“Fools,” Lucan murmured, the word quiet but sharp enough to cut through the low static humming from the monitors around him. The screens painted his face in cold light—maps, encrypted reports, the council’s broadcast feed looping silently on one of the larger displays.He sat in a dark control room buried deep beneath an abandoned research annex. Dust coated the walls, and power cables ran like veins across the floor, feeding into a single console that pulsed faintly with blue light.On the screen, Director Hale’s voice played back from the recording: You don’t locate him. You erase him.Lucan smiled, but it wasn’t amusement—it was hunger. “Erase him?” he said softly, leaning closer to the image. “You’ve been trying to erase me for years, and you think you’ll succeed with my creation?”The man standing beside him shifted nervously. He was young, one of the few surviving technicians who still followed Lucan’s orders. “Sir, with all due respect, the council’s deploying Valkyrie dron

“Arin… hey—Arin, wake up.” The voice reached him before the world did. It was soft, shaking, edged with panic. Then a hand touched his face—warm, real—and the darkness broke open. He inhaled sharply. The air burned as it hit his lungs. For a second, he didn’t know where he was. The ceiling above him flickered between shadow and dim light, the sound of rain dripping through broken metal. Then he felt it—the hum beneath his skin. Low, steady, wrong. Maris exhaled with relief when his eyes opened. “Thank God. You were out for almost an hour.” He tried to sit up, but the world tilted. Kade was there in an instant, steadying him with a rough hand on his shoulder. “Easy,” the older man said. “You passed out halfway here. The system inside you’s gone haywire.” Arin blinked, trying to focus. They were inside the power station—a skeleton of concrete and rusting panels. Old turbines lined the walls, silent except for the occasional groan when wind moved through their blades. Kade’s eq

“Do you see it now, Arin?”The voice wasn’t in the room; it was around him—woven into every pulse of light, every current of static that breathed through the dark. He tried to speak, but the words didn’t come as sound. They formed inside his mind, traveling through the same circuits that now felt like veins.“Lucan?” he thought, or maybe whispered.“Yes,” the voice replied, calm and familiar. “Or what’s left of him. You’re walking through what I built, just like I once walked through the world that built me.”The darkness shifted, folding outward. Suddenly, Arin was standing—no, existing—in an endless space of fractured reflections, each shard carrying a moment that wasn’t his: memories, data, and dreams. The world was made of glass and circuitry, shimmering in slow motion, as though the entire network breathed through him.He turned, and everywhere he looked, something flickered to life—faces, voices, fragments of the past. A child laughing in a lab corridor. A woman with Lucan’s eye

“Director Hale, you need to see this.”The analyst’s voice trembled as she spoke, her eyes glued to the array of monitors that stretched across the council’s control chamber. Hale approached slowly, the echo of her heels slicing through the steady buzz of machines.“What is it this time?” she asked.“Everything,” the analyst whispered.The feed before them rippled like disturbed water. One by one, the live images from the surveillance drones began to flicker, glitching between static and light. At first it looked like interference—but then a pattern emerged. The flashes weren’t random. They pulsed, steady and synchronized.Rourke entered behind her, still pulling on his tactical vest. “Report.”The analyst didn’t turn. “The drones… they’re not responding to manual control. Every single one of them has synced to the same frequency.”Hale frowned. “Which frequency?”“The one coming from the power station sector,” the analyst said, turning pale. “Director, it’s organic. The pulse data—it

“So what’s the plan now, genius?” Kade asked, his tone half-gruff, half-worried as he stared at the monitors that refused to stop flickering.Arin was standing near the console, eyes focused but distant, his fingers hovering over the screen without touching it. The hum that had filled the station before was quieter now, almost like the place was holding its breath, waiting.Maris sat on the edge of the broken table, watching both of them. “He’s been staring at that thing for fifteen minutes,” she said softly. “He’s either thinking or listening.”Arin blinked once, as though returning from a far-off place. “Both,” he said.Kade folded his arms. “Then maybe let the rest of us in on what the hell you’re hearing, because every screen out there’s flashing like a heartbeat and none of them are yours.”Arin hesitated. “That’s what I’m trying to understand. I shut down the council’s core commands, but something’s still running—something that isn’t me.”Maris frowned. “What do you mean isn’t y