Somewhere in the chaos of gunfire, alarms, and blood, A child woke up, Her eyes opened slow, pale silver-blue, glowing faintly in the half-light of Vault K, She blinked. Once. Twice. Then sat up without assistance, even though she’d been unconscious for years.The machines still connected to her didn’t beep, They obeyed, One by one, the vitals dropped to zero. Then the systems flickered. She looked at the security camera in the corner. And smiled.Robert slammed the vault access shut behind him, breath ragged. Mira hadn’t followed, still locked in combat above. Thomas’s voice was in his earpiece, scrambled, panicked.“They breached the surveillance chamber, Sarai’s inside the mainframe, she’s trying to reroute the protocol.”“Robert, whatever’s in that vault, it’s coming online.”Robert stood alone in the control room now, weapons abandoned, the weight of his father’s legacy pressing down like concrete, The console blinked. The vault was still sealed.But a new window opened on the te

In a lab hidden far beneath the streets of Singapore, the red vial hissed as it was injected into a motionless figure on a metal table. Muscles twitched, Eyes snapped open, void black. No whites. No iris.The doctor stepped back, Sarai Quinn watched from behind reinforced glass. “Vitals stabilizing,” the technician said. “Subject is waking up faster than expected.”The being on the table sat upright without aid. A pulse monitor exploded from the surge. Without a sound, it tore the restraints from its wrists and looked straight at the camera. “Subject Theta is active,” the tech muttered.“Not ‘Theta,’” Sarai corrected, stepping forward.“Call him Zero-One.”Meanwhile, in Kingsbridge, Robert sat beside Nine in the vault-secured penthouse command center, She hadn’t slept. Didn’t seem to need it.She spent hours staring at security feeds, code streams, encrypted chatter across the dark web. It wasn’t just surveillance.She was listening. “You’re filtering data from every Consortium node,”