The silence inside the vault was unlike any other.
Not the kind of quiet you hear—but the kind that listens back.
Nova stood beneath the dim flicker of failing overhead lights. Her gear was stripped down to its bones: a single pulse pistol at her hip, a neurospike ring on her finger, and a custom holo-rig on her back that buzzed gently with real-time feeds from six quadrants of global surveillance.
She hadn't slept in 31 hours.
Couldn't.
Not with Kestrel in motion. Not with Matherson alive.
And not with Ghostbyte still human enough to care.
She pulled back her cowl and moved to the central table—a slab of polysteel littered with fragments of old data cores, holo-chips, and one cracked photograph: a younger version of herself, arms crossed, standing beside a man with gray stubble and sharp eyes.
Jayson Holt.
She touched the image with the back of her knuckle. "You never told me what you did to him, Jay."
Not the boy. Not Matherson.
The code.
She remembered the final transmission she'd intercepted eight years ago, before everything fell apart in Kyoto. Jayson had screamed something garbled through static, just before the system went dark.
"I didn't hide the truth I built it…"
At the time, she assumed it was desperation. Or madness.
Now?
She wasn't so sure.
She keyed open a private console, encrypted beneath six layers of Edenfall and Lucent Veil firewalls. A single file pulsed red inside:
SUBJECT: MATHERSON_HOLT
CLASSIFICATION: OMNI CODE RED – CORE ACCESS LOCKED
She ran a palm over the surface. Locked.
No voiceprint. No passkey. No override.
But if the rumors were true if what Jayson really discovered was encoded in his son then Matherson wasn't just the key to exposing Edenfall.
He was the vault itself.
And Nova?
She wasn't sure anymore if she was meant to open it or destroy it.
Back When She Still Believed
The Specter moniker was never meant to last. She'd taken it when the world got too complicated for names and loyalty became just another form of currency.
But once, long ago, she had a name.
Nova Rehn.
And she had stood for something.
She had hacked into satellite nodes not to steal, but to reveal. She had written code that tore down state secrets like tissue paper. She had helped Jayson uncover Project Edenfall, thinking they were exposing a weaponized surveillance tool.
Instead, they unearthed a religion.
A digital theology, designed to replace choice with design.
Edenfall wasn't just a project.
It was an operating system for the future.
Predictive modeling. Behavioral engineering. Data manipulation so precise, it could push a generation toward war or peace with nothing more than curated truths.
And now?
Now Edenfall wanted to control memory itself.
Rewrite history in real time.
And Matherson?
He was either their last failure…
Or their greatest backup.
Now — The Shadow Between
A secure comm flashed on Nova's terminal. Incoming.
Lucent Veil: Uplink Priority Echo-Seven
She accepted.
A blurred face appeared in the screenless projection. Masked. No eyes.
Just a voice: low, glitched, serpentine.
"You've touched the code."
Nova said nothing.
"He's not what they think."
"I know," she said. "But neither do you."
"Then find out. Before they do."
The image crackled out.
She stood still for a long moment, weighing the silence like a weapon.
She could let Edenfall deploy Kestrel. Let them erase every trace of rebellion, wipe clean the ledger Jayson died to expose. She could let Ghostbyte die believing he was still fighting the good fight. Let Matherson burn before he ever understood what he carried.
Or…
She could play all sides.
And set the world on fire herself.
Nova pulled her hood back over her head, fingers brushing the neurospike.
"One more move, Jay," she whispered. "Let's see what your boy really is."
She vanished into the vault's shadows.
A ghost, again.
But this time…
She wasn't the only one.