All Chapters of The Shadow Code: Chapter 21
- Chapter 30
100 chapters
Chapter 21: Blood on The Circuits
The storm started before Ethan and Lorna even reached the compound.A thick sheet of rain hammered the windshield as the abandoned server farm came into view an enormous concrete block swallowed by weeds, broken fencing, and decades of silence. Power lines sagged in the wind like snapped nerves, and the sky above flickered with weak lightning, casting long shadows across the building’s gutted frame.Ethan killed the headlights and coasted the last few meters in darkness.“This place feels wrong,” Lorna murmured, staring through the rain-blurred glass.“It’s supposed to,” Ethan replied, pulling his hood over his head. “The Shadow Code never hides in places that feel safe. Comfort is a luxury. Fear keeps you alert.”Lorna swallowed hard. She’d been on edge since she received the threatening message exposing her past. Ethan had seen her eyes sharpened, calculating, but scared. He didn’t push her. Not yet.They slipped out of the car into the rain, moving quickly across the cracked paveme
Chapter 22: Marcus Vale Resurfaces
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
Chapter 23: A City Listening
The rain had not stopped for two days, but tonight it fell with a strange rhythm like fingertips tapping on glass, like coded knocks on the city’s spine. Lorna sat in the observation deck of the municipal surveillance hub, a half-lit tower that overlooked Helion City like a lone watchman. Rows of monitors glowed around her, all muted, all waiting. The hum of the servers below vibrated faintly through the steel floor.She wasn’t supposed to be here. Not this late. Not after everything that happened at the Arcology. But sleep had become a luxury she couldn’t afford, not when Marcus Vale had resurfaced and not when the Shadow Code seemed to be breathing through the city’s infrastructure again.A message flashed on the central dashboard:AUDIO VIBRATION PATTERNS DETECTED SOURCE UNKNOWNLorna leaned forward, her pulse tightening. “Not again,” she whispered.The city’s acoustic sensors thousands of them embedded in old street lamps, building facades, even bus stop rails were originally desi
Chapter 24: Ghost Protocols
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.
Chapter 25: The Intercepted Transmission
The city had gone quiet in a way Marcus Vale didn’t trust too still, too intentional, like someone had pressed mute on a world that should never be silent. Rain tapped against the windows of the abandoned telecom hub he was using as a temporary base, thin rhythmic beats cutting through the hum of dying servers. The place smelled of dust, copper, and something else fear, maybe. Fear left a scent when enough people breathed it.Marcus sat at the cracked workstation, eyes fixed on the wall of monitors he had rebuilt from scraps. A blinking red icon pulsed in the corner of the main screen, steady… insistent… wrong. That symbol hadn’t appeared in over six years not since the last time he had been involved with Operation Black Veil.He leaned forward.INCOMING UNAUTHORIZED SIGNAL. SOURCE UNKNOWN.INTERCEPTION POSSIBLE.The Shadow Code rarely sent messages. When they did, the world bled.His fingers hovered over the keyboard for half a second before he entered the command.INTERCEPT.The scr
Chapter 26: The Woman in the Red Coat
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.
Chapter 27: A Deal With The Undernet
The city never truly slept, but at 3:14 a.m., it shivered. Streetlights flickered. Traffic signals lagged. Surveillance drones glided slower than usual, their blue guidance strips pulsing like a heartbeat out of sync. Ethan noticed every anomaly as he moved through the industrial outskirts, his footsteps deliberate, his senses sharpened to a razor’s edge.The memory capsule Aria had given him sat cold in his pocket. He hadn’t dared open it yet not without a secure environment. And the safest place in the city for anything forbidden, corrupted, or outlawed was buried beneath a scrapyard on the edge of South Quill District.The UnderNet.A digital black market. A ghost network. A hive of hackers, code-breakers, ex-operatives, criminals, and geniuses who lived off the grid. If the traditional web was the bloodstream of the city, the UnderNet was the rot growing underneath. No one entered this place without being changed or owned.Ethan approached the scrapyard’s rusted gate. A mechanical
Chapter 28: The Stimulation Archive
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
Chapter 29: Lorna Breaks
Lorna had always held herself like glass transparent enough to be read, but tempered enough never to shatter. That morning, Ethan finally saw the first fracture.The sun hadn’t risen yet. The city was in that bluish quiet where everything felt suspended. They were still in the abandoned mag-lev depot where they had slept for two hours just enough to stay functional, not enough to mend the exhaustion stitched into their bones.Ethan woke to find the world trembling.Not an earthquake.Not a drone scanning grid.Not Kade’s footsteps returning.It was Lorna.She stood near the broken window, arms wrapped around herself, shaking so violently her breath fogged the dusty glass. Ethan approached slowly, careful not to startle her.“Lorna?” he said softly.She didn’t turn.Didn’t blink.Didn’t speak.She just stared out into the empty station yard as if something out there had followed her into the night. Ethan stepped beside her, and only then did she whisper:“They found her.”Ethan frowned
Chapter 30: The Memory Key
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