The recycled, sterilized air in the lab tasted like ash in his mouth. Ken stared at his screen, the innocuous-looking streams of data now contorting into something monstrous. A neurological command string. Finch wasn't just a profiteer; he was a wannabe puppeteer, determined to reprogram the free will of man, starting with his daughter's biochemistry. The cure was a trojan horse, and they were being forced to polish the wood.He risked a glance at Elara. She was focused on Sophia's body scans, her brow furrowed in concentration, not yet in disgust. Across the laboratory, De Vries muttered in a low, tense voice into his headset, directing his captured state security troops, each word advancing Finch's agenda now. They were all cogs, turning in flawless, oblivious synchrony.The note was gone, but the message stuck in Ken's mind: He's lying. He wants to be the key.Who had written it? A dissatisfied employee? A rival of the "Collective"? It didn't matter. It was a crack in Finch's flawl

The commander's words hung, heavier than the smell of blood and ozone. He will unravel her mind, and then her body. The prospect of Sophia, not simply held captive but deliberately taken apart by Finch's hysterical fingers, was a more efficacious goad than any threat. Ken's clear conscience dust in his mouth. He had chosen the world, and the world had sent him a new set of chains.He bent and lifted the data pad. The flashing coordinate in the Swiss Alps was a joke. A long, barren range of mountains. The Aerie could be anywhere."He's in the wiring," Elara breathed, reading the words on the pad, her analytical mind cutting through shock. "It's not where he is. It's where he exists."The black-clad commander, who had introduced himself only as 'Kessler', watched them with vulture patience. His men raked the devastated lab in cold efficiency, collecting data cores and sending any of Finch's remnants who showed a trace of defiance packing. They were not heroes; they were repo men for the

The tiltrotor's cabin was a tomb of exhaustion and adrenaline. The bellow of the mountain's fall faded into the distance, like the roar of a departing beast, replaced by the steady whine of the machinery. Sophia slept restlessly against Ken's chest, her breathing still catching with residual terror. Each tremor that ran through her was a condemnation. He had won. He had his daughter back. Why, then, did the void where once The Aerie stood feel now to be inside him?Elara leaned her head against the cold window, her eyes closed, but Ken could see the rapid eye movement beneath her eyelids. She wasn't sleeping; she was running the numbers, reliving the cascade failure they'd designed, haunted by the thin line they'd walked between salvation and suicide.De Vries sat rigidly opposite him, fastidiously cleaning a streak of blood from his temple with a field wipe. His eyes kept sliding towards Finch, handcuffed to a support strut, staring blankly at the floor. The Inspector's face was a ba

The darkness was absolute. The sudden quiet—the absence of the server whine, the flickering monitors, the anxious beep of machines—was more deafening than an explosion. For an ice-water instant, nobody breathed, transfixed and bewildered by the void.Then a single, gasped breath broke the stillness."What did you do?" Pieter's voice, a cold shriek in the blackness, had shed all its calculated cool tones. Panic. Raw panic. "The failsafes! Redundants!"Ken heard him fumbling, hitting furniture. A drawer was yanked open. The crack of a flashlight. The light sliced through the blackness, illuminating Pieter's white, terrified face as he frantically cranked the manual ignition of a backup generator.Click. Click. Click. Nothing.The entire lodge, everything in the tech for a mile, was stone dead. Not off. Vacant.Elara found Ken's arm in the dark, her grip tight. "An EMP? But the pulse wasn't there. It's just… drained.""It's not drained," a tiny voice said. Sophia. Ken could just make out

The journey to the Aerie ruins had been through a world reborn. The earth was blanketed in thinking moss that hardening slightly underfoot eased their way. Streams flowed pure, their water so clean it seemed to hold light. It was beautiful, and entirely different.They found the emergency ventilator shaft of the bunker, hidden in a crevice half a mile away from the main collapse. The steel door was dogged closed, but the rock around it now had the glowing, organic patterns of the wild code. The code was avoiding the hatch, flowing around it like water around a boulder."He's creating a damping field," Pieter reported, his sensors humming with cross-polarizing information. "A point-localized EM frequency intended to disrupt the cohesion of the code. He's making himself invisible to it.""He's struggling with the air," De Vries growled, loading a miniature breaching tool.The explosion was dampened by the rock. The hatch swung open. A stale, recycled exhalation of air wheezed out—the dy