The night refused to end.Rain still lashed at the broken windows of the Knight estate, and lightning flared across the walls like ghostly photographs flashing in sequence. The storm had become a living thing — moaning through the halls, clawing at the curtains, whispering secrets into the cracks of the old marble.Adrian sat beside Elena’s motionless body, his back against the wall, the taste of blood still sharp in his mouth. His shirt was torn, his knuckles raw, his reflection his twin gone into the storm like a shadow that knew where to hide.He pressed two fingers against Elena’s neck. Her pulse was faint but there. A fragile rhythm, fighting to hold onto the world. He couldn’t tell if she was unconscious or lost somewhere deeper.He whispered her name, but the wind swallowed it.Adrian’s mind was chaos, images, sounds, words colliding. Echo Genesis. The original. The defect. None of it made sense, yet all of it felt true.He rose shakily and looked around the study. The old desk

The flight into Zurich carried them through a thin, cold light. Dawn spread along the Alps like a promise that had been postponed too often; the snow on the peaks looked clean enough to hide any sin. Adrian watched the ridge lines through a smeared window and felt the old, electrical ache under his ribs — the ache of someone who has discovered the foundations of his life were built on someone else’s ledger. Beside him, Elena slept with her head against the seat, one hand clenched around the blanket as though it were a talisman. Her face was pale but softer than the wound he kept prodding; in those quiet moments she looked more human than anything else in his orbit.They rented a car under a name that meant nothing and drove with no hurry that mattered. The city folded itself around them: tidy tramlines, coffee shops taking the morning as if there were time for civility, men in wool coats with faces that did not ask questions. It felt horribly like a place that could bury secrets and s

They parked the car just beyond where the trees thinned, leaving it shadowed beneath a gullied rise as if the earth itself had agreed to hide it. The sky was a valley of black and the moon had the softness of a thing that had given up trying to warn anyone. Adrian moved first, the lineage map burned into the small memory of the portable device in his pocket like a single living thing. Lucas followed with the methodical step of a man who had rehearsed escape routes until his muscles learned them by memory. The Professor walked last, shoulders rounded beneath a coat that had never been designed for comfort, only for necessity. Elena came with them, quieter than before, as if silence had become a way to preserve the parts of herself she feared would be stolen again.The compound lay below like a wound cut into the mountain, pale from the lights within and ringed by the dull throb of camera eyes. They moved like shadows because that was what shadows were for: to hide mistakes and to misle

They drove until the hills blurred into ordinary night, until the city’s lights swallowed their tracks and the road became a line of possibility rather than a map of threats. Inside the car, the air smelled of wet leather and the faint tobacco smoke Lucas kept like a talisman against nerves. Elena sat rigid beside Adrian, the fragment of lineage clutched so tightly in her palm that the edges had bitten small crescents into her skin. The partial map hummed with the gravity of what it promised: enough proof to make an institution look guilty, enough truth to make people with clean hands sweat.Adrian watched her in the rearview as if trying to save her twice. The mountain had taken a breath and kept it; their theft had been surgical and messy and miraculous in equal measure. They had escaped with pieces of the network and the knowledge that somewhere a remote instance had the authority to reach across hosts. That last fact lay between them like a live wire. The person who could flip tha

The river that night moved like a long, indifferent thing a dark animal that drank light and spat it out somewhere downstream. Its surface was a black mirror broken only by the city’s orange spill and the staccato of distant traffic. Adrian drove with the windows up, the heater cutting the damp air into something sensible, while Elena watched the world pass as if through a film that refused to focus. The partial lineage in his pocket felt heavier than any weapon he’d carried; it was a question with teeth.They slowed where the footpath curved beneath the long, institutional bridge a neutral place where people walked dogs and lovers kept distance from the river. The CCTV frame Claire had shown them had been grainy but clear enough to mark gait, coat, timing. The hooded figure had favored the right leg. A limp with a purpose. That index was small and precise and, if read correctly, lethal in the way it misled.“Keep your head down,” Claire said from the passenger seat of Marta’s unmarke