Adrian didn’t sleep, not really. His body lay still on the thin mattress of the safehouse bunk, but his mind was a battlefield that refused to quiet. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw fragments,Blue light ripping through his skull.The creature wearing Cole’s face.His father’s calm smile.Mara’s voice calling his name, shaking and raw.He jerked awake again, breath harsh, sweat cold against his shirt. The room was dim, lit only by a single emergency lamp hooked to a dying battery. The safehouse felt too small, too quiet, too temporary, because it was.Cipher was out there.The creature was out there.And something in Adrian’s mind… wasn’t the same anymore.He rubbed his temples. He didn’t know if the pressure in his skull was leftover pain or something deeper. Something Cipher planted. Something his father triggered.Footsteps approached the door before it opened with a soft creak.Mara stepped inside carrying a datapad and a cup of something steaming. Her hair was tied back loo

The room felt too small.Adrian paced from one end of the abandoned infirmary to the other, the broken lights above him humming like insects trying to whisper warnings. He tried to make sense of what he’d seen, of the memories Cipher tried to rewrite in his head, of the flashes of his father’s face bending between truth and illusion, and of the clone-units hunting them through steel corridors.But nothing fit.The world felt fractured, like a mirror he kept trying to piece back together even though the edges kept slicing his fingers.Mara watched him from the corner of the room, seated on an overturned metal crate. Her elbows rested on her knees, her face half-shadowed. She looked like she’d aged ten years in the last hour. And maybe she had. Trauma had a way of carving people deeper than bullets ever could.“You’re circling like an animal,” she said quietly. “You need to sit.”He didn’t. Couldn’t.Every time he blinked, the white flash returned, the neural detonator burning its way into his

The storm broke over the mountains long before they reached the ridge. Adrian felt the first tremor before he heard it, the low, rolling growl of thunder vibrating through the valley floor like the earth itself had begun to breathe. Wind clawed at the treetops, tearing leaves free and hurling them into the night as he and Mara pressed forward, soaked to the bone, cold cutting through the seams of their uniforms.The ruined research outpost loomed ahead, half-buried beneath collapsed beams and creeping vines. According to Cipher’s old internal maps, this place had once been called Station Helix, but whatever purpose it once served, nature had swallowed it almost entirely.And hidden somewhere inside, Mara insisted, was the one thing they desperately needed:A surviving access core, one containing Cipher’s pre-war archives.If they were lucky, if Cipher hadn’t wiped it all, those files might reveal who was pulling the strings behind the cloned units, who resurrected their father, and why Ad

Smoke still drifted through the ruined corridor, curling around Adrian like the ghosts of every choice that had led him here. His pulse hammered against the quiet, uneven throb of the emergency lights. Behind him, the alarms had finally died, leaving the facility in an eerie, suffocating stillness.But the silence didn’t comfort him.It felt like Cipher was holding its breath.Mara pressed her back against the wall, one arm wrapped tightly around her ribs. She didn’t complain, didn’t slow, but the tension in her jaw told Adrian the hit she’d taken earlier was worse than she let on. Blood darkened the fabric of her suit. She ignored it.She always ignored her pain.“We need to keep moving,” Mara said, her voice steady but low. “What happened back there… whatever that detonator did to you… Cipher won’t let that be the end.”Adrian nodded, though the electricity buzzing faintly under his skin hadn’t faded. His vision still pulsed every now and then, as if a piece of that blue light still lived

The alarms were still screaming overhead when Adrian forced himself up from the debris-littered floor. Smoke curled through the shattered corridor, thick enough to burn the back of his throat. His ears rang from the blast, everything distorted, distant, hollow, like he was underwater.But the memory hit him first.Mara’s hand slipping from his.The ground ruptured beneath them.Her body disappeared into the collapsing shaft.He staggered forward, blinking through the haze. “Mara!”His voice didn’t echo. The entire wing was too damaged, metal warped, ceiling half-collapsed, walls trembling with every groan of the dying facility.Adrian pushed through a fallen beam, ignoring the sting of metal gouging his shoulder. He stared down into the jagged, black maw where the floor had caved. Sparks flickered deep below like dying fireflies.“Mara!” he shouted again.Silence. Only the settling clatter of debris.He swallowed hard.She was alive. She had to be. Cipher didn’t get to take her too.H