Grey looked miles away, his expression shuttered. She wondered what ghosts he was seeing — and how many of them had her name.She stood, pacing the narrow space. “You said there was another property — the one your uncle kept off records?”He nodded slowly. “The coastal plant near Ridgeport. It burned two years before the mansion.”“The wrong fire,” she said under her breath.Grey looked up. “What?”“Seraphine’s message. You’re looking in the wrong fire. That must be it.”The thought crystallized between them, electric and terrible.“If she’s right,” Grey said, “then the night my mother died wasn’t the start — it was the cleanup.”“Then the first fire,” Lana whispered, “might’ve been where I came from.”He froze. The truth was like gravity — pulling them both toward something they weren’t ready to face.⸻They moved before dawn. The Foundation teams wouldn’t linger long once the rain washed away the trail, but Grey knew better than to trust silence.They cut through the forest until th

The cliffs bled into gray as they descended toward the coast. Wind tore through the air, sharp and wet with sea spray, tugging at Lana’s coat as she stumbled over the rocks behind Grey. Every muscle in her body screamed, but she didn’t stop. Neither of them spoke; the world around them had gone hollow — only the sound of their breath, the surf, and the far-off hum of engines fading behind them. They didn’t look back. The lighthouse shrank into the distance, swallowed by the mist. A thin trail of smoke still drifted from the ridge, curling into the dawn like a question that refused to die. By the time they reached the shore, Lana’s lungs burned. The sand was dark, coarse, mixed with ash — a graveyard of what had once been driftwood. An abandoned fisherman’s hut stood nearby, its door hanging crooked. Grey tested the frame before pushing it open. Inside, it smelled of salt, rust, and rain. A small stove sat in one corner, a pile of nets rotting in another. He shut the door behind

The sea calmed by dawn. The fog had thinned into a low, ghostly veil that clung to the water’s surface, stretching endlessly toward the horizon. The trawler drifted in silence, its small engine humming a weary rhythm.Grey stood at the bow, face drawn, eyes fixed on the horizon. Behind him, Lana sat on the deck with the metal case open across her lap. The reports had dried overnight, though the edges curled like burned parchment. Every line she read deepened the pit forming in her stomach.Project Reclamation. Subject 47-R. Her name where his once had been.She had stopped trying to make sense of it. There was no neat answer to the question of what she was — not fully human, not fully stolen. Something made. Something carried forward in fire.Grey’s voice broke through the quiet. “You should rest.”She looked up. “I can’t. Every time I close my eyes, I see that room. The ash. That vial.”He turned from the sea, his expression unreadable. “You don’t have to understand it all tonight.”

The sea had turned rough by the time they reached the coast again. Waves crashed against the blackened rocks, foaming white under a bruised morning sky. The storm from the night before hadn’t fully passed — it lingered at the horizon like an unmade decision.Lana stood at the edge of the cliffs, the wind tearing at her coat, the salt stinging her face. Behind her, Grey pulled the trawler’s tarp over the few things they’d managed to save from the observatory. The wooden box — Seraphine’s final trail — sat between them like a secret too heavy to open again.“This is where she meant,” Lana said quietly. “Where the sea meets the ash.”Grey joined her, scanning the shoreline below. The black sand was streaked with pale driftwood and debris from the ruined pier. “There’s a cave system beneath the rocks,” he said. “Old smugglers used it decades ago. If Seraphine wanted to hide something here, that’s where it would be.”Lana adjusted the strap of the case across her shoulder. “Then that’s whe

By morning, the estate was nothing but embers and whispers.Ash drifted across the coastline, mixing with the mist rolling in from the sea. What had once been the Foundation’s heart was now a hollow pit carved into the cliffs, still smoldering, the last testament of a century-old lie finally collapsing under its own weight.Lana and Grey had found shelter in the ruins of an old chapel half a mile down the shore. The pews were rotted, the altar long fallen, but its stone walls still held firm against the wind. The first light of dawn filtered through a stained-glass window fractured by time — the image of a saint’s face now split in two.Lana sat near the window, staring at the small data drive resting in her palm. The casing was scratched, blackened at the edges, but it had survived. She hadn’t slept. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw Seraphine’s face illuminated by the rising fire.Grey entered quietly, carrying two mugs of something that resembled coffee. “It’s instant,” he sa