The Lazarus Protocol

Chapter 6 — Bloodlines

The sirens had gone quiet.

For a city that never truly slept, the silence in Harbor Row was unnatural. Like the breath before a scream. Or the pause before a trigger pull.

Ethan moved through the shadows of the safehouse’s second floor, eyes narrowed as he looked out over the street. No patrols. No agents. But he felt it. The shift in the air. Something was off.

Inside, Mara was assembling the tech Ethan had recovered from the informant in the last raid—an old-world drive, still encrypted, but radiating heat like it was alive. Reese stood nearby, loading a shotgun with clinical precision. Ayla tapped through surveillance feeds on a cracked laptop, cursing softly in Romanian. Lila was nowhere to be seen.

“Where is she?” Ethan asked.

“Lila went to get comms supplies from one of the outposts,” Ayla muttered. “Fifteen minutes ago.”

Reese’s brow furrowed. “She should’ve checked in by now.”

The explosion ripped through the alleyway two blocks east—sending dust, concrete, and fire curling into the sky like a signal flare from hell. Ethan didn’t hesitate. He grabbed his sidearm and ran.

When he arrived, the street was chaos. Rubble littered the sidewalk. Smoke choked the air. But amid it all, he found her—Lila—bloodied, gasping, pinned beneath a collapsed wall.

“Lila!” Ethan shouted, dropping to his knees, hands digging through debris to reach her.

She coughed. “Trap… it was a trap… Marcus knew.”

He froze. “Marcus set this?”

Her trembling fingers pressed a blood-streaked device into his palm. “He’s not just hunting you. He’s trying to finish what the Lazarus Protocol started.”

Then her body went still. Breathless. Gone.

Ethan’s jaw clenched. Another life taken by the ghosts of his past.

He stood up, eyes burning.

“Enough,” he growled.

Back at the safehouse, Ayla managed to crack part of the old drive. The screen flickered with grainy footage. Ethan stood before it, staring at a younger version of himself. Dressed in military black. Hooked to wires. His face a blank slate.

A voiceover played:

“Subject-07: Codename LAZARUS. Memory suppression complete. Behavioral overwrite engaged.”

Mara gasped behind him. “They reprogrammed you. You weren’t just a soldier. You were the prototype.”

Footage shifted. A lab. Cryotubes. Children. Files scrolling across the screen.

Name after name.

And one that made Ethan stagger.

“Aiden Vale.”

Ethan stared. “That’s… my son.”

Mara nodded, tears in her eyes. “They told me he died in childbirth. But it was a lie. They took him for the program. He’s alive, Ethan.”

Ethan felt the floor disappear beneath him.

Aiden—his son. Alive. Part of the same machine he had unknowingly helped build.

The team gathered around the table that night. The map sprawled out. Pins. Dotted routes. Marked targets. But now the mission had changed.

“This is personal,” Ethan said. “Rayburn isn’t just playing god with minds—he’s playing god with bloodlines. They took Aiden. We get him back.”

Reese nodded. “Then we go for the heart. The facility on Apex Island.”

Ayla frowned. “That’s a death sentence. It’s fortified.”

Ethan looked at Mara. “You said the rebels had assets inside.”

She hesitated. “One. But we haven’t made contact in years.”

“We don’t have years.”

Just past midnight, Ethan’s instinct screamed. He reached for his weapon—and the windows shattered.

Suppressor fire hissed through the living room. Red lasers danced through the smoke.

“Cleaners!” Ayla screamed, diving behind the counter.

Ethan rolled across the floor, taking down two agents with controlled bursts. Mara provided cover fire while Reese dragged the encrypted drive to safety.

Outside, the black vans kept coming.

“They found us,” Ayla said. “We’ve got to burn this place.”

“No,” Ethan said. “We take the fight to them.”

Using a back alley and decoy explosives, they slipped out. By the time the last cleaner entered the house, the timer had run down.

The explosion tore through the safehouse, and half of Harbor Row went dark.

They fled under cover of fire and ash, adrenaline pumping. The team was fractured, bleeding, but not broken.

They had one destination now: Apex Island.

And Ethan had one goal.

“Hold on, Aiden,” he whispered. “I’m coming.”