BLACKOUT PROTOCOL

Chapter 9

“Grab his hand, Ethan… or both of you are going to die”

Glass exploded as Ethan and the duplicate tore through the shattered wall of the operations center. For a suspended moment there was only the sensation of falling cold wind, swallowing darkness, and the distant scream of alarms fading into the storm.

Impact came like a hammer. They hit a lower rooftop hard enough to fracture concrete. Ethan rolled across the rain-slick surface, smashing into a metal ventilation unit. Pain erupted through his injured shoulder like fire.

The duplicate landed several meters away and rose at once. Still functional. Still alive.

Rain hammered the rooftop while broken glass fell down like glittering shrapnel from the sky above.

Ethan forced himself upright, shaking. The duplicate straightened at the same time. Blood soaked through the chest wound, yet his face remained unchanged.

No fear. No hesitation. No humanity.

“You should be dead,” Ethan said calmly.

The duplicate tilted his head.

“I was improved.”

Lightning split the sky, briefly turning the city into a shadow of steel and smoke.

Below and above them, Crowe’s forces and resistance fighters tore through the building in gunfire and chaos.

The duplicate removed his ruined jacket, revealing reinforced surgical plating beneath the torn skin. Ethan’s stomach tightened.

“What are you?”

“A refined outcome.”

Then he moved. Fast beyond expectation. Ethan barely blocked the first strike before a second crushed into his ribs. The duplicate fought like something built rather than born, every movement stripped of hesitation.

Ethan drove an elbow upward into his throat. Nothing changed. Impossible.

They moved across the rooftop in a violent rhythm of rain and impact. Ethan was driven back toward the ledge where thirty stories of open air waited.

The duplicate struck him across the face with a headbutt that shattered Ethan’s focus. He was thrown hard across the roof. Concrete cracked beneath him.

“You are inadequate,” the duplicate said calmly.

“Crowe expected more.”

Ethan spat blood.

“Crowe lies a lot.”

The duplicate paused. A flicker of disturbance crossed his face.

“You sound like him.”

“Like who?”

The answer came after a hesitation that should not have existed.

“Our father.”

Silence deepened. Ethan’s breath slowed.

“What did you say?”

The duplicate pressed fingers to his temple, frowning as if something inside him resisted.

“I hear him sometimes.”

Ethan studied him differently now. Not as an enemy. As something broken.

“You are not fully controlled,” Ethan said.

The duplicate snapped his gaze up.

“Stop.”

“Crowe lied to you.”

“Stop talking.”

Emotion broke through the surface, rage, confusion, something almost like grief. Ethan rose slowly.

“What is your name?”

The duplicate froze. Then answered flatly.

“I have none.”

The words landed heavier than any punch. No name. No self. Only construction.

“He said names create weakness,” the duplicate added.

“Crowe said that?”

“Yes.”

Ethan’s jaw tightened. Crowe did not build soldiers. He erased people. The rooftop door burst open. Soldiers flooded in, rifles raised.

“There”

The duplicate turned slightly. Annoyed. Not obedient.

“Orders changed,” one soldier shouted.

“Both targets alive.”

The duplicate’s expression darkened.

“Both?”

“Yes, Extraction priority updated”

The realization settled between Ethan and the duplicate at the same moment. They were both disposable.

“Stand down,” the soldier ordered.

The duplicate exhaled slowly.

“No.”

Violence erupted. He moved first, tearing a rifle away and snapping the soldier’s neck before the man could react. Ethan engaged another attacker, slamming him into the ledge as bullets carved through the rain.

The rooftop became a storm of bodies and gunfire. The duplicate was no longer restrained. He killed with precision and speed that felt mechanical.

Yet Ethan noticed something shifting. He was not following Crowe’s orders anymore. The last soldier stumbled backward.

“You’re malfunctioning”

The duplicate walked toward him.

“No,” he said softly.

A gunshot ended the man’s life. Silence followed. Rain washed blood across the concrete. Ethan lowered his weapon.

“What now?” he asked.

The duplicate looked to the city lights.

“I do not know.”

It was the most human sentence yet spoken. Helicopters roared overhead. Searchlights pinned them in place. Loudspeakers crackled.

“Do not move”

The duplicate looked up.

“They will not stop.”

Us. Not you. Us. Ethan understood. Before anything else could be said, a missile fired from above.

The duplicate grabbed Ethan. And leapt off the roof into the storm.

The helicopters circled like mechanical predators, slicing beams of white light through rain thick enough to sting the skin. Wind tore across the rooftop remnants, carrying the smell of burning fuel and wet metal.

Ethan caught a glimpse of Crowe’s insignia on the underside of one aircraft before it vanished into the cloud again. The fall swallowed them instantly.

Air screamed past Ethan’s ears as the building rose away like a collapsing tower of memory. For a moment his mind refused to process anything except speed and gravity. The duplicate held him tightly, not like a captor, but like an anchor refusing to break. Ethan looked at him mid-fall.

“Why are you doing this?”

The duplicate’s voice cut through the wind.

“Because I choose to.”

The words should not have been possible. Choice. Not programming. Not command.

Below them, the city blurred into streaks of light and shadow. Rain turned into needles against their skin. The missile detonated above the rooftop, blooming into a silent orange flare that lit the storm like a second sun.

The shockwave followed seconds later, shaking the air around them violently.

The duplicate adjusted their route slightly, guiding their descent through collapsing currents of wind. Ethan realized then that he was not being dropped. He was being carried.

Behind them, helicopters shifted direction rapidly, hunting.

Crowe’s voice crackled faintly through comms somewhere above, distorted by static and thunder.

“Retrieve them. Do not lose either asset.”

Asset. Not sons. Not men. Assets. The duplicate’s grip tightened. For the first time, Ethan felt something like shared defiance between them.

Not obedience. Not programming. Something dangerously close to freedom. They disappeared deeper into the storm’s darkness as the city swallowed their fall.

The wind grew colder as they dropped through layers of storm cloud, the world above fading into distant thunder. Ethan’s mind raced between fear and disbelief, yet beneath it all was a strange awareness that the man holding him was no longer entirely what Crowe intended.

The duplicate’s eyes stayed open through the fall, scanning the dark like he was calculating survival rather than simply reacting. Every movement of his grip adjusted subtly, correcting their descent as if gravity itself was being negotiated. Ethan shouted over the wind,

“If we survive this, what are we?”

For a moment, there was only rushing air. Then the answer came, quiet but certain.

“Not his.”

Below them, the city waited unforgiving, vast, and alive with consequences. The storm swallowed them completely as they continued to fall, no longer just targets of a mission, but something undefined and dangerous forming between control and choice.

In the distance, more searchlights began sweeping through the rain, but the storm kept most of them hidden. For the first time, Ethan stopped thinking about escape alone and started thinking about survival together, whether he wanted to or not. Something was changing between them in freefall and neither knew. The fall felt longer than life itself.