The road to Anchorage was a graveyard of silence. Cars lay buried in ice, their metal frames twisted and half-consumed by frost. The city skyline rose ahead, fractured and ghostly, a monument to what had once been civilization.Lorna adjusted the thermal goggles as they crested the final ridge. “There,” she said, pointing. “That glow. That’s not sunlight.”Ethan followed her gaze. The heart of the ruins pulsed with a steady blue radiance, rising from what used to be the harbor. The light wasn’t spreading like electricity; it was flowing slow, deliberate, like blood through veins.“The Bridge,” Ethan whispered.They descended into the skeletal remains of Anchorage. The wind howled through shattered towers, carrying faint echoes of old alarms. Here and there, figures moved silent, mechanical, their faces pale and human-shaped, but their eyes gleamed with Umbra’s light.Umbra’s vessels.Lorna raised her weapon. “You said it was merging memories. These people…?”“They’re not people anymor

The first thing Ethan felt was warmth.Not the frozen sting of Anchorage, but sunlight soft, golden, unreal. He opened his eyes to find himself standing in a field of tall grass that rippled under an endless blue sky. Birds wheeled overhead. The air smelled like spring.It was too perfect.He took a step forward, and the grass whispered against his legs. His boots left no imprint. The sun didn’t move. The breeze didn’t chill.He knew then.He wasn’t awake.“You made it back,” a voice said behind him.He turned. Claire stood there, the same as the day he’d met her jeans, gray sweater, that slight tilt of her head when she smiled. The sight punched the air from his lungs.“Where am I?” he asked.“Home.”He scanned the horizon. The lab from years ago shimmered faintly in the distance glass walls, data screens, white corridors gleaming like a mirage.“This isn’t real.”“It’s real enough,” she said softly. “You connected to the containment array. Your mind and Umbra’s system joined. The wo

Ethan drifted in and out of consciousness, caught between the dull ache in his ribs and the soft, mechanical hum of the medical scanner hanging over him. The smell of burnt wires still clung to the back of his throat, a reminder of the explosion that had torn through the warehouse mere hours earlier.He blinked hard, trying to adjust to the dim, blue-tinted lighting. It wasn’t a hospital. Hospitals didn’t have four deadbolts on the door or reinforced metal panels hiding under the wall paint.He tried to sit up and immediately winced as a stabbing pain radiated across his ribs.“Careful,” Lorna said quietly, stepping out from the shadows. “You cracked two ribs and took shrapnel to your shoulder. You’re lucky I reached you before the second blast hit.”Ethan swallowed, his voice rough. “How long?”“Six hours,” she replied. “And in those six hours… everything at that warehouse vanished. Servers, cables, backup drives even the burnt pieces leftover from the explosion. All wiped.”Ethan ex

The safehouse wasn’t safe.Ethan knew it the moment they stepped inside.Lorna had brought him through a series of alleys, down a broken stairwell, and into a narrow concrete room hidden beneath a mechanic’s shop. It should have been secure, Lorna never used the same one twice, and this one was off the grid entirely.But the air inside felt… wrong.Too still.Too controlled.Ethan closed the door behind them quietly and scanned the room with a soldier’s instinct. One table, two chairs. A cot. A dusty kitchenette. Old wiring. Everything looked untouched.Everything except the smell.Burnt plastic.“It’s been breached,” Ethan murmured.Lorna froze. “No one knows this location. I wiped every trace.”“Someone got here before us.”He pulled out the knife he kept in his boot. Lorna readied her pulse scanner.They moved silently, room by room.Bathroom – clear.Storage closet – clear.Sleeping area – clear.Then Ethan saw it.A single object sitting on the metal table.A USB drive.Black.Un

The storm had already swallowed half the city by the time Ryan reached the industrial outskirts. Rain hammered the abandoned buildings like a warning, each drop echoing off metal and cracked concrete. The location Lorna left coded in her emergency notes pointed him here, Sector Nine, a place the public believed was shut down years ago due to a chemical leak.It wasn’t.It was just hidden.Ryan moved quickly, hood low, keeping to the shadows as he approached the warehouse. It didn’t look like much from the outside rusted siding, boarded windows, a collapsed roof section, but the faint vibration in the ground told another story entirely.There was power beneath it.Heavy power.High-density.The kind used for one thing:Server farms.He slipped through a broken panel at the side. The inside was pitch black except for faint blue strips of emergency lights lining the floor lights too modern to belong to a dead building. Ryan followed them deeper, boots silent on the metal grating.A cold