The Memory Key burned hot against Ethan’s palm, like it was pulsing with a heartbeat that wasn’t his. Lorna stepped back cautiously, her eyes fixed on him, on the device, on the air itself like the room had shifted into some new gravity since the moment he activated it.His breath trembled.Then the world broke open.Light spilled around him not blinding, not violent, but soft, like a curtain of gold being pulled aside. He felt something loosen behind his eyes, a pressure he’d forgotten was even there.And then, He wasn’t standing in the UnderNet safehouse anymore.He was somewhere else.He was someone else.THE FIRST MEMORYA lab.Cold. Bright. Too quiet.The hum of machines filled the space, steady and faintly rhythmic, like mechanical breathing. Ethan stood in the center of the room, but he wasn’t alone. Figures in lab coats moved around him, blurred at the edges like half-loaded images.He looked down his hands were steady. Younger. Cleaner. No scars.He heard himself speak before

The message arrives at 3:14 a.m.Ethan isn’t asleep, he hasn’t truly slept since the fire memory began clawing its way back into his mind, but he’s lying still, staring at the ceiling of the safehouse as if the shadows might rearrange themselves into answers.They never do.A faint vibration touches the mattress. His phone, face-down beside him, lights up.Unknown Number.One line of text.Stop digging. The truth will break you.Ethan sits up slowly, pulse rising like a tide swallowing a shoreline.He doesn’t breathe. He doesn’t blink. He just stares.The world feels suddenly tilted, as though memory and reality have begun sliding against each other again.Of all the voices he has tried to bury…Marcus’s is the one that haunts.He reads the text again. And again.The warning isn’t a threat. It’s a promise.A promise only one man could craft with such serenity:Marcus Hale.The architect of Helix.The mentor Ethan once admired.The man who molded him, manipulated him, broke him and the

The bunker’s emergency lights stuttered back to life, bathing the room in a muted red glow. The screens were still overrun with the mirror lattice, pulsing like a heartbeat, steady, deliberate, alive. Marcus didn’t move. Not when Kai lowered his weapon. Not when Lorna whispered his name like a warning, like a question.He didn’t even blink.Because he knew what was coming next.The past always rose when the code called for it.Lorna stepped toward him slowly. “Marcus… what exactly did you bury?”For the first time in hours, Marcus spoke with a voice that felt like gravel dragged across cold metal. “This wasn’t supposed to exist anymore.”Kai scoffed. “You keep saying that. But that mirror protocol recognized your key. It greeted you by name.”Marcus didn’t deny it.Instead, he walked toward the far wall the one that had clicked open during the blackout. A thin seam now glowed faintly, marking a hidden door they had never seen before.Lorna watched him with a tightening jaw. “Start tal

Marcus had seen system failures before temp shutdowns, corrupted feeds, isolated breaches, but nothing behaved like this. The Grid Needle’s activation hummed beneath every monitor in the ops room, a faint vibration like a heartbeat buried under metal. The lights hadn’t flickered. No alarms were blaring. The city above still moved on with its usual mechanical confidence. But Marcus knew. Something was wrong in a way the Grid had no language for.He stood over the console, gaze locked on the silent cascade of system logs. No red alerts. No breach flags. Only the faint digital equivalent of a held breath. A sequence of commands had executed without author tags, leaving behind an impossible signature: no origin point. Commands always came from somewhere, even a spoof had fingerprints. But these didn’t. They were void-made.Lorna hovered behind him, arms folded tight. “It’s too quiet,” she said. “You ever seen the logs go dark like that?”“No,” Marcus answered. “And that’s the part that sc

The drive to the coordinates was silent, not the comfortable kind, but the heavy, suffocating silence that came when Marcus’s mind was moving faster than any of the machines around him. He didn’t speak. Kai didn’t push. The city flickered in and out of half-light as they sped through abandoned industrial blocks, the old factories blinking like rusted sentinels.The coordinates led somewhere no one went willingly.Sector 12.A place mapped on paper, but long erased from public knowledge.When the car finally rolled to a stop, the building in front of them looked dead. A wide structure made of old concrete slabs and reinforced steel, windows blacked out, walls scarred with decades of neglect. No lights. No movement. No life.But Marcus felt it.Something inside was awake.He stepped out of the vehicle slowly, jaw set, gaze locked on the structure. Kai flanked behind him, weapon drawn, scanning the perimeter.“You feel that?” Kai asked.Marcus nodded. “Pressure waves.”“To what?”“An int