Adrian caught Carl's wrist before the second shove landed. He twisted it sideways and stepped in close, forcing Carl's arm behind his back. Carl yelped and tried to swing with his free hand, but Adrian shifted his weight, hooked Carl's ankle, and put him on the floor so fast the man's cigar fell out of his breast pocket before his back hit the carpet.The room went silent. Carl lay on the floor staring at the ceiling with his face red and his breathing heavy. The other relative was frozen on the couch with a glass of wine halfway to his lips."Being family does not give you permission to insult her." Adrian released Carl's wrist and stepped back. "Remember that."Kathy grabbed Adrian's arm and pulled him toward the door. "Come on. We are leaving."They drove to Adrian's office at Skyward. Kathy sat across from him and placed the photograph on the desk between them. Adrian studied the woman's face carefully, then opened his laptop and began searching through old records."Her face is n

The address led them to a property forty minutes outside the city. An old industrial building surrounded by chain link fence and dead grass, sitting at the end of a road that looked like nobody had driven on it in years. Adrian parked the car a hundred meters away and studied the building through the windshield."This was registered under a company your mother worked for before she disappeared." He turned to Kathy. "The registration was never transferred. Technically, it still belongs to her.""Then let's go inside."They climbed through a gap in the fence and walked toward the front entrance. Adrian reached for the door handle, and then he heard it. Footsteps. Not one pair. Several. Coming from both sides of the building at the same time.Four men stepped out from behind the walls. They were dressed in dark clothes, faces covered, moving in formation. The lead man raised his hand and pointed directly at Adrian."Turn around. Leave. This is your only warning."Adrian pulled Kathy behi

"If you won't tell me the truth, I will find it myself." Kathy picked up her bag and walked toward the door. "And when I do, don't pretend you tried to help."Victor did not move. His eyes followed her out, and Adrian saw something in them that he recognized. Not anger. Fear. The deep, quiet fear of a man who knows the walls he built are about to come down.Back at Skyward, Adrian plugged into the encrypted network Sarah had set up. He began running traces on Elena's old records, pulling data from sealed archives and dormant government systems. The information was fragmented, scattered across databases that had been deliberately corrupted.Then the screen flickered. Someone else was inside the system. Adrian watched as files began disappearing in real time, one after another, vanishing from the server like lights going out along a corridor."They're deleting the records." Adrian's fingers moved fast across the keyboard. "Someone is watching us right now and erasing everything we found

Adrian stared at the records. The dates matched his first days in prison. He remembered the injections. He remembered a nurse telling him it was routine, nothing to worry about. He had not questioned it because his mind was already drowning in grief and anger and the weight of what he had just done."Why would they want me to forget the people around me but keep the work?""Because the work was worth billions. You were not. As long as you remembered how to code, how to think, how to build, they could always find a way to use you later. But if you remembered the people who helped you, you might try to find them. And if you found them, you might discover what Meridian had done."Kathy spoke from across the room. Her voice was tight and controlled, but underneath it was something raw and burning."You disappeared when I was two months old. Victor found me alone in your apartment. You left a baby in a crib by herself."Elena's face changed. The clinical composure she had been wearing sinc

Elena stood in front of the digital whiteboard in Skyward's secure conference room. She had drawn a diagram from memory, lines and boxes connecting names and dates and systems that spanned over a decade. Adrian sat across from her, staring at the board like a man reading his own autopsy report."You called it Project Aegis." Elena tapped a box at the center of the diagram. "Not the version Skyward uses now. The original. The one you built before everything fell apart.""I remember the name. I remember working on it. But I don't remember why I stopped.""You didn't stop. You hid it." Elena turned to face him. "The original Aegis was not an information processing system, Adrian. It was a behavioral prediction engine. It didn't just analyze data. It studied how people think, how they react under pressure, how they make decisions when they believe nobody is watching. And then it predicted what they would do next.""How accurate was it?""In controlled testing, it predicted human decision