The rain hadn’t stopped for two days.It came down in thin, endless sheets against the glass walls of Ethan Cross’s apartment, the kind of rain that turned the city into a smudged watercolor all gray skies, flickering traffic lights, and distant sirens. Seattle always looked like it was mourning something. Tonight, it felt personal.Ethan sat in front of his laptop, an empty coffee mug beside him, half a cigarette burning in the ashtray. His desk was a battlefield newspaper clippings, photos pinned to a corkboard, and sticky notes scrawled with names and dates.At the center of it all was one face Claire, his wife. Her photo was slightly crumpled at the edges, taken on a beach three summers ago. She was smiling, hair in the wind. Ethan couldn’t look at it without something tightening in his chest.He rubbed his eyes and leaned back in his chair.He had written a dozen exposés in his life on corporate fraud, political laundering, digital blackmail but none had ever drained him like this

The highway to Tacoma stretched like a ribbon of wet glass under the morning mist.Ethan’s wipers thudded rhythmically, pushing away drizzle that refused to stop. Each swipe cleared the view for a second then the fog swallowed it again. It felt like driving through memory: shapes appeared, then vanished before he could decide if they were real.The radio hissed faint static. He wasn’t listening anyway.His mind replayed the warning message on his phone: STOP LOOKING FOR UMBRA.He’d deleted it, but the words stayed carved somewhere behind his eyes.Claire would have told him to keep going.She’d always said truth had a voice it whispered to people who refused to forget.He tightened his grip on the steering wheel.The UniversityTacoma State Research Center sat on a hill overlooking the sound, a cluster of gray buildings with mirrored windows. The campus was half-empty; students had scattered for spring break. Ethan parked beside the old computer-science wing and walked in through a sid

The rain had turned to mist again by the time Ethan reached the industrial side of the city. The streets were silent, warehouses looming like sleeping giants under a bruised sky. It was almost midnight.He parked two blocks away from the NeuroSys headquarters a glass-and-steel fortress that glowed faintly against the darkness. A place he once entered with an ID badge and purpose. Now, every window felt like an eye.Marcus was waiting beside a black sedan, the collar of his jacket turned up.“Still time to change your mind,” he muttered as Ethan approached.Ethan gave a thin smile. “If I had that luxury, I’d be asleep right now.”Marcus grunted. “Let’s move.”They crossed the service road and stopped near a back gate. A security drone hummed overhead, scanning the perimeter. Marcus opened a small case and pulled out a handheld device with blinking green lights.“Borrowed this from evidence lockup,” he said. “Disrupts low-frequency sensors for about thirty seconds. Gives us a window.”Et

Darkness.Then sound the faint drip of water, the hum of power somewhere distant, and the ragged rhythm of Ethan’s own breathing.He opened his eyes to blackness and pain.His head throbbed. The floor was cold and slick beneath him. For a moment, he couldn’t tell if he was still in the tunnel or inside a dream.“Marcus?” His voice came out hoarse.No answer.He pushed himself up, wincing. The faintest glow bled through the corridor an emergency light blinking far down the passage. He followed it, boots crunching on broken glass.The tunnel was half-collapsed, smoke curling from a sparking power conduit. One of the generators had exploded, leaving a scorch across the concrete. Ethan’s ears still rang from it.He called again, louder this time. “Marcus!”A groan answered from somewhere to his left.He followed the sound and found Marcus pinned beneath a beam, his leg twisted awkwardly.“Damn,” Marcus hissed when he saw him. “Thought you’d joined the ghosts.”Ethan knelt beside him, tryin

The convoy rolled out before dawn. Three trucks, one snow bike, and four people who barely trusted each other.Ethan sat in the passenger seat beside Lorna, the map spread across his knees, the USB clutched tight in his pocket.The world outside was dead quiet. Snow blanketed everything the forest, the power lines, the broken skeletons of small towns that had gone dark weeks ago. Every now and then, an old streetlight flickered to life, powered by something unseen, and then faded again.“Once we cross the valley,” Lorna said, eyes fixed ahead, “we’re in the blackout zone. No signals. No navigation. If we lose visual contact, we don’t regroup. We keep moving north.”Ethan nodded. “Got it.”Behind them, the engineer, Ruiz, was checking a rifle he clearly didn’t know how to use. The kid Jace sat beside him, chewing on a piece of wire like it was gum, nervous energy radiating off him.“Can I ask something?” Jace finally said.Lorna sighed. “Make it quick.”“Why not just nuke the whole zone