcast, they found the first one.Not in a lab or locked facility but in a rehab center in the outskirts of Aether District. The girl’s name was Kael. Fifteen years old. Found wandering the rails outside the old fusion refinery, eyes vacant, arms covered in tracking ink. She didn’t speak. But when Nick entered the room, she looked up. Straight at him.And whispered, “Nine.”It shattered him.He crouched beside her, gently taking her hand. “You remember me?”She shook her head. “No. I remember feeling you.”Anna watched from the doorway, face pale. Leah stood beside her, silent.“She’s like you,” Anna whispered.“No,” Nick said, eyes still on Kael. “She’s worse. She didn’t break free.”The next few weeks became a blur of leads, warnings, and ambushes.Veratech was dying—but it was dying violently. Their rogue security arms, the remnants of the blacksite networks, had gone freelance. Rogue factions now hunted Echo units like war trophies.

The blast doors groaned under pressure as the vault shook again this time harder. Shards of ice and metal fell from the ceiling, clattering across the deck. Remy’s voice buzzed through the comms, clipped and urgent.“Unknown hostiles inbound—black sigil armor, no insignias. They’re not Veratech security. They’re worse.”“Contractors,” Leah hissed, fingers flying over the interface. “Ghost mercs. Veratech must’ve hired third-party cleanup after the Zurich leaks.”Nick swore under his breath. “They’re here to bury it all.”Kael dragged a portable field generator to the edge of the lower platform. “We’ll hold them off. Get the systems shut down, extract who we can, then blow the rest.”Nova hovered above the stasis pods, arms raised. “I can jam their signals. Mask us for a few minutes.”Nick gave her a sharp look. “How many minutes?”“Enough if Leah works faster.”“I’m already breaking laws that haven’t been written yet!” Leah snapped, sweat beading on her temple as she wove through a di

The black sky over Siberia pulsed with an electric storm as the skiff sliced through the upper thermals, cloaked and silent. Beneath them stretched a vast stretch of permafrost uncharted, unclaimed, unspoken. Leah had called it “the blind spot,” a patch of Earth where no satellite dared linger for long.Echo-0 was buried beneath it.Inside the skiff, the air was tight with expectation. The children slept sedated gently by Anna’s formula, giving them a chance to rest before what might come next. Kael stood at the cockpit window, arms crossed, eyes scanning the dark.“I don’t like it,” she muttered.“No one does,” Nick replied, checking his weapon. “Which means we’re close.”Remy finished syncing the comms to a secure loop. “Nothing’s pinging. No heat signatures, no EM interference. Just… blank space.”“Echo-0’s hiding itself,” Leah said, dragging the last thread of Nova’s data through her cracked tablet. “Every digital trail leads to a dead end. But the closer we get, the stronger the

The snowstorm hit hard as they broke atmosphere, but the skiff’s reinforced hull held steady. Below them, the remnants of the Nova Vault faded into static. They weren’t flying toward safety anymore—they were flying toward warning.“Twelve sites,” Leah said, staring at the flickering holo-map in her lap. “Each one marked as dormant. But dormant doesn’t mean dead.”Nick sat in the pilot’s seat, his side patched from the last fight. Kael stood beside him, silent, arms folded, eyes scanning the map.Anna looked back at the children huddled in the cargo hold, wrapped in thermal blankets, their eyes wide and hollow. “They’re safe… for now.”Leah’s voice dropped. “Until Omega wakes up.”Nick adjusted the flight path toward their next known contact—a decommissioned orbital uplink site once used to track Echo satellites. “We need to send a signal. Let the world know what’s coming.”Kael raised an eyebrow. “You think anyone’s listening now?”“Someone will,” Nick said. “They have to.”—The upli