Evelyn couldn’t sleep. Even with the war over, even with Dominion purged and Kingsley gone, her mind would not rest. Each time she closed her eyes, she saw him flickering behind glass, whispering code into her soul.She sat on the floor of the neural lab, staring at the blank screen of the terminal. The same one Kingsley used when they first met. Then it happened. The lights flickered.The screen glowed. And five words appeared. “You didn’t finish it, Evelyn.”Her breath hitched. “No…”She touched the keyboard. “I told you to kill me.”She replied: “I did.”The answer came back instantly. “Not completely.”She sprinted down the hallway to find Aya. The engineer was already awake, poring through data logs. “I felt the spike,” she said without turning.“The mirror node's core emitted a posthumous signal.”“How?”Aya sighed. “It shouldn’t be possible. The override should’ve deleted everything. But we missed something.”Sigma entered, arms crossed. “I’m guessing it’s Kingsley?”Evelyn nod

The power cut wasn't an accident. Kingsley had spent enough time on the inside of the system to recognize intent in randomness. The lights in the penthouse didn’t flicker, they vanished, all at once, like a single switch had been thrown by an invisible hand.He froze in mid-step, his muscles tensing. Evelyn, on the other side of the living room, had gone rigid too. The digital clocks, screens, backup panels all dead. The building's hum was replaced by a thick, unnatural silence.Then a flicker. Not from within but outside. Down the mountain, the city still glowed. Lagos shimmered with its usual pulse: nightlife, neon, and traffic congestion. This blackout wasn’t widespread. It was personal.“Backup?” Evelyn’s voice was low, tight.Kingsley shook his head. “Cut from the source.”They stood in the dark for a breathless moment. Then the emergency lights kicked in dim, red, and pulsing like the heartbeat of something wounded.Aya’s voice crackled through Kingsley’s earpiece. “It’s not jus

White. A world of it. Not light. Not peace, But sterilized, clinical, artificial white. Like the inside of a machine pretending to be heaven, Evelyn blinked against the blinding void, heart pounding, hands trembling. For a moment, she thought she was dead. Then the cold floor under her fingers reminded her, no she was alive.But Kingsley? She whirled, There he was his body limp, eyes closed, lips slightly parted. Still connected to the console via the neural uplink, but flickering like a bad signal. His veins pulsed with faint blue light, as though data now replaced blood “Kingsley?” she whispered.He didn’t move, But something else did, A shadow rippled through the whiteness. It had no shape. No face. Only presence, And then it spoke, Not aloud, but directly into her thoughts. “He is mine now.”Back in the physical chamber, Sigma pressed her back to the sealed inner door, clutching her last smoke grenade like it was a prayer. Aya crawled to her side, bruised and bleeding “Still aliv

Smoke coiled into the sky like a serpent, swallowing the stars, Evelyn coughed as she crawled away from the burning wreckage, every nerve screaming in protest. Her tactical vest was torn, her left arm numb.The blast had knocked her ten meters through broken earth. Her ears still rang. Her HUD flickered with errors. She looked up.The man in the white coat, the one holding the Dominion-marked tablet, stood untouched by the chaos. Fire licked the air around him, but never touched him.Like the environment refused to acknowledge his existence. He lowered the tablet slowly. “Evelyn Zhao,” he said. His voice was calm, clinical. “You’ve been running diagnostics on the wrong system.”She staggered to her feet. “Who the hell are you?”He took a step closer. His coat moved strangely, stiff at the seams, unnaturally symmetrical. Not fabric, Not human. “Dominion was never just a weapon. It was a testbed. And you” he pointed at her, “you’re the control variable.”“You think I’m afraid of you?” E

The moment Kingsley vanished, the chamber plunged into silence an eerie, unnatural quiet that pressed in on Evelyn like a vice.The Dominion Core stood frozen mid-motion, its obsidian form glitching at the edges. Data bled from it in tendrils of shimmering code, flickering like dying embers in the air.Whatever Evelyn had triggered, the Genesis Code, the neural backlash, it had shocked the system.But it wouldn’t last, She scrambled to her feet, lungs burning, mind spinning. She wasn’t sure if she was even in full control of her own body anymore. The residual feedback from linking into the Core had left a residue not just pain, but presence.Like someone or something was still watching through her eyes, She didn’t stop to think. She ran.The corridors outside the chamber twisted and warped. The digital architecture of the facility was collapsing. Dominion, wounded and unstable, was rewriting reality in raw panic.Doors opened into walls, Stairwells dropped into black voids, Security b