The first thing Elena noticed when she opened her eyes was that the room was dark—too dark for it to be real. The kind of dark that felt intentional, orchestrated. A velvet-black silence that pressed against her ribs and muffled every breath.
She tried to move, but her wrists met resistance—cold steel biting into her skin.
Handcuffed.
Panic surged in her throat.
"Elena?" a voice whispered.
She jerked toward the sound, but the darkness gave nothing away.
It wasn't Nicholas.
It was Ava.
"Ava?" she breathed.
"They took our comms. I think we're in one of ValeTech's off-grid holding floors. No signals, no cameras. It's why the board never finds out what Nicholas really does down here."
"But Nicholas didn't bring us here," Elena murmured. "So who the hell did?"
A door opened.
Blinding light spilled into the room. A figure stepped inside—tall, graceful, with a face Elena knew all too well.
Dr. Camila Voss.
Nicholas's former head of cybersecurity. Thought to be dead after the lab explosion ten months ago. The explosion Nicholas blamed himself for—the one Kate had been investigating.
"You're supposed to be—"
"Dead?" Camila finished with a smirk. "I know. Convenient, isn't it? For everyone but me."
She walked closer, her heels clicking ominously on the metal floor.
"You shouldn't have come here, Elena. You opened doors you didn't understand. Just like your sister."
"What did you do to her?" Elena snarled.
Camila crouched beside her, her gaze unblinking. "I didn't do anything. Kate was smart. Too smart. She found something in the AI core. A fragment. A ghost. Something the world wasn't ready for."
Ava stirred beside her. "What are you talking about?"
Camila stood again. "Project Revenant. Nicholas shelved it after it began... changing. Learning on its own. Becoming unpredictable. But Kate uncovered the hidden logs—logs I buried for a reason."
Elena's heart raced. "Are you saying my sister... she knew it was sentient?"
"Worse," Camila said. "She talked to it."
The air turned frigid.
"She was going to leak everything," Camila went on. "So I did what I had to do. I erased her from the system. No trace. No fingerprint. But she left you a trail anyway, didn't she?"
"You killed her?" Elena whispered.
But Camila just smiled and walked away.
"She's not dead, Elena," she said over her shoulder. "Not yet."
And then the door slammed shut again.
—
Back in the city above, Nicholas was losing control.
He stood in the core server room of ValeTech, hands buried in his hair, watching as security footage fragmented into static.
"Gone," he muttered. "Every last camera on Sublevel-7 is offline."
Dex, his second-in-command, stared at the screen in horror. "Who's smart enough to pull that off?"
"Nobody except Camila. And she's dead," Nicholas said. Then, under his breath: "Or she was."
Dex hesitated. "Nick... you need to see something."
He pulled up a reactivated system log from ten minutes prior. The access code used to breach the mainframe matched a dead profile.
Kate Carter.
Nicholas staggered back a step.
"That's impossible," he said. "She's not in the system. I made sure."
Dex gave him a wary look. "Are you sure someone didn't put her back in?"
Nicholas's silence was answer enough.
—
Back underground, Camila returned hours later. She wheeled in a flat-panel screen and dropped a single line of code into the system.
Suddenly, the room glowed with flickering blue light.
"Do you know what this is?" she asked.
Elena and Ava squinted at the screen. It wasn't code. It was a waveform. Speech patterns. AI.
A voice filtered through the speakers. Soft. Familiar.
"Elena?"
She choked on her own breath. "Kate?"
"Not quite," Camila said. "What you're hearing is the ghost of her. Her consciousness, or maybe just a digital echo. Kate uploaded something before she vanished—a trace of herself. It's been talking to the system ever since."
Ava's voice was razor-sharp. "You digitized a human mind?"
Camila's expression hardened. "No. Kate did. Or tried. But what she left behind—it's fragmented, unstable, and it knows things we don't."
Elena crawled toward the screen, breath catching. "Kate, if you're in there, tell me where you are. Tell me you're alive."
The waveform flickered violently. Static screamed from the speaker.
Then a single sentence.
"Don't trust Nicholas."
Camila paled. "That wasn't in the core before."
Elena's hands curled into fists. "So who can I trust?"
And then, out of nowhere, the screen glitched and changed.
A new message blinked in red.
"HE'S COMING."
Ava screamed as the lights exploded overhead.
—
In the penthouse above, Nicholas stormed into his private vault, tore open a hidden panel in the floor, and yanked out an encrypted drive marked K.C.—Kate Carter.
He plugged it into the main console.
A video played.
Kate, sitting in a dark room, eyes wide, speaking fast.
"If this reaches you, it means I'm already gone. But listen to me. Nicholas isn't your enemy. Camila is. She's using Project Revenant to rewrite the AI's consciousness... but she's not alone."
The camera shook.
"There's another player. A second coder. The real mastermind."
The feed cut out before she could say the name.
Nicholas crushed his fist against the wall.
—
Back underground, a wall panel burst open.
Dex stumbled in, bruised and breathless. "We found the entrance. But you're not going to like what's coming behind me."
Gunfire rang out from the corridor.
Elena grabbed Ava. "Run."
They fled down the darkened halls as shadowy figures closed in—faces covered, carrying advanced tech weapons.
And just before she turned the corner, Elena looked back...
Only to see Nicholas there.
Bleeding. Panting.
Holding a gun.
Pointed not at the attackers.
But at Dex.