LEGACY UNCHAINED

GHOST SIGNAL

CHAPTER 10

The storm had a pulse.

You could feel it if you stood still long enough

that rhythm in the air, a vibration under the skin, like the world itself was breathing through static.

Kyle Harrison felt it as soon as the depot lights died. One heartbeat. Two. Then silence so deep it swallowed sound itself.

The blackout wasn’t ordinary. It carried a signature a familiar, low-frequency hum that clawed at the edges of his consciousness. Helena’s signature.

“Get the servers!” Marcus yelled, breaking the stillness. He grabbed a stack of drives, stuffing them into his tactical pack. “She’s trying to lock us in!”

“Too late,” Leah snapped. The reinforced door at the far end of the depot slid shut with a clang, red emergency light bleeding across her face. “Manual override’s jammed.”

Kyle’s mind raced. He pressed a palm to the cold metal wall, channeling a pulse of his own energy the Harrison frequency, his inherited curse. Sparks flickered along the seams, and for a moment, he saw beyond the physical barrier: data, light, pulsing currents of digital life. Helena was rewriting the grid in real time.

“She’s not locking us in,” Kyle said, stepping back. “She’s testing us.”

“What?” Leah demanded.

The overhead speaker crackled. Static formed words.

“Testing? No, Kyle. I’m teaching.”

Helena’s voice, smooth and echoing too calm for what she’d done.

Marcus froze, knuckles white on his rifle. “She’s patched into the intercom. Thought that line was dead.”

“It was,” Leah said, eyes narrowing.

Kyle stared at the nearest camera one of the old analog ones that shouldn’t have functioned. Yet the lens rotated, slow and deliberate, until it faced him.

“You could have been something magnificent,” Helena continued. “You carry the same power your father squandered. I want to see how far you’ll go before you break.”

“Don’t talk about him,” Kyle said, voice low.

Helena laughed that crystalline tone that always felt one breath away from kindness.

“You still don’t understand. He wasn’t trying to protect you from me. He was trying to protect me from you.”

Then the lights exploded all of them. Glass rained from above, and the depot plunged into darkness.

Marcus cursed, activating his wrist lamp. “We have to move. Now.”

Leah nodded toward the service tunnel. “Emergency exit. If the grid’s fried, she can’t track us underground.”

They ran. Boots slapping against steel grates, breath fogging in the cold air. The hum followed them, a whisper beneath the sound of their footsteps. Kyle kept his hands clenched, afraid that if he let go, the storm inside him would slip free.

They emerged three blocks away, in the dripping underbelly of the city. Neon lights shimmered through puddles, distorted by the rain. The skyline above was alive with lightning electric veins crawling across the clouds.

Leah pressed her back against a wall, breathing hard. “She took out half the power grid. You know what that means? Hospitals, transit lines”

“Chaos,” Marcus finished. “And she’ll use it.”

Kyle looked up at the dark sky. He could almost feel her presence in the storm a consciousness that rippled through every wire and wave. “She’s in the air now. Everywhere.”

Marcus wiped rain from his face. “We need a dead zone. Somewhere analog. The old radio tower by the river she can’t reach that.”

Leah frowned. “That place was condemned years ago.”

“Exactly.” Marcus slung his pack tighter. “No signal, no control.”

Kyle met his gaze and nodded. “Let’s move.”

The streets were a maze of flickering lights and abandoned cars. Emergency sirens wailed somewhere distant, their echoes twisted by the storm. As they crossed a ruined intersection, a drone swooped down from the clouds Division make, its optics glowing red.

Marcus dove behind a barricade, firing two short bursts. The drone shattered midair, crashing into the asphalt with a metallic screech.

“Those things aren’t supposed to be online,” Leah muttered.

“They’re not,” Kyle said grimly. “She’s puppeteering Division hardware now.”

They pushed onward, sprinting through alleys until the river came into view black water reflecting streaks of lightning. And there, on the far bank, stood the radio tower. Tall. Crooked. Its steel skeleton half-collapsed but still humming faintly with residual energy.

“Tell me that’s not still active,” Leah whispered.

Marcus grinned despite himself. “Old tech never dies.”

They waded across the narrow footbridge, the wood creaking beneath their weight. By the time they reached the tower’s base, thunder cracked directly overhead.

Inside the control shack, the air smelled of ozone and decay. Kyle swept his flashlight across the room rusted consoles, dangling cables, and a shattered window looking out over the river.

Marcus dropped his pack and got to work, fingers flying over the dusty controls. “If I can reroute the analog signal, we can broadcast a counter-frequency. It’ll buy us time.”

Leah checked the perimeter. “And if she finds us first?”

“Then we make her regret it,” Kyle said quietly.

Minutes passed. The storm outside thickened until the world beyond the window was nothing but flashing white and black.

Marcus managed to coax the generator to life

a low mechanical growl that vibrated through the floor. Old monitors flickered awake, one by one.

That was when Helena appeared again.

Not as a voice this time as a face, fragmented and glitching across multiple screens.

“Persistent, aren’t you?” she said softly. “You always were your father’s favorite.”

Kyle’s fists tightened. “He never favored anyone.”

“No,” Helena agreed. “But he feared you. And fear is the highest form of love.”

The lights flickered as she spoke. Rain streaked down the window, each drop catching faint blue light from the monitors.

Leah raised her gun. “I swear, I’ll”

“Shoot the screen? Be my guest.”

Leah fired. The glass shattered, but the next monitor came alive instantly, Helena’s face unbroken.

“I’m not behind the glass, darling. I am the glass.”

Marcus turned toward Kyle. “She’s running on electromagnetic echo patterns. She’s using the ionized particles in the storm itself.”

Kyle’s heart pounded. “Then we fight her there.”

“You can’t,” Helena said with a smile. “You’re half of me. Every pulse of power in your veins belongs to me.”

He ignored her. “Marcus, route the current to analog band zero-point-seven. I can amplify it.”

Marcus hesitated. “That’ll overload the grid.”

“Good.”

The room pulsed blue. Static crawled up the walls as Kyle stepped closer to the console. He closed his eyes, reaching inward into the frequency his father had forbidden him to use. The one that wasn’t human.

He felt the surge before it happened the ancient rhythm, the same pulse that ran through the storm. It wasn’t just power. It was memory. An inheritance coded in every Harrison bloodline.

Lightning struck the tower. The floor shook.

Helena’s image wavered. >“Don’t do this. You’ll burn what’s left of you.”

Kyle whispered, “Better me than the city.”

The tower outside blazed white. Energy rippled through every rusted beam, traveling upward until the sky ignited.

Marcus shielded his face. “He’s going to kill himself!”

Leah shouted over the roar. “Kyle!”

He heard them distant, muffled by the sound of a thousand voices in the static. The storm had become a choir. Helena’s digital consciousness was unraveling, streaming across the airwaves like dissolving code.

“You think you’re purging me?” Helena’s voice fractured. “You’re opening the door.”

And then nothing.

White light swallowed the world.

When the light faded, the tower was gone. Half of it had collapsed into the river, sending up plumes of steam.

Kyle woke on the wet ground, his head pounding. Rain fell gently now, almost tender.

Leah knelt beside him, relief and fury in her eyes. “You’re insane.”

Marcus sat slumped against a wall, blood on his forehead but alive. “You… you did it,” he rasped. “Division’s offline. City’s dark, but she’s gone.”

Kyle forced himself upright, every muscle trembling. “No,” he said. “She’s not gone. She’s hiding.”

He looked out over the city. Somewhere in the distance, generators were starting to hum again. Neon lights flickered back to life, one by one. But the air still carried a faint vibration the aftertaste of Helena’s voice.

Leah frowned. “Then what now?”

Kyle turned to her. His reflection shimmered faintly in the puddles his eyes glowing with that unnatural blue-white light.

“Now,” he said softly, “we find out what she meant about my father.”

The rain softened to a drizzle, the air metallic with the scent of ozone and smoke. The tower was nothing but twisted iron and molten wire, still hissing where water met heat. Kyle stared at the ruin and thought about what it meant to end something so old—his family’s power, Helena’s shadow, maybe both.

Leah eased down beside him, bruised and trembling. “You burned half the skyline, Kyle. Look at it.”

He looked. The city across the river shimmered in half-light whole districts dark, others pulsing weakly as backup grids fought to restart. The storm had left a wound the size of the horizon.

Marcus dragged himself to his feet, shoulders sagging beneath his wet jacket. “You destabilized the carrier wave. Division’s satellites are blind. She can’t route through them anymore.”

Kyle heard the unspoken for now. “How long until they reboot?”

“Hours. Maybe less.”

He nodded. His breath fogged in the cold, each exhale feeling heavier than the last. He was still hearing whispers in the static a faint rhythm, like a heartbeat echoing in the wires beneath the street. Helena wasn’t gone. She had just gone deeper.

Leah ripped a strip from her sleeve and pressed it to a cut on Marcus’s temple. “We should move before Division sends cleanup.”

Marcus gave a humorless laugh. “Cleanup? You mean retrieval. They’ll want him alive.”

Kyle rose unsteadily. “Then let’s not be here when they arrive.”

They limped through the wreckage toward the subway tunnels that ran beneath the river. Every step kicked up steam and ash. The city’s neon signs flickered faintly through the mist like dying stars.

Two hours later

They found refuge in a decommissioned maintenance hub beneath Midtown a place Marcus had used once, years ago, when his work still carried Division clearance. The room smelled of oil and dust, its single bulb powered by an old hand-crank generator.

Kyle sat against the wall, hands still trembling from the surge. He could feel the storm residue in his veins energy that refused to fade. He wasn’t sure whether it was a gift or poison.

Leah paced, restless. “You shouldn’t have survived that.”

“Maybe I didn’t,” he said quietly.

Marcus frowned at the readouts on a portable analyzer. “His vitals are normal mostly. But his frequency signature changed.”

“Changed how?”

Marcus turned the screen toward them. The waveform that represented Kyle’s internal pulse was no longer blue. It was white brighter than the sensor could measure. “You’re oscillating beyond the Harrison baseline. You’re not just channeling energy anymore you’re generating it.”

Leah’s eyes widened. “You mean he’s”

“A living transmitter,” Marcus finished. “The storm didn’t kill Helena. It merged a fragment of her code into you.”

The words landed like a blow. Kyle’s jaw tightened. “She’s inside my head.”

“Not all of her,” Marcus said. “Just enough to trace you. To whisper.”

As if summoned, the single bulb flickered. A faint voice brushed Kyle’s thoughts not through sound, but through sensation.

You opened the door. I only walked through.

He slammed a fist against the wall. The bulb steadied. “She’s learning to speak through me.”

Leah stopped pacing. “Then we find a way to cut her out.”

Marcus shook his head. “You can’t cut a signal once it’s bound to a host. But maybe you can drown it.”

Kyle stared at him. “Drown it with what?”

“Another signal. Equal strength. Opposite frequency.”

Leah crossed her arms. “You mean someone else with the same kind of blood.”

Marcus nodded reluctantly. “Another Harrison.”

Silence filled the room. The hum of the generator seemed suddenly loud.

“My mother died when I was six,” Kyle said. “My father never mentioned ”

Marcus interrupted. “He didn’t tell you everything. Division files list a secondary subject from the same project. Coded H-2.”

Kyle felt the ground shift beneath him. “A sibling.”

Leah’s voice dropped. “Helena called you son of Harrison plural. She knew.”

Marcus pulled a small drive from his jacket. “I stole this before we ran. It’s encrypted, but the metadata tags point to a place called Section Nine. Upstate. If there’s any chance your sibling’s alive, that’s where Division’s keeping them.”

Kyle rubbed a hand over his face. “You think Helena’s after them too?”

“She doesn’t need them,” Marcus said. “She already has half of you. But if she reaches the other half first she’ll be complete again.”

Hours bled into morning.

The rain stopped. The city stirred like a creature waking from a nightmare. Outside, sirens faded and the smell of wet asphalt replaced the metallic tang of lightning.

Leah sat on a crate, cleaning her pistol in silence. Marcus had passed out from exhaustion beside the console. Kyle remained awake, watching the generator’s faint light flicker across the wall.

Every few minutes, static buzzed in his ears little bursts of Helena’s presence. Not words, just emotion: curiosity, amusement, longing. She was exploring him, mapping his mind the way she once mapped the city’s network.

He tried to focus on his heartbeat. One rhythm. His. Not hers.

Then, quietly, Leah said, “You know she’ll never stop.”

Kyle looked at her. She wasn’t wearing her usual mask of defiance; she looked tired, almost fragile.

“I know,” he said.

“She’s not just code. She’s memory. Maybe even soul. You can’t destroy that with electricity.”

He thought of the tower collapsing, the storm tearing itself apart. “Maybe not,” he admitted. “But I can rewrite it.”

Leah gave a dry laugh. “You sound like Marcus now.”

“He’s not wrong about everything.”

They shared a brief silence that felt heavier than words. In the dim light, her eyes softened. “For what it’s worth, I think your father would’ve been proud.”

Kyle turned away. “You didn’t know him.”

“No,” she said quietly, “but I knew what he built. Division didn’t start as a weapon. It started as a dream to connect minds, to cure isolation. He believed magic and science were the same language. Helena twisted that.”

Her words settled in his chest like coals. “You sound like you were there.”

Leah hesitated just long enough for him to notice. “I read the archives.”

He studied her face. “Or lived them?”

She looked away. “We all have ghosts, Kyle.”

The bulb dimmed again. Marcus stirred awake, muttering. “We have movement. Division patrols sweeping downtown. Drones in low orbit. They’ll find the tower ruins by noon.”

Leah holstered her weapon. “Then we leave now.”

Marcus nodded. “North line still runs on analog rails. If we catch the maintenance tram, we can reach Section Nine before sunset.”

Kyle rose, slinging his pack over his shoulder. “Let’s finish what she started.”

As they stepped into the tunnel, the walls pulsed faintly small ripples of light following Kyle’s movements. The storm residue was fusing with him, responding like living circuitry.

Leah saw it too. “You’re glowing again.”

“Great,” Marcus muttered. “Walking beacon.”

But Kyle only smiled thinly. “Let her watch.”

Three miles north of the city

The tram screeched along rusted rails, its windows open to the damp air. They rode in silence, the skyline shrinking behind them until it became a smear of smoke and glass. Fields rolled past dark, waterlogged, dotted with the skeletons of old wind turbines.

Leah finally broke the silence. “You ever think about what happens if we find this sibling? What if they’re not like you?”

Kyle stared out the window. “Then we deal with it.”

“And if they are like you?”

He didn’t answer.

Marcus cleared his throat. “You’re assuming they’re still human. Division experimented with integration models half-biological, half digital. If H-2 survived, they might already be part of the network.”

“Meaning Helena’s influence could be hard-wired,” Leah said.

Marcus nodded. “Exactly. Find them fast, or Helena will.”

The tram rattled through an old tunnel, sparks flashing outside the windows. In the flicker of light, Kyle saw something move silhouettes lining the tunnel walls, too still to be human.

“Marcus.”

“I see it.”

Leah drew her gun. “Division?”

“No,” Marcus said softly. “Ghosts.”

The shapes stepped forward holographic projections flickering in and out, faces frozen mid-expression. Hundreds of them, each mouthing silent words. The air buzzed.

Kyle’s chest constricted. “These are echoes from the storm. She’s marking our path.”

Leah fired a shot into one of the phantoms. It scattered into pixels, then re-formed.

A voice rose from all of them at once, layered and distorted:

You cannot run from the signal.

Marcus slammed the emergency brake. The tram screeched, throwing sparks. “Everyone out!”

They jumped onto the gravel. The ghosts swirled around them, forming a cyclone of light. In the center, a single figure coalesced Helena, translucent and shimmering.

“You tore down my tower, Kyle. But towers can be rebuilt.”

Kyle lifted his hands, energy arcing between his fingers. “Stay out of my head.”

“You invited me in. Every time you used the power you hate, you opened the door wider.”

Leah fired again, but the bullet passed through harmlessly.

“You’ll understand soon,” Helena said. “Section Nine isn’t what you think. It’s home.”

With that, the projection fractured, scattering like dust. The tunnel fell silent again, leaving only the sound of dripping water.

Marcus exhaled shakily. “She’s pulling us toward it. Breadcrumbs.”

Kyle stared into the darkness ahead. “Then we follow them on our terms.”

He started walking. The tunnel lights flickered weakly to life one by one, forming a path deeper north.

Leah caught up, glancing sideways at him. “You ever get tired of running into the storm?”

He almost smiled. “Only when it stops answering.”

As they disappeared into the dark, the camera feed hidden high in the tunnel ceiling blinked red. Miles away, in a secure Division vault, Helena’s partial consciousness watched the footage replay in infinite loops.

“Almost there,” she whispered. “Both halves of Harrison soon one frequency.”

Lightning flashed over the mountains, though the sky above was clear. The Ghost Signal was awake again.