The rain had slowed to a cold drizzle by the time Ethan and Lorna reached the safehouse an abandoned communications bunker carved into the side of a hill, reinforced with steel beams and coated in layers of dust. It wasn’t comfortable, and it wasn’t warm, but it was hidden, and hidden was all they could afford.Ethan pushed the heavy metal door shut behind them and locked every bolt. Then he stood still. Quiet. Unmoving. His jaw clenched so tightly it hurt.Lorna watched him cautiously from across the dimly lit room.“Ethan,” she said softly. “You need to sit.”He didn’t. He just stared at the floor, rainwater dripping from his hair, his breathing shallow, almost mechanical.Marcus Vale.It felt unreal every time his mind replayed the moment. Seeing him older, hollow-eyed, still carrying that same calculating expression had ripped something open inside Ethan. A piece of himself he had buried years ago.Lorna tried again. “You’re shaking.”He wasn’t. Not externally.Inside, though ever

The city felt wrong.Not in the usual Helion City way corrupt, crowded, buzzing with restless electricity, but wrong in a deeper, structural sense, as if something beneath the asphalt had shifted. As if the ground itself were thinking.Lorna sensed it the moment she stepped out of the surveillance van and followed Rourke toward the derelict terminal on the city’s eastern fringe. The old freight station was abandoned decades ago, its steel skeleton rusted into a graveyard of forgotten machinery. But tonight, strange power pulses throbbed from beneath the cracked concrete like a buried heart restarting.“This place was shut down before I joined the Bureau,” Lorna murmured.Rourke didn’t slow his pace. “Because it wasn’t a freight terminal. That was a cover.”“For what?”“You’re about to see.”He pressed his hand against an unmarked steel slab. It scanned him with a faint hum. The slab then split down the middle, sliding open to reveal an elevator descending into darkness.Lorna blinked.

The street was too quiet for a Friday night. Neon lights blinked lazily above puddles of old rainwater, and the city hummed its usual static, but something in the air felt… wrong. Ethan Hart didn’t slow down as he crossed the intersection. His mind was still buzzing from the server farm raid, from the bodies, from the blackout, from the fact that Marcus Vale, the man he’d buried in memory was alive and leading the Shadow Code. All night, the city had been shifting like something alive, listening to his footsteps, watching him. He didn’t know if it was paranoia or the AI turning its eyes toward him again. What he did know was that someone was following him.He didn’t hear her at first; he felt her. The soft alignment of footsteps matching his rhythm, the faint presence hovering just outside his field of view. Ethan turned into an alley where the street cameras were fried. He made sure to keep his breathing calm, to hide the tension pulling his shoulders tight.Five seconds passed.Ten.

The descent into the Archive felt nothing like the UnderNet tunnels, or even the hidden labs Ethan had infiltrated in the past. This place wasn’t built by criminals or syndicates. It felt older colder as though the air remembered every secret ever whispered in its presence. The elevator cage shuddered as it sank, lights flickering over Ethan and Lorna. Neither spoke. There was too much weight pressing against the silence.The UnderNet broker, a gaunt man with implants stitched into his jawline, had given Ethan a single warning before sending them down: “What you see there will ruin the idea of reality for you.” Ethan didn’t flinch then. Now, as the elevator rattled deeper beneath the city, he began to understand why that warning wasn’t dramatic. It was literal.A soft chime sounded. The gate slid open.And the world they stepped into shouldn’t have existed.Rows of cylindrical pods rose like metallic pillars in an endless grid. The ceiling was too distant to see. White-blue light wash

For a moment, Ethan couldn’t tell if the cold he felt came from the abandoned station around him or from the name Lorna had just spoken into existence.Nathan Hale.It didn’t belong to him, yet it sat in his chest like a weight he had carried his whole life without knowing. Lorna watched him carefully, her face still streaked from tears she refused to let slow her down.“They recognized you,” she repeated quietly. “Not as Ethan. As Nathan Hale.”The name echoed through his mind.It didn’t trigger a memory.It didn’t spark a flashback.It just… pressed against him.Hard. Unyielding.“Say it again,” Ethan said, steady but low.“Nathan Hale,” Lorna whispered.Something tightened behind Ethan’s ribs. Not a memory, something deeper. A reflex. As if his body remembered what his mind could not.“Who the hell is Nathan Hale?” he asked finally.Lorna hesitated. “I don’t know everything. Just fragments. Just enough to understand why they wiped you.”“Tell me.”She exhaled slowly, bracing hersel