All Chapters of THE GHOST PROTOCOL : Chapter 21
- Chapter 30
160 chapters
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE:THE SHADOW IN THE SYSTEM
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
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO:THE ECHO IN THE BLOOD
The room was silent except for the slow, rhythmic ticking of the old wall clock, the only object in the safehouse that hadn’t been smashed during their escape. Adrian sat on the edge of the table, elbows on his knees, fingers clasped so tightly the tendons bulged beneath his skin. He didn’t blink. He barely breathed.Mara watched him from across the room, leaning against the cracked plaster wall, but even she didn’t dare come closer. Not yet.He hadn’t moved since they arrived.Not after the fight.Not after the revelation.Not after the blood.Not after the truth about Cipher’s newest obsession:Adrian’s mind. His memories. His inheritance.The neural attack from the fake Kaine hadn’t just hit him, it had awakened something inside him that shouldn’t have existed.Something he didn’t understand yet.Mara swallowed the knot in her throat. Adrian Kaine was many things, cold, calculated, dangerous, but he was never still. The silence around him now felt wrong, like the air was holding it
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: THE PRICE OF BEING UNBREAKABLE
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
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: THE BLOOD THAT KNOWS YOUR NAME
The elevator shuddered as it rose, rattling against the rails like something alive was clawing at it from below. Adrian leaned against the metal wall, his breaths still uneven, his mind still struggling to stitch reality back together after the simulation fracture Cipher had forced him into.Mara stood in front of him, arms folded, pretending she wasn’t watching him, but she was. Every few seconds, she glanced at him like she expected him to collapse again.He hated that look. He hated that she’d seen him break.But he couldn’t erase the moment: the creature wearing Cole’s face, the false father, the detonator, the memory-rip.It still clung to him.Like something under his skin.The elevator screeched to a stop.Mara straightened. “Top floor. Extraction bay.”Adrian nodded but didn’t move yet. His hands were still trembling. He hid them by sliding them into his pockets.Mara noticed anyway.“You’re not fine,” she said quietly.“I’m breathing.”“That’s not the same thing.”He didn’t answer.She too
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: THE SHADOW IN THE SIGNAL
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
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX:THE FINGERPRINT OF GHOSTS
The storm rolled in before dawn, low thunder rattling the facility walls like distant artillery. Adrian barely heard it. He hadn’t slept. Not because he didn’t want to, but because he couldn’t. Not after what he’d seen in Cipher’s archives.Not after the revelation that someone in Cipher had been creating memory-ghosts of their past… and using them against him.And not after last night, After the message.A single encrypted file had appeared on the tablet he recovered from the data vault. No sender. No trace. No ID signature. Just one chilling sentence:“You’re looking in the wrong direction, Adrian. The traitor isn’t behind you. The traitor is beside you.”He’d stared at those words for hours.Mara slept across the room on a narrow steel cot, one arm draped over her face, her chest rising and falling in slow breaths. She hadn’t betrayed him. She couldn’t have. Not after everything they’d survived. Not after the way she pulled him back from the brink, the way she’d risked her life again and
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: SHADOWS THAT LEARN TO BREATHE
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
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: THE SHADOW BETWEEN TRUTHS
The sirens were still echoing through the fractured facility when Adrian forced himself to breathe again. Everything smelled of burning wires and cold steel. The last blast had knocked half the corridor offline, leaving only a stuttering emergency light to paint the walls in jolts of red. Mara stood beside him, her fingers trembling as she reloaded, eyes locked on the smoke-filled passage where the creature had vanished moments earlier.“It didn’t die,” she said quietly.Adrian didn’t answer. He already knew.Nothing Cipher created died easily, especially not something that wore Cole’s face.He stepped forward, boots crunching over broken glass, and peered into the settling smoke. The silence felt wrong. Not like an escape. Like a pause. As if the creature was waiting for the exact moment he let his guard down.Mara grabbed his arm. “Adrian. We need to move. Reinforcements will reach this sector in under four minutes.”“Good,” Adrian said. “I’m done running.”Mara’s jaw tightened. “You’re no
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE: THE THIN LINE BETWEEN TRUTH AND MADNESS
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
CHAPTER THIRTY: THE ROOM WITHOUT DOORS
The walls were too smooth, smooth enough to make Adrian believe they hadn’t been built, but grown. The faint blue gleam pulsed beneath the surface like veins made of light, breathing in and out in a rhythm that didn’t belong to anything human. It was silent, yet humming. Still, yet alive.Adrian forced himself to sit up.A headache pounded behind his eyes, sharp and rhythmic, almost like someone tapping from inside his skull. The last thing he remembered was the detonator going off, the blue flash, Mara’s scream, the creature with Cole’s stolen face leaping toward them,Then nothing.His pulse quickened as he scanned the strange room. No doors. No windows. No vents. Just a seamless circular chamber of shifting blue light that felt…watchful. Like it was studying him back.“Adrian.”The voice came from his right, familiar, steady, threaded with urgency.Mara.She was sitting against the wall, one knee bent, her hand pressed to her ribs. A bruise darkened the side of her face. She looked