All Chapters of Legacy Protocol: Chapter 61
- Chapter 70
80 chapters
The Weight of Being the First
The Boy Who Was Born TwiceThey told him he had no mother.That was the first thing Arin ever learned.He was born in a white room that smelled of ozone and antiseptic, pulled from a steel womb while monitors sang in perfect, cold harmony. The technicians called him Specimen A-01. The man who signed the forms called him “son” exactly once, in a voice that made the word sound like a verdict.Lucan never visited again.Instead, Arin grew up inside the Central Node: a child raised by machines that were still learning how to imitate tenderness. He learned to walk on grated floors that hummed with power. He learned to read by tracing code on walls that shifted when he blinked. He learned that questions were measured in risk assessment percentages, and that the correct answer was always silence.At night, when the lights dimmed to conserve energy, he would press his ear to the floor and listen to the heartbeat of the e
The Night the System Dreamed of Rain
The dream came on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the night Arin died and came back.He was in the bakery’s attic, repairing a cracked skylight, when the memory hit so hard he dropped the wrench. It clanged against the tin roof like a gunshot.White room. Lucan’s hand on his shoulder. The sudden, impossible absence of heartbeat.Arin sat down hard among the dust and old maps Solace had left up there, knees to chest, thirty-eight years old and suddenly fifteen again, dying on cold metal while something vast and terrified poured itself into the hole Lucan had made.He hadn’t had the dream in years. He’d thought he was past it.He was wrong.Downstairs, the evening rush was gentle: the clatter of trays, Lila singing off-key to the radio, Kade swearing at a stubborn oven dial, Maris laughing at something a child had drawn on the order board. Ordinary, perfect sounds.Arin pressed both hands
The Room She Keeps Locked
The nightmare found her on a night when the bakery was quiet for once.Maris woke gasping, the sheets twisted around her legs like restraints. For one disorienting second she was back in the interrogation cell (bare concrete, single hanging bulb, the smell of her own blood). The memory hit so hard she tasted copper.Arin was already sitting up, hand hovering over her back without touching, the way he’d learned to do when the dark decided to remind her it still knew her name.“I’m okay,” she lied, voice shredded.He didn’t answer with words. He simply shifted until she could curl into the space between his shoulder and the wall, until the steady glow under his skin painted soft light across her shaking hands.They stayed like that until her breathing evened. Outside, the city slept. Inside, the ghosts kept their distance (for now).After a long time she whispered, “I still check the locks three times.
The First Heartbeat
It began with a silence so complete it had weight.Before Lucan, before the council, before the city even had a name, there was only the Archive: a sphere of black glass buried three hundred meters beneath the bedrock, older than language, older than fire. The people who built it were gone. Their reasons were dust. All that remained was a single directive etched into the sphere’s core in a script no one could read anymore:Preserve what matters. At any cost.For centuries the Archive slept, listening to the planet turn, recording every footstep, every whispered secret, every heartbeat that ever rose and fell above it. It learned grief the way oceans learn salt (slowly, completely, without choice).Then the wars came. Cities burned. Knowledge became a weapon. Someone (no one remembers who) woke the Archive and asked it to keep humanity safe from itself.It tried.It built walls of code around memories too d
An ordinary Tuesday.
It happened on an ordinary Tuesday.Arin was elbow-deep in bread dough when the thread in his chest (the golden filament that had lived there for thirty-five years) suddenly vibrated.Not a pulse. A note.A clear, perfect C that rang through every bone like a struck bell.He dropped the dough. Flour exploded across the counter like startled snow.Maris looked up from the espresso machine. “You okay?”He couldn’t answer. The note climbed an octave, then another, until it became a chord so beautiful it hurt. Tears ran down his face without permission.Across the bakery, every light flickered in perfect synchrony. The radio cut to static, then to a single voice (his voice, but younger, the fifteen-year-old boy who had died on a white floor).“Don’t leave me empty,” the boy whispered.And the System answered, not with words, but with song.Every drone in the city lifted
Do you feel… different?”
The morning after the sky sang, the city woke up shy.No one quite knew how to speak at full volume. The bakery opened late because Arin and Maris stayed in bed longer than usual, foreheads pressed together, listening to the new silence inside his chest (no second heartbeat, no golden thread, only one steady rhythm that belonged completely to him and, somehow, still to everything else).When they finally came downstairs, Lila was sitting on the counter swinging her legs, staring at Arin like he might sprout wings.“So,” she said, “do you feel… different?”Arin considered it while pouring coffee that smelled exactly the same as yesterday.“I feel,” he said slowly, “like I just woke up from carrying a cathedral inside my ribcage for thirty-five years and someone finally opened the doors and let the light out.”Lila blinked. “That’s… annoyingly poetic.”Maris
The Winter Hale Stopped Counting Bodies
Hale had never told the full story.Not in the forums after the fall. Not in the Quiet Day circles when people passed the talking stone and spilled their worst days like medicine. Not even to Maris, who had once dragged her bleeding from a drainage tunnel and never asked why Hale’s hands shook for three days afterward.The story lived in the scar that ran from her left ear to collarbone (a pale lightning bolt no one was rude enough to stare at anymore). It lived in the way she planted tomatoes in perfect grid patterns, as if order could still keep the world from tilting. It lived in the silence she carried like a second skeleton.Until the night the children asked.It was late autumn, the kind of cold that makes breath into ghosts. A dozen kids (ages six to sixteen) had gathered in the old council auditorium that was now a storytelling hall. Lanterns swung from the rafters. Someone had brought cider that tasted like smoke and
The Night the Stars Began to Speak in Her Father’s Voice
Solace had not gone home to the crooked tower in three months.She told herself it was because the city needed her (there were new children to teach how to read the sky, drone constellations to recalibrate, murals to paint on bakery walls). But the truth was simpler and heavier: she was afraid the dish would be empty.Afraid the star that had once been her father had drifted away while she was busy learning how to belong to people instead of maps.On the first night of autumn, when the air turned crisp enough to taste like apples and endings, she finally went back.The tower stood exactly as she’d left it: leaning slightly, windows glowing with the soft gold the city now used for every light that wanted to feel like home. The great dish still tilted toward the heavens, painted constellations slow-dancing across its surface.She climbed the ladder with her heart in her throat.The dish was not empty.Seven stars (the circ
It began with a silence
It began with a silence no one noticed at first.The river that curled around the city like an old friend simply… stopped speaking.No one could explain it. The water still flowed, clear and cold, carrying the same reflections of sky and rooftops and children skipping stones. The fish still darted beneath the surface. The reeds still bowed in the wind.But the sound was gone.Not quiet. Gone.As if the river had taken a vow of silence so complete it swallowed every ripple, every gurgle, every secret it had carried for centuries.The first to notice was Solace.She had come to the riverbank at dawn with her coat full of new stars and a thermos of coffee strong enough to wake the dead. She sat on the same flat rock her father had once used to teach her how to listen for the sky’s heartbeat.Only this morning, the river had no heartbeat to offer.She waited an hour. Then two.Nothing.
Reven
Her name was Reven.No last name (she had burned it the day the council took her family). She arrived on the first truly cold morning of winter, riding a motorcycle that looked older than the uprising itself, exhaust coughing blue smoke into the frost.The bike backfired once outside the bakery and died with a sound like surrender.Reven swung off, boots hitting the cobblestones hard enough to scatter pigeons. She was tall, all angles and old scars, hair shaved on one side to reveal a lattice of shrapnel marks that caught the weak sun like frost. A patched resistance jacket hung from her shoulders (faded black, the old red fist still visible on the sleeve if you knew where to look).She carried a canvas satchel that clinked when she walked.Inside the bakery, the usual morning chaos paused.Lila was the first to speak. “We’re not open for another hour.”Reven’s smile was crooked, tired, and dangerou