Chapter One: The Ghost in Zone ZeroThe rain never touched Zone Zero.Not because the clouds avoided it, but because the sky above it was fake.Projected light, recycled storms, engineered silence—everything about the place was artificial, even the air. They called it “Cleansed Territory.” A zone built for the undesirables, the expired, the erased.Shayne Marrow had lived here for seven years.He sat inside a dim repair booth that barely qualified as a room. Wires hung from cracked ceilings. The glow of half-dead monitors flickered against his unshaved jaw. A vintage scripture was projected across a cracked lens screen in front of him—faint, encrypted, and written in fragments only he could read.Blessed are the persecuted…A spark popped from a broken drone core he was welding. He didn’t flinch.Outside, a woman screamed—then silence. That was normal here. Screams came and went like passing taxis. Zone Zero didn’t ask questions. It just swallowed.Shayne leaned back, staring at the s

The console screen turned blood red.Broadcast Initiated.Timer: 4:59… 4:58… 4:57…Shayne stared directly into the camera, his eyes steady, his breath calm. Outside the booth, Elysia stood with her back against the door, hand hovering near her weapon, listening for footsteps. She knew they’d come the moment they traced the unauthorized signal.Shayne leaned forward.“If you’re seeing this, then the Accord didn’t stop me in time.”His voice carried no fear. It rang with quiet fire — deliberate, raw.“You don’t know my name. You’re not supposed to. They buried me seven years ago. They told you I was an extremist, a virus, a cancer in the body of progress. They called me a myth. A warning story. But I’m none of those things.”He placed the rusted silver cross on the desk beside him, just barely within frame.“My name is Shayne Marrow. And I remember everything.”Somewhere deep in the Central Capitol, in the mirrored tower of the Accord’s Authority Hub, the High Chancellor stood motionles

The lights in the chamber dimmed.Not because someone adjusted them—but because Facility 9 was designed to mimic circadian rhythm, as though sleep was possible in a place like this.Shayne sat cross-legged in the center of the room, back straight, palms on his knees.He had bled from one ear earlier. The ringing hadn’t stopped.But that wasn’t what disturbed him.It was the voice.Not a hallucination. Not like before.This had weight. Texture. Like someone had spoken directly into his soul.And it said his name.He kept still. Silent.But the voice came again.“Shayne…”A whisper. Female. Familiar, somehow, though he couldn’t place it. Soft like wind through a chapel door.“Who are you?” he whispered aloud.No response.Just silence.And then, faintly:“You were never alone.”⸻In a surveillance chamber four levels above, Elysia Vorn sat behind a curved glass wall, watching him.The chamber labeled Sector 7 was live.Feed from his cell flickered in front of her. Shayne hadn’t spoken i

Shayne stared at the floor of the chapel, where the fallen cassette had cracked open.Instead of tape reels, a silver coin tumbled from its hollow core—engraved with the same symbol as before: the Watcher’s Mark, but now encircled with flames.He touched it, and the ground vibrated faintly beneath his knees.Not a tremor.A heartbeat.The pulse wasn’t his own.It belonged to something beneath the facility—something buried.Then the voice returned.Not from the coin. Not from inside his head.This time… from the walls.“Find the vault. Before they do.”⸻Elysia Vorn sprinted through Sector Nine, bypassing biometric locks with stolen credentials. Her ID pinged red, but she overrode it without blinking.She couldn’t explain why she was doing it.All she knew was this: the symbol on Shayne’s neural scan matched the one in her brother’s final message—the symbol he died for.And now Shayne was carrying it inside him.She pulled up the old Accord blueprints from before Facility 9’s renovatio

The library beneath the tower was darker than the hallways Shayne had passed. Not dark in the sense of light—though the flickering sconces cast a haunting amber—but dark in the way a graveyard might feel at midnight. Every shelf was tightly packed with leather-bound volumes, some so ancient their spines had cracked and peeled like scorched bark. Dust floated like ash in the air. The silence was so thick it pressed against his ears.Miss Revah motioned for him to keep walking. Shayne obeyed, still reeling from her earlier words:“The girl’s name was Serah. You loved her once, before the cleansing. Before the Accord took your memories.”He didn’t remember her—yet the name ignited something in his chest. Something hollow. A scar, perhaps, shaped like a girl he couldn’t see. Every beat of his heart thudded against that wound like a bell toll.“Why did you bring me here?” he asked finally, watching her thin frame drift between the shadows. “What is this place?”Miss Revah didn’t look back.