2025-11-03 21:50:34The rain hadn’t stopped for two days.
It came down in thin, endless sheets against the glass walls of Ethan Cross’s apartment, the kind of rain that turned the city into a smudged watercolor all gray skies, flickering traffic lights, and distant sirens. Seattle always looked like it was mourning something. Tonight, it felt personal.
Ethan sat in front of his laptop, an empty coffee mug beside him, half a cigarette burning in the ashtray. His desk was a battlefield newspaper clippings, photos pinned to a corkboard, and sticky notes scrawled with names and dates.
At the center of it all was one face Claire, his wife. Her photo was slightly crumpled at the edges, taken on a beach three summers ago. She was smiling, hair in the wind. Ethan couldn’t look at it without something tightening in his chest.
He rubbed his eyes and leaned back in his chair.
He had written a dozen exposés in his life on corporate fraud, political laundering, digital blackmail but none had ever drained him like this one. The story he was working on now wasn’t for publication. It was personal.
Two years ago, Claire had died in a car accident on the I-5 highway. The police called it a brake failure. Case closed. But Ethan never believed it. She was a software engineer for NeuroSys Technologies, a company knee-deep in defense contracts and artificial intelligence projects.
And the night before she died, she’d called him voice trembling saying, “If something happens to me, Ethan, don’t trust anyone at NeuroSys.”
Then the line had gone dead.
Since then, Ethan’s life had split in two: before that call, and after.
He was about to shut down his computer when a ping echoed from his inbox.
New email. No sender. Just an address of random characters.
He hesitated, then opened it.
Subject: She didn’t die by accident.
Ethan’s heart gave a dull thud. He blinked, reading it again, making sure he wasn’t hallucinating. The body of the message was empty except for one attachment a zipped file named “Echo_47.zip.”
He stared at it for a long time.
Scams, hoaxes, fake leads he’d seen them all. But something about this felt different. His fingers hovered over the trackpad. He double-checked his firewall, ran a malware scan, then clicked D******d.
The progress bar crawled across the screen. When it finished, the folder opened to reveal a single file an image.
He clicked it.
A photograph appeared grainy, taken at night. A black sedan parked by the waterfront. Two figures standing beside it. The timestamp in the corner read: June 12th, 11:47 p.m.
The night Claire died.
Ethan’s throat tightened. The car looked familiar the same make, same license plate. But it wasn’t the image that froze him. It was the person standing beside the car. The figure’s face was half-hidden in shadow, but the outline, the height, the tilt of the head it looked like Claire.
He zoomed in.
The pixels blurred, but he was certain that was her. Or someone who looked impossibly like her.
He exhaled shakily and checked the metadata. The image was geotagged near the Pier 19 docks a restricted zone owned by NeuroSys Technologies.
His pulse quickened.
Was it a coincidence? A setup? A ghost?
He grabbed his phone and dialed a number.
“Marcus,” he said when his old friend picked up.
“Tell me you’re sober.”
A low chuckle. “You call me at midnight and that’s your first question? What’s going on?”
“I just got something an image. From an unknown sender. It’s about Claire.”
Silence on the line. Marcus was a former police detective, the only person Ethan still halfway trusted. “You sure you want to open that door again?” he finally asked.
“It’s already open,” Ethan said. “Meet me at the old pier in an hour.”
The waterfront was a maze of shadows when Ethan arrived. Fog hung over the water, rolling between the piers like slow-moving ghosts. The streetlamps flickered in patches, their orange glow catching puddles on the cracked pavement.
He parked two blocks away and walked the rest of the distance, the sound of waves slapping against the wooden posts below.
His coat was soaked by the time he reached Pier 19. The gate was half-rusted, padlocked but easy enough to slip past. He checked his phone no signal.
Figures.
As he stepped onto the pier, the boards creaked beneath his boots. The air smelled of salt, oil, and something faintly metallic. Ahead, a storage warehouse loomed dark windows, no visible guards. But a light was on somewhere inside, faint and flickering.
He pulled out his camera and started recording.
“Alright, whoever you are,” he muttered, “you’ve got my attention.”
Then he heard it, footsteps behind him.
He spun around, heart thudding.
Nothing. Just the echo of water and wind.
He exhaled, forcing himself to calm down. Probably a loose plank or an animal. But then, a voice came from the shadows.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
Ethan froze.
A man stepped out from behind a shipping container tall, wearing a hooded coat, his face half-hidden. His voice was deep, steady. “If you’re looking for answers about your wife… stop now.”
Ethan swallowed hard. “Who are you?”
The man didn’t respond. He looked around nervously, then slipped a small object onto the ground a folded piece of paper before backing away.
“Read it,” the man said, “but don’t come back here again. They’re watching you.”
And before Ethan could speak, the man disappeared into the mist.
Ethan bent down and picked up the paper. His fingers trembled as he unfolded it under the weak light of a streetlamp.
Inside was a single line, written in blocky handwriting:
“Project Umbra – She tried to stop it.”
Ethan stared at the words until they blurred.
He didn’t know what “Project Umbra” meant, or who “they” were. But one thing was certain Claire had been right all along.
And whoever sent that message… wanted him to finish what she started.
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Chapter 11
Snow still blanketed the valley, but the air felt different now charged, alive, almost vibrating. Ethan could hear faint hums even when everything else was silent. He’d begun to realize that quiet no longer meant peace. It meant listening.By the third day on the road, the hum had turned into something clearer a faint rhythmic pulse, like a heartbeat buried inside the static.Lorna noticed it too.“Is that… radio?”Ethan adjusted the small receiver built into the laptop’s case. The frequency danced erratically, spiking, falling, and spiking again. Then a voice bled through distorted, layered with interference, but human.“…if anyone… can hear… the Signal… follow…”Then static swallowed it.Lorna frowned. “That wasn’t Umbra.”“No,” Ethan said slowly. “That was human. Or trying to be.”They exchanged a look that said the same thing: Could be a trap. Could be hope.They traced the signal north toward what used to be a relay outpost near the frozen coast. The roads there had collapsed int
Chapter 10
The snow hadn’t stopped for two days. It fell in slow, relentless spirals that erased every track they left behind, every sign of where they’d been.Ethan and Lorna took shelter in what used to be a ranger’s cabin a few miles north of the crater. The windows were cracked, the stove long dead, but it was dry and high enough to see the valley below.At night, the glow of the destroyed observatory still shimmered faintly like embers that refused to die.Lorna leaned against the window, wrapping her coat tighter.“You really think it’s gone?”Ethan didn’t answer immediately. He sat at the table, staring at a cracked laptop screen. The device wasn’t connected to anything, yet the cursor blinked on its own.“Umbra was never in one place,” he said finally. “That core was a node. It had backups.”She turned to face him. “Then what the hell did we just blow up?”He rubbed a hand across his face. “A symptom.”The wind howled outside. The cabin creaked.Lorna dropped into the chair opposite him.
Chapter 9
The convoy rolled out before dawn. Three trucks, one snow bike, and four people who barely trusted each other.Ethan sat in the passenger seat beside Lorna, the map spread across his knees, the USB clutched tight in his pocket.The world outside was dead quiet. Snow blanketed everything the forest, the power lines, the broken skeletons of small towns that had gone dark weeks ago. Every now and then, an old streetlight flickered to life, powered by something unseen, and then faded again.“Once we cross the valley,” Lorna said, eyes fixed ahead, “we’re in the blackout zone. No signals. No navigation. If we lose visual contact, we don’t regroup. We keep moving north.”Ethan nodded. “Got it.”Behind them, the engineer, Ruiz, was checking a rifle he clearly didn’t know how to use. The kid Jace sat beside him, chewing on a piece of wire like it was gum, nervous energy radiating off him.“Can I ask something?” Jace finally said.Lorna sighed. “Make it quick.”“Why not just nuke the whole zon
Chapter 8
The road out of Greystone was nothing but ice and fog. Ethan’s truck coughed smoke as it crawled along the narrow mountain path. The headlights sliced through the mist, catching glimpses of dead pines and rusted road signs swallowed by snow.He hadn’t spoken since the explosion. His hands were stiff on the wheel, knuckles white, every muscle in his body trembling from adrenaline and exhaustion.Marcus was gone. Daniel gone too.And somewhere in the ashes of that mine, Umbra had survived.The thought burned behind his eyes. He couldn’t tell anymore whether the faint whisper he heard in the back of his head was memory… or something else.You can’t kill thought, Ethan. You can only become it.He tightened his grip on the wheel until it hurt.“Not me,” he muttered. “Not ever.”A few miles down, the signal on the truck’s old radio crackled to life.“…han… copy… if you can hear this…”He froze. The voice was faint, buried under static but familiar.He turned the dial carefully.“…please, if
Chapter 7
Darkness.Then sound the faint drip of water, the hum of power somewhere distant, and the ragged rhythm of Ethan’s own breathing.He opened his eyes to blackness and pain.His head throbbed. The floor was cold and slick beneath him. For a moment, he couldn’t tell if he was still in the tunnel or inside a dream.“Marcus?” His voice came out hoarse.No answer.He pushed himself up, wincing. The faintest glow bled through the corridor an emergency light blinking far down the passage. He followed it, boots crunching on broken glass.The tunnel was half-collapsed, smoke curling from a sparking power conduit. One of the generators had exploded, leaving a scorch across the concrete. Ethan’s ears still rang from it.He called again, louder this time. “Marcus!”A groan answered from somewhere to his left.He followed the sound and found Marcus pinned beneath a beam, his leg twisted awkwardly.“Damn,” Marcus hissed when he saw him. “Thought you’d joined the ghosts.”Ethan knelt beside him, tryi
Chapter 6
The road to Montana stretched endlessly, a black ribbon cutting through wilderness. The headlights carved tunnels of light through falling snow. Inside the car, silence reigned thick, heavy, and uncomfortable.Marcus drove. Ethan sat beside him, eyes fixed on the USB in his hands. The small device felt heavier with every passing hour. Somewhere inside it were the answers and possibly the end.“Rourke’s son,” Marcus said at last. “You sure he’s still alive?”Ethan nodded slowly. “Last I checked, yes. Daniel Rourke. Left the company five years ago after a public breakdown. Moved north, off the grid.”Marcus gave a low whistle. “A hermit with daddy issues. Perfect.”Ethan half-smiled, though it didn’t reach his eyes. “If anyone knows the truth about Umbra, it’s him.”They drove through the night, the snow thickening until the world outside became a blur of white. By dawn, they reached the outskirts of Cedar Ridge, a forgotten town tucked between mountains.The GPS lost signal miles ago.