The shot Ethan fired didn't kill her.
Ghost 02 moved like she had rehearsed his every gesture. She dropped low, the bullet grazing her shoulder, and retaliated with a swift motion. A flashbang clattered to the floor between them.
"Down!" Darius roared.
Ethan ducked behind a stone column just as the blast went off—light and sound crashing like thunder in his skull. Disoriented, he felt the floor tilt under him. His ears rang like broken glass.
Cassian pulled him up. "We move. Now."
They sprinted through the east corridor, Ghost 02's men in pursuit. Darius stayed behind briefly, planting a device on the wall—then detonated it, sending rubble crashing into the hallway. A momentary barricade.
"They won't be slowed long," he muttered.
Cassian shoved open a hidden panel in the library wall, revealing a spiral staircase.
"This leads to the old catacombs," he said. "Marcus had this built as an escape route."
Ethan didn't hesitate.
The air turned colder as they descended. The stone steps were slick with moss, and the narrow walls closed around them like a throat.
Faint lights embedded in the ceiling flickered on—motion-triggered. Ethan's thoughts raced faster than his feet.
Ghost 02. Cipher. Project ECHO.
And now, a direct attempt to wipe them out.
The passage emptied into a stone chamber lined with archival crates. Old tech. Printed dossiers. Paper backups of long-dead operations. It was a vault of secrets, untouched by digital erasure.
Darius glanced around. "We need to torch this place after we're out."
Ethan nodded. "Nothing here can fall into Cipher's hands."
Cassian tapped a crate. "Some of these identities go back decades. Operatives, front companies, shell banks. All the scaffolding Marcus used."
A sound echoed from above. Boots.
They were coming.
The trio emerged into a storm drain tunnel that fed into the lake. An amphibious escape pod—a sleek, black torpedo-like vessel—waited in a hidden docking hatch.
Cassian jumped in first, activating the controls. Darius shoved Ethan inside and followed.
As the hatch sealed, the vessel sank beneath the water, moving silently under the ice.
Inside the dim cabin, Ethan stared out the porthole. Murky water. Distant lights. Then darkness.
"We need to disappear," Cassian said. "Cipher will blanket every network looking for you."
Ethan looked up. "No. We don't disappear. We surface where he least expects."
Darius raised an eyebrow. "Which is?"
Ethan pulled the drive from his jacket and plugged it into a console. "We go to Oslo."
"Why?"
"There's a node Marcus left there. I saw it on the Zurich files. It's off-grid—military encrypted, buried under a non-existent data farm. It may contain the original source code for the firewall."
Cassian's eyes narrowed. "You want to reboot ECHO?"
"No," Ethan said. "I want to weaponize it."
They emerged three hours later in the woods near a decommissioned border checkpoint. Snow blanketed everything, muting their movements.
A truck—one of Darius's stashes—waited under camouflage netting. They climbed in.
Ethan rode shotgun, the chill seeping through his coat.
For the first time in days, he felt... direction.
Not just survival. Momentum.
On the road to Oslo, Darius shared intel.
"Cipher was part of a rogue DARPA program in the '90s. He vanished before they shut it down. Rumors say he helped engineer cognitive weapon systems—AI that predicted thought patterns."
Ethan absorbed it silently.
Cassian added, "Marcus discovered Cipher's plan to hijack ECHO. That's why he sealed it. That's why he faked his death."
Ethan's jaw clenched. "And now I'm the only one who can finish what he started."
At a border crossing, they forged IDs. Ethan posed as a systems engineer; Cassian as a diplomatic envoy. Darius played security detail.
The guards barely looked up.
Once through, they headed straight into the mountains beyond Oslo—toward a forgotten NATO bunker repurposed as a data haven. One Marcus had hidden from everyone, even Cassian.
Only Ethan had the access codes now.
Inside the bunker, power still ran. Emergency generators hummed.
And on the central pedestal: a server sealed in glass.
Ethan stepped forward.
The glass hissed and opened. A palm scanner emerged.
He placed his hand on it.
The interface came alive.
HELIX SYSTEM: SECONDARY CORE INTERFACE
STATUS: RESTRICTED ACCESS.
USER: ETHAN M. ALDEN — AUTHORIZED.
A prompt appeared:
"Upload current core?
Warning: may overwrite firewall boundaries."
Cassian stepped forward. "This is it. Once you start, there's no rollback."
Ethan stared at the screen.
His reflection stared back—older now. Hardened.
"No more running."
He inserted the Zurich drive.
The lights flickered.
The core accepted the data.
New architecture bloomed across the display—like veins threading a synthetic brain. Ethan watched as the system began parsing the merged files. Protocols emerged.
PROJECT NEMESIS: INITIATED
Darius blinked. "What the hell is Nemesis?"
Ethan didn't look away. "The part of ECHO my father didn't finish. The countermeasure. If Cipher tries to hijack ECHO again… this program will hijack him back."
Cassian exhaled. "We just turned on a war machine."
"No," Ethan said. "We just made it ours."
Outside, the first rays of sunlight pierced the mountain pass.
The fracture line had become a frontline.
And Ethan was ready.