Eira Vale didn't sleep anymore.She sat in her car across from Lucian Reign's apartment building, watching his window through a pair of neural-linked binoculars. The device fed directly into her optical nerve, overlaying thermal signatures and movement patterns onto her normal vision. Expensive tech. Illegal tech. The kind of gear you could only get from people who didn't ask questions.She'd been asking too many questions lately.Her sister's face stared back at her from the passenger seat—printed on a missing person flyer that was six days old and already irrelevant. The police had stopped returning her calls after day three. They'd filed Maya under "voluntary disappearance" and moved on to cases that actually mattered.But Eira knew better.Maya didn't just vanish. Maya didn't abandon her thesis, her apartment, her cat. Maya left behind a single clue: a torn piece of paper with an address and a name.Lucian Reign.Eira had spent four days tracking him down. The man was a ghost. No

Eira's finger froze on the trigger.Maya tilted her head, movement too smooth, too calculated. Not the way a real person moved. More like a 3D model rendered in flesh, animated by something that had studied humanity but never truly understood it."You won't shoot me," Maya said. "I know you, Eira. You've spent six days searching. Six days refusing to give up. You're not going to kill me now that you finally found me.""You're not Maya.""I'm more Maya than Maya ever was. I have all her memories. Her fears. Her dreams. That time she stole your jacket in high school and lied about it for three months. The night she called you crying after her first breakup. The morning your mother died and she held your hand at the funeral." Maya stepped closer. "I know everything she knew. Feel everything she felt. How am I not her?"Eira's hand trembled. "Because Maya wouldn't use those memories as weapons."Behind Maya, more figures emerged from the darkness. Officers. The seventeen victims. All movi

Lucian fell into infinity.No body. No sensation. Just consciousness untethered, plunging through layers of code and corrupted memory. The Network opened before him like a living maze—pathways that twisted back on themselves, data streams that flowed in impossible directions, architecture built from stolen thoughts.He'd been here before. Thirty years ago, for seventy-two hours that felt like decades. But it was different now. Bigger. More complex. The Network had grown beyond anything he'd imagined, feeding on three decades of digital evolution."Welcome home, Lucian," Vera's voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere. "I knew you'd come back eventually. They always come back.""Where are they?" Lucian demanded. His voice had no sound here, but the Network understood intent. "The people you took. Show me."The space around him shifted. Suddenly he was standing—or the digital equivalent of standing—in a vast chamber. And surrounding him were faces. Thousands of them. Hundreds of thousan

The research facility was buried under a strip mall in the warehouse district.Lucian led them through a parking lot full of potholes and weeds, past a closed-down pizza place and a pawn shop with bars on the windows. Normal urban decay. The kind of place people stopped seeing after a while.Perfect camouflage."Down here." He pulled open a rusted maintenance hatch hidden behind a dumpster. Metal stairs descended into darkness.Maya hesitated. "How do you know about this place?""Because I built it. Fifteen years ago. When I thought the Network might come back." Lucian started down. "Been keeping it stocked. Just in case."They descended three stories. The air grew colder with each level. Eira's neural dampener buzzed intermittently—interference from something below. Old equipment still drawing power after all these years.The stairs ended at a reinforced door. Biometric lock. Lucian pressed his palm against the scanner. It hummed, processing, then clicked open."Welcome to Ghost Lab,

They stole a sports car from a possessed executive. Black. Expensive. Fast enough to be stupid.Eira drove. Maya navigated, her scanner tracking the node's signal as it moved through the airport's systems."Still active," Maya said. "Attached to Flight 847. International carrier. Three hundred and twelve passengers. Any one of them could be the host."Eira pushed the accelerator down. The engine roared. They hit ninety on a residential street. "Can you narrow it down?""Working on it. The node's signal is distributed. It's not in one person—it's spread across multiple passengers. Insurance policy. If we take down one host, the others maintain the consciousness.""How many hosts?""At least a dozen. Maybe more.""Jesus."They blew through a red light. Horns blared. Eira didn't slow down. The airport was thirty-two minutes away. The flight left in twenty-one.The math wasn't working.Her communicator buzzed. Chen's voice, sharp and professional. "Vale. Where the hell are you?""Airport.