2025-05-20 22:11:38
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Ch-55
Nathan's boots echoed through the underground lab’s sterile corridor, a steady rhythm of urgency and restraint. Subject 028C hung limply in his arms, her breath ragged, her face a mirror-image ghost of someone he was supposed to protect. Or rather, someone who was supposed to protect him! She wasn’t Harper, but she was close enough to make him flinch every time she whispered his name like she remembered him."I told you not to come back here…" Harrow snapped the moment he entered the quarantine bay. The old doctor looked up from his terminal, brows furrowed beneath the glow of a dozen screens.Nathan laid the girl down on the examination table. “I had no choice. They were overwriting her with Harper’s neural map. She was bleeding memories she didn’t earn.”“She’s unstable,” Harrow said, eyeing the subject like a ticking bomb. “It’s a half-graft. A neural parasite caught mid-feed. She’s not Harper. She’s not herself either. She’s a… glitch.”A soft noise made them both freeze.The g
Ch-54
The snow was a blanket of silence.Red Hollow loomed in the distance—half-buried under ice, crumbling on the edges, yet pulsing faintly with power beneath its rotted surface. A mausoleum with a heartbeat. Nathan crouched on the ridge, goggles tracking heat signatures below. Nine guards on rotation. Three at the perimeter. One at the central tower. Two underground.And one subject.No movement from her cell in the last twelve hours.He exhaled, breath fogging against the inside of his mask. “I’m going in.”Dr. Harrow’s voice crackled in his ear. “Be precise. Their uplink refreshes every seven minutes. That’s your window to breach the firewall.”Nathan adjusted the bio-scrambler on his wrist and launched into motion, sliding down the slope between trees. Snow crunched under his boots in rhythmic bursts, muffled by layered noise-cancellation tech. At the fence, he clipped a signal disruptor onto the grid. The hum of surveillance cams dipped for five seconds—just long enough.He vaulted o
Ch-53
The first sign was barely more than a flicker. A tremor in Harper’s left hand, a subtle curl of her fingers beneath the blanket. Nathan, half-asleep beside her bed, caught it from the corner of his eye. He straightened instantly, heart pounding, gaze fixed on her face. Her lashes twitched. A faint crease appeared between her brows, as if something in her dreamscape tugged at her mind, trying to drag her upward through layers of fog. Her lips parted, and a whisper caught between them, too quiet to make out. He leaned closer. “Harper?” No response. But her head rolled slightly on the pillow, and her fingers twitched again. He reached for her hand, gently interlacing his fingers with hers. She didn’t flinch. But she didn’t let go either. It was something. The hospital wing of the hidden facility, what remained of Harrow’s private lab, was eerily quiet. There were no alarms, jistythe slow beeping of machines and the low thrum of power coursing through old Imperium tech. She was h
Ch-52
Harper didn’t remember falling asleep, but she remembered waking up.Her body ached like it had been split apart and stitched back together in the dark. There was something foreign missing—an absence deep in her chest that left her both relieved and afraid. The hum of old medical equipment surrounded her. A faint antiseptic tang clung to the air. It was too quiet.Then came the voice.“Vitals are holding. But we’re not out of the woods yet.”She knew this voice… it was Dr. Evelyn Harrow. Still alive, and as cold as ever.Harper forced her eyes open.She lay in a makeshift surgery suite, dimly lit and lined with analog monitors salvaged from some forgotten era of science. The padded cot beneath her smelled faintly of mothballs and sterile gauze. Her chest was bandaged, the skin beneath sore and humming with memory.She turned her head.Nathan was sitting beside her, jaw clenched, elbows on his knees. His ring glowed faintly against the side of her arm where his hand gripped hers.“You
Ch-51
The corridor smelled like dust and static, humming low with electricity beneath the walls. Harper moved quietly, her bare feet pressing against the cold metal floor. Her breath came in slow, controlled bursts. She couldn't afford to run out of energy. Despite the throbbing pain in her head and backbone, she pushed forward. She had counted the guards, observed their shifts carefully, and most importantly, she had stolen a small access chip during her last ‘examination.’ Now, all she needed was to escape… or she might never get this chance. A sharp buzzing sound echoed in her ears as she passed under the sensor array. The bio-manipulator flared in warning, but she kept her pace steady. Panic would only make the situation much, much worse.She pressed the chip into the wall panel… and for a few moments, nothing happened.“Shit!”She muttered a curse under her breath, ready to try again. But the soft sound of footsteps behind her froze her blood in her veins. She turned, ready to fi
Ch-50
To anyone who moved on after the first glance, the small farmhouse at the edge of the Ashvale woods would look like it had been abandoned for years. Ivy had grown so rapidly and densely that it almost choked the wooden beams, the windows were clouded with dust and grime that had accumulated with, and the fence had collapsed under its own weight. But Nathan Cole knew better. To someone with an eye as sharp as his, the movement of shadows inside the house was enough prood of life. Moreover, there were cables, that might be hidden, but clearly ran to a private grid. The security net was subtle but flawed.He breached it in under thirty seconds.His steps were silent as he entered through the back, the ring on his finger cool and dormant. That worried him. No pulse. No warmth. Harper wasn’t close.A rusted hallway led to a steel door, polished on the inside. He keyed in the last cipher from Harrow’s old logs.The door opened with a hiss.Inside, an old woman in a lab coat stood hunched
Ch-49
Nathan turned the leather-bound book over in his hands for the third time that evening. The Silent Mind—a gift from Harper. She’d handed it to him just after they wrapped the Pacific hearing, smiling like she’d found the perfect thing. “For when the world is too loud,” she had said. “Find your stillness.” He hadn’t understood it then.Tonight, with Harper missing and silence crawling over every wall of his apartment, the words hit differently.He sighed and opened it. The pages had been thumbed through, but something felt off now. The weight distribution. His eyes scanned the margins again, flipped past the mid-chapters. A quiet clink interrupted the stillness.Something metallic slid out from between pages 147 and 148 and landed softly on the floor.A silver key.Not one from his collection of classified lockboxes. This one was unique—slender, antiquated. The bow of the key was shaped like a gear, the stem engraved with a faded crest: Gravemoor Trust. Nathan stilled.That name hadn’t
Ch-48
Harper’s breathing stuttered again.She clutched the edge of the briefing table, eyes squeezed shut, heart pounding wildly in her chest. The fluorescent lights above swam into a blur as her vision fogged, narrowing to a dim tunnel. Cold sweat broke across her neck.“Harper?” one of the junior agents asked, voice laced with concern. “Ma’am, are you—?”“I’m fine,” she gasped, straightening with effort. “Just… low blood sugar.”But even as she brushed past them, her mind screamed a different truth: this was the third episode in two weeks.Nathan ordered a medical scan the moment she stumbled into his office and slumped against the wall. An hour later, the results came in—and they chilled him to the bone.“There’s a device,” the Imperium medic said quietly. “Embedded near her heart. Organic-compatible metal. We didn’t pick it up on standard scans. It emits microbursts of electric interference—strong enough to interrupt cardiac rhythm and cognitive clarity.”Harper stared at the monitor in
Ch-47
Nathan stood before the war table, the tactical map glowing beneath his fingertips. His face was pale, still recovering from the toxin that nearly killed him, but his eyes were sharp. Clear and lethal.Harper stepped beside him, suited in black utility gear, her tablet already synced to the incoming intel.“The poison failed,” Nathan said quietly. “That means Ethan’s desperate. He’s losing ground faster than he thought.”Harper nodded. “And that gives us an opening. I’ve identified one of his key labs—hidden under an abandoned textile plant outside Bratislava. It’s not just a facility. It’s where they’re mass-producing the neurological suppressors.”Nathan’s jaw clenched. “The same ones used in the Edenfield experiments.”She didn’t have to answer. He already knew.“I’ll lead the strike team,” she said.“No,” he said instinctively. “You nearly lost me last night—”“And I’m not losing you by sitting this out. I know how Ethan thinks. I’ve studied his old battle doctrines, field tests,
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