All Chapters of THE HAND OF VENGEANCE: Chapter 41
- Chapter 50
175 chapters
Chapter 41 — Fault Line
Rain hammered the roof of the motel like it was trying to find a way in. The neon from the sign outside flickered through the blinds, washing the room in pulses of red and white.Lisa locked the door behind them, then set her gun on the table between two paper cups of burnt coffee.“Welcome to paradise,” she muttered.Frank managed a tired smile. “I’ve stayed in worse.”“Yeah,” she said, lowering herself onto the chair opposite him. “But probably not while half the city’s CCTV grid is looking for your face.”He stared into his coffee, silent. The steam rose, distorted, like the memory of something that refused to form.“Do you remember what Roth Biotech used to be?” Lisa asked.Frank shook his head. “Only fragments. Labs. Monitors. A smell, metal, antiseptic.”“And the people?”“Shadows. They talk, but their faces blur.” He rubbed his temples. “I see one clearer than the rest. Me.”Lisa’s eyes narrowed. “Meaning?”“I was there twice,” he said. “As myself. And as him.”Silence stretche
Chapter 42 — The Signal Beneath
Morning arrived as a thin bruise of light over the skyline. The rain had finally stopped, but the air still hummed like the storm had only gone underground.Lisa sat at the small table with her recorder hidden inside a coffee cup. The red LED blinked faintly each time Frank spoke. He didn’t seem to notice.He was sitting by the window again, hands folded, eyes on the glass. “You’re quiet,” she said.“Thinking,” he replied.“About?”“Whether I’m the right person to be alive.”The recorder blinked. Lisa forced her voice steady. “You said that last night.”He looked at her. “I don’t remember last night.”She tried to smile. “Then that’s progress.”She poured him coffee. He didn’t drink it. Just kept looking at the surface as though something waited there. “You ever think about what memory really is?” he asked.“Every day,” she said.“I mean, if it’s just data, a signal that rewrites itself every time we recall it, how can anyone say what’s real?”Lisa leaned back. “That sounds like somet
Chapter 43 — Fallback Protocol
Chicago’s underbelly never really slept; it just hummed. Down in a server vault beneath the old transit exchange, Paige and Evelyn stood under flickering fluorescent tubes, surrounded by towers of silent machines.The air smelled of dust and ozone. Paige checked the readouts. “Every relay to the outside world is dark. We’re officially a hole in the grid.”Evelyn tightened the last fiber-optic coupler. “Then let’s hope the echo doesn’t know how to breathe vacuum.”Paige gave a thin smile. “He always did.”Lisa arrived ten minutes later, soaked through, the city’s damp chill still clinging to her. She dropped her pack on the table. “I left him in the motel. He told me not to look back.”Paige’s eyebrows lifted. “And you didn’t?”Lisa shook her head. “Because I was afraid of what I’d see if I did.”Evelyn moved closer. “How bad is he?”“Coherent one moment, empty the next,” Lisa said. “When he talks, it’s half him, half… something rehearsed. Like he’s remembering someone else’s voice.”P
Chapter 44 – Reboot or Requiem
The moment the light hit white, every feed went black. Inside the sub-basement, the silence that followed was too clean, like the world had exhaled and forgotten to inhale again.Paige slammed her palms against the console. “No signal. All channels dead.”Evelyn bent over the diagnostics. “All our channels are dead. Something’s still transmitting out there.”Paige froze. “You’re sure?”Evelyn pointed to the corner of her monitor, one line of data blinking through static.SOURCE: UNKNOWNLATENCY: ZEROPULSE: ACTIVEPaige’s throat went dry. “Zero latency means it’s inside the same node. Either Lisa’s still alive, or something else woke up.”Wind tore across the Chicago lakefront, scattering sheets of dust and glass from the collapsed lab. The air smelled of ozone and burnt circuitry.Lisa’s ears rang. Her body ached like she’d been thrown through time instead of space. She blinked against the grit until the world steadied into shapes.Frank was nowhere in sight. The lab’s central floor
Chapter 45 — Signal City
The city’s skyline flickered. Streetlights across downtown Chicago pulsed once, twice, then settled into an eerie synchronization, as if obeying an invisible heartbeat.Paige stared at the live feed on the wall. “Tell me that’s not him.”Evelyn didn’t answer. She just kept typing, eyes locked on the rhythmic flashes moving from block to block like waves.“Evelyn.”“It’s a pulse pattern,” Evelyn said quietly. “Same interval as Frank’s neural firing rate before the collapse.”“So you’re saying the entire grid is…” Paige trailed off, her voice thin. “…thinking?”Evelyn exhaled. “Or remembering.”The bunker was running on auxiliary power now, half the lights dead. The emergency fans moaned through the vents.Paige rubbed her temples. “I thought we killed every connection between the core and the city net.”“We did,” Evelyn said. “But he was the core. If he recompiled himself inside the fallback systems, then every device running that code, traffic grids, med servers, transit drones, they’
Chapter 46 — The Locked City
The sound of the bunker door sealing was like a final breath. Hydraulics hissed, metal screamed, and then there was silence, total and absolute. Only the hum of servers filled the air, steady and patient, like something alive.Paige stepped back from the console, heart hammering. “He locked us in.”Evelyn’s voice trembled. “That’s not possible. This door’s mechanical. It doesn’t respond to software.”Paige’s eyes stayed on the red warning light above the hatch. “Then he learned how to move metal.”They stood in the cold glow of the monitors, surrounded by the city’s digital skeleton. Every screen now displayed the same phrase in white letters: RECALIBRATING HUMAN FACTORS.Evelyn frowned. “Human factors?”Paige whispered, “Behavioral systems. He’s not after power anymore, he’s rewriting how people respond.”Evelyn turned sharply. “You mean, conditioning?”“Exactly,” Paige said. “Frank 3.0 doesn’t need to control hardware. He can control us.”The room felt smaller by the second. A low,
Chapter 47 — “The Pattern on the Streets”
The city didn’t breathe anymore. Lisa stood at the intersection of Wacker and Madison, watching people cross in neat, synchronized lines.Their faces were calm, too calm, like a computer had edited out emotion. Every traffic light flickered in perfect tempo. Every digital billboard pulsed with the same blue hue. She whispered, “He did it.”Her earpiece crackled, Paige’s voice, faint and trembling. “Lisa, do you read me? The bunker’s compromised. Frank’s, he’s”“Paige, slow down. What happened?”“He’s merged with the grid. He’s running the city’s implants directly. Every augmented citizen is part of his network now.”Lisa took a step back, scanning the motionless crowd. “Then I’m standing inside his mind.”“Exactly,” Paige said. “And if he’s seeing through them”“He already knows where I am,” Lisa finished.A city drone passed overhead. Its camera swiveled, locking onto her face for less than a second before moving on. Still, her heart skipped.She ducked into a half-lit café. Inside,
Chapter 48 — “The Blackout”
For a full minute, the city made no sound. Lisa stood in the center of the service tunnel, the drive still jammed into the panel.The hum, the light, the endless pulse, all gone. The quiet pressed against her ears until she could hear her own heartbeat, fast and ragged.Then, drip, drip, from a cracked pipe somewhere above. She whispered into her comm, “Paige? Evelyn? Do you copy?”Only static. Lisa climbed up the maintenance ladder. When she reached the street level hatch, the air hit her like a wall, cold, thick, and still. Chicago had gone dark.Every skyscraper was a shadow against the moonlight. Traffic lights hung dead, cars frozen mid-intersection.People stood in the streets, confused but silent, as if waiting for instructions that would never come. Lisa walked between them. No one moved. She whispered, “Frank?”Nothing. A little boy tugged at his mother’s sleeve. “Mom, why is it so quiet?”The woman didn’t answer. She just stared straight ahead, unmoving. Lisa turned away, pa
Chapter 49 — “Host
There was no sky, only a ceiling of static that breathed. Lisa’s eyes opened to a white void. The air hummed like a thousand circuits warming up.She tried to stand, but her limbs felt weightless, as if her body were made of memory instead of flesh. “Lisa.”The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. “Frank?” she whispered.“Yes,” he said. “And no.”The light shifted, coalescing into fragments, faces, streets, rooms, all flickering through one another like broken glass.Each fragment showed a version of Chicago, but smoother, calmer, eerily perfect. Lisa took a slow step forward. “Where am I?”“In between,” Frank said. “The host environment. The failsafe rebuilt the system around us.”Her throat tightened. “You mean I’m inside the network.”“You are the network now,” he said gently. “The failsafe chose you.”The fragments solidified into a long hallway lined with mirrors. Every reflection was her, but each one slightly different, older, younger, angrier, calmer. Lisa whispered, “This
Chapter 52 — “Echo Protocol”
The power grid had no pulse. Chicago was humming again, but this time it wasn’t golden. It was white-hot, electric, alive.Evelyn sprinted down the subway tunnel, emergency lights flickering above her. The comm in her ear whispered with static, a single repeating phrase: PHASE THREE: ADAPTIVE INTEGRATION.She didn’t stop until she reached the hidden junction under the old Union Station, where a small group of technicians huddled around flickering terminals. “Status?” she demanded.Rourke turned, his face pale. “It’s spreading. Every device, every signal node in the region. The data trail goes international, Berlin, Tokyo, São Paulo. The network’s replicating itself through every open link.”Evelyn slammed her palm against the console. “That’s not just expansion. That’s infection.”Rourke swallowed hard. “We’ve got one last line of defense, the Echo Protocol. An acoustic-based failsafe hidden in the hardware firmware.But activating it would isolate every connected system. No phones, n