Ethan didn’t breathe for almost a full minute after the door clicked shut behind Lorna. The sound echoed in his skull, sharp, metallic, decisive. He lowered himself into the nearest chair as if gravity had suddenly multiplied. His pulse thrashed against his ribs in a confused, frantic rhythm. She had locked the door. From the outside. Lorna who never locked anything around him had walked out with her shoulders tight and her eyes hollow like she was protecting him from her. Or worse protecting something inside her from being stopped.The silence in the apartment was the wrong kind of dark. Not the quiet of late nights after coding marathons, not the comfortable stillness they used to share. This was a vacuum, a space missing something essential. Ethan dragged both hands through his hair, forcing himself upright. He needed to breathe. He needed to think. He needed answers.He reached for his tablet, pulling up every diagnostic line he had on Lorna’s neural activity since her abduction.

Ethan Rowe sat alone in the dim operations room, the glow of a single monitor illuminating the sharp edges of his face. The hum of the system filled the silence like a pulse. Outside the reinforced windows, the storm hammered the streets, but Ethan didn’t notice. He hadn’t noticed weather in years. Weather was noise. The grid was signal.And tonight, the signal was shifting.He leaned back in his chair, fingers tapping the armrest with slow, deliberate rhythm. Two beats. Pause. Three beats. A habit he picked up during the Blackline Incident, when one mistake could have cost him far more than a badge.“Vale moved,” Ethan whispered to himself.Not surprised. Not alarmed. Just… confirming something he had already predicted.Ethan was one of the few people who understood Marcus Vale’s patterns, not because Vale had taught him, and not because Ethan had worked under him, but because Ethan had once studied the same darkness that shaped Vale. Their philosophies diverged. Their methods did no

The storm hit the city like a warning. Sheets of rain hammered the rooftops, turning the neon skyline into a trembling blur of lights. From the window of the abandoned telecom exchange Ethan had claimed as his new base, the whole grid hummed beneath him alive, furious, and waiting. The Hackers’ Covenant was scattered across four different safehouses, and Lorna’s condition had settled into a fragile, frightening calm. Her mind was still drifting between fragments of code and memory, like she was stuck somewhere between consciousness and a machine’s dream.But tonight wasn’t about waiting.Tonight was about finally understanding why Vale had spent ten years building a cyber-empire inside the bones of the city.Ethan adjusted his headset as the Covenant connected one by one.“online.”“ready.”“monitoring channels.”“firewalls solid.”He exhaled slowly. The storm outside cracked against the sky, illuminating the room in white light. Perfect. Noise in the grid meant noise in the surveilla

The blackout rolled across the city like a living shadow, spilling from district to district, devouring neon, drowning screens, and silencing the constant mechanical heartbeat that defined the grid. For the first time in years, the skyline stood naked, no flicker, no pulse, no electronic hum, only the raw darkness of a city stripped of its armor. And in that darkness, three battles unfolded at once, converging in ways none of them could yet see.ETHANHe entered the Covenant’s cryptic chamber with a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. The doors sealed behind him with a mechanical hiss, leaving him alone with the final array. The walls glowed with cascading threads of red and blue code, twisting like veins, like nerves, like something alive. His wrist interface vibrated violently, Vale’s blackout had begun.“Of course he forces my hand now,” Ethan muttered.At the center of the chamber was the device, an obsidian console split into two hemispheres, each glowing faintly. One red

The countdown bled red across the steel door, each second striking Ethan like a hammer to the ribs.59:1259:1159:10He inhaled once slow, steady then forced the handle open. The door hissed, releasing a burst of stale, metallic air that smelled of cold machinery and something older… something chemical. The Red Chamber lay somewhere beneath this façade, buried under layers of decoys and forgotten floors.Ethan stepped inside.The door slammed shut behind him with a metallic finality that echoed like the sealing of a tomb.He moved into the dark.A narrow hallway stretched ahead, lined with flickering strip-lights that activated only as he passed, each one burning out behind him, leaving a trail of dead illumination. Vale wanted him moving forward. No turning back.“Classic,” Ethan muttered under his breath. Vale always did love his theatrics.A soft hum vibrated through the floor.Then a voice synthetic, feminine, warm in a way that made his stomach twist, filled the corridor:“Welco