The scent of ozone still hung in the air from the power surge that had killed the lights. When the backup generators kicked in, the lab glowed faintly again—dim red emergency bulbs that painted everything in warning colors.
Narion was already typing furiously, trying to reconnect the systems, but I could see it in his face—the fear he was trying to hide. Clyde stood near the door, gun drawn, scanning shadows that didn't move.
"They found us," I said quietly.
Both of them froze.
Clyde turned first. "What do you mean found us?"
I held up the device in my hand—a small, blinking tracker no larger than a coin. Its signal light pulsed in rhythm with my heartbeat. "This was embedded in the last batch of files we opened. The moment we accessed Shin's data, Clayton's internal net tagged our coordinates."
Narion swore under his breath. "You're saying they know where this lab is?"
"They don't just know," I said, glancing toward the windows. The hum outside wasn't thunder anymore. It was the low drone of approaching rotors. "They're coming."
For a heartbeat, no one spoke. The sound of rain against glass filled the silence.
Then Clyde stepped forward. "We can move the drives—wipe the traces, run."
I shook my head. "If they capture the hardware, everything we've done is useless. They'll rebuild Helios from what's left. We end it here."
Narion's hands dropped to his sides. "Ellen, this lab—my whole setup—"
"Will be ashes," I said, steady. "It's the only way to make sure no one else dies for this."
He stared at me like I'd just cut something vital out of him. "You can't be serious."
"I am," I said. "And you both need to leave."
Clyde frowned. "We're not leaving you."
"You are," I insisted. "You'll get as far from this place as possible. Once the fire starts, no one will trace what was left here." I looked between them, my throat tightening. "But there's something else I need from you."
They waited.
I took a breath. "What we found about Shin—his identity, what they did to him—it dies with us. You can't tell anyone, not even the people we think we can trust. If Clayton learns that Shin survived long enough for us to find him, they'll go after anyone connected to him. Including you."
Narion's jaw clenched. "Ellen—"
"Promise me," I said sharply. My voice cracked on the last word. "Please."
For a long moment, neither spoke. Then Clyde nodded slowly. "You have my word."
Narion hesitated, then gave a small, defeated nod. "Yeah. Mine too."
I turned back to the servers, the hum growing louder in my ears. "Good. Then go."
Clyde's hand brushed my shoulder, but I didn't look at him. When the door closed behind them, the room felt suddenly smaller, quieter.
I stared at the monitor one last time—Shin's name faintly reflected in the glass—and whispered, "You won't be theirs again."
Then I lit the first charge.
Flames caught quickly, racing along the cables, devouring the walls in bursts of orange. The smell of melting plastic filled the air as the machines began to die one by one.
By the time the fire reached the main terminal, the approaching drones were almost overhead.
The night air still burned with the scent of smoke. My hands trembled as I pulled the earpiece away, staring at it like it had turned into something alive.
The words wouldn't leave my head—Protocol Helios… rebooting.
That wasn't supposed to happen. Clyde burned everything. Narion wiped the servers clean. I saw it myself. And yet…
A soft crackle came again through the static—faint, rhythmic. Not words this time. Just a pulse. Like a heartbeat.
Behind me, gravel crunched.
"Ellen."
I spun around. Clyde emerged from the haze, face streaked with soot, eyes wide with a mix of anger and disbelief. "You stayed?"
"I had to be sure," I said, my voice raw. "It's not over, Clyde. The system—it's trying to come back."
He shook his head, jaw tight. "That's impossible. We fried the mainframe. Even Narion said—"
"I heard it." I stepped closer, thrusting the earpiece toward him. "Listen."
He hesitated, then pressed it to his ear. After a few seconds, his expression shifted—from irritation to dread.
"It's… pulsing," he murmured.
"Like it's alive."
Before he could answer, a flash of light streaked across the remains of the lab—faint, but deliberate. A beacon signal. Then, one by one, the streetlights around the site flickered… and went dark.
Narion's voice broke through the comm, urgent and uneven.
"Ellen—Clyde—get out of there. Now. Something's piggybacking on the old Helios code. It's moving through the grid."
I looked back toward the wreckage, the glow of embers reflecting off my boots.
"Moving where?" Clyde demanded.
Narion's reply came with a short burst of static, followed by four words that froze me to the bone.
"It's not in the system anymore."
The signal died.
"El— they found us," Narion said, breath tight over the comm.
"Not yet." I say it soft, and then I pull a phone from my jacket pocket as if it were a talisman.
"What are you going to do?" Clyde asks, voice sharp in the night.
"Let them taste what they made," I answer, cold and steady.
I reboot the remnants of Clayton's system from the handheld—one last, vicious loop to scatter their trackers and make noise where they expect silence. The screen blinks; a terse line pops up and glares at me.
SYSTEM DISTRACTION ACTIVATED.
We decide to move—back to the group's safe house, straight to the study room where plans don't burn so easily.
"Narion," I tell him as we walk, the city breathing around us, "life won't be quiet unless we fight this bloody war with it."
He gives me a confused look, like he's trying to reconcile the woman who lights fires with the one who remembers funerals.
"They saw you," I say, lowering my voice. "First, we take care of the person who still has access to their system—the one who saw your faces. Make it look clean, fast. Do that, and your lives go quiet again."
Narion's jaw tightens. He studies me, searching for the echo of the old hesitation.
"Easy enough," he says finally, but I can hear the unease beneath the words.
I don't let him see the part of me that already tastes the ash.
Rain started to fall—soft at first, then harder, washing over the cracked pavement outside the safe house. The storm came without warning, as if the sky itself wanted to erase what we'd done.
Narion sat by the table, dismantling his pistol with mechanical precision. Clyde paced near the window, eyes flicking to the street every few seconds. I stood before the map on the wall, tracing my finger over a red-marked district—Sector 9, Clayton's data hub.
Our target lived there.
"The trace led to an external user," Narion said without looking up. "Freelancer, probably. Someone Clayton hired off the books to monitor security breaches. Name came up once—Rian Voss."
"Voss…" I repeated, tasting the name like a threat. "He saw your faces during the last breach."
Clyde turned, tension breaking through his calm. "You're saying we kill him?"
Silence. Only the rain answered for a moment.
I exhaled slowly. "If he stays alive, Clayton finds us within days. He's the thread that ties us to everything—Helios, the lab, Shin."
Narion reassembled his weapon with a click. "Then we cut the thread."
I nodded once, though my stomach twisted. "Clean. No blood on the streets. We do it quiet."
Clyde rubbed his temples, muttering, "You're getting good at this, El. Too good."
I met his gaze. "Survival teaches faster than fear."
The power flickered—lights dimming, then returning. A faint hum followed, crawling through the air like static.
Narion frowned. "That's not the generator."
I turned toward the monitors. One of them lit up on its own, displaying a single encrypted message.
Rian Voss: SYSTEM OVERRIDE ATTEMPT DETECTED. LOCATION—UNKNOWN.
"Impossible," Narion breathed. "We just found him."
Then another message appeared beneath it.
'You should've stayed in the fire.'
The screen glitched—flickered once—and went black.
For a long moment, none of us moved. The words on the dead screen seemed to burn through the dark room, branding themselves in silence.
Clyde was the first to speak, his voice low, uncertain. "You think that was really him?"
Narion shook his head, already moving to his terminal. "Could be a mimic. Could be a trace trap. If Voss has half the clearance his profile says he does, he could ghost our comms in seconds."
I stepped closer, eyes fixed on the monitor's fading afterglow. "No. That message was for me."
Narion looked up. "Then he knows who you are."
I didn't answer. My pulse was too loud in my ears. Somewhere deep inside, I already knew the truth—Voss wasn't just monitoring the system. He was inside it. And if he could send messages through our blackout, he was already closer than we thought.
Clyde's voice broke the silence again. "So what now, Ellen? He's taunting us. You said clean, no mess. How do we do that when the guy's playing ghost?"
I grabbed my jacket from the chair, slipping it on as the rain pounded harder against the windows. "We find him before he finishes whatever he started. If he's overriding the Helios backup, he's not just covering tracks—he's resurrecting them."
Narion cursed under his breath. "Helios is gone, Ellen. You burned it."
I turned to him, eyes cold. "Then tell me why it keeps coming back."
He had no answer.
The lights flickered again, then died completely this time, plunging us into darkness. Only the faint blue glow from Narion's emergency terminal lit the room.
Clyde reached for his gun. "Backup power should've kicked in."
It didn't.
And then, through the hiss of the rain and the hum of dying circuits, a faint electronic voice spoke through the speakers—broken, distorted, but unmistakably human.
"You're looking for me. You shouldn't have."
I froze.
Outside, through the veil of rain, a single car engine started.
Narion lunged toward the window, but I already knew.
He wasn't warning us.
He was coming.
"Be ready — we don't have to find him. He came to us." Narion's voice was low but sharp; I heard the anger threaded through it.
I heard the two of them curse softly behind me, but I let it slide. There wasn't time for theatrics.
"Alert our men. We're not facing just one enemy." I ordered.
They nodded and moved out. I retreated into the safe house and slipped into my secret room. My fingers closed around the mask waiting on the shelf — a matte black thing that smelled faintly of smoke and oil, its surface patterned like shifting mist. I put it on; the mask was more than concealment. It was a symbol — the Black Mist.
"You're coming willingly into hell," I murmured to myself, tasting the words like a warning.
Not long after, gunfire cracked outside.
Good.
I'd already sent Shin away to Leyte for good. Whether he was truly safe I didn't know. That uncertainty gnawed at me, but there was no going back now.
Moving like a thief, I eased out of the study room and climbed toward the window, careful and silent. From my perch, the garden spread below — a mess of bodies and equipment, dark figures moving through ash and smoke. Clayton's men were everywhere, black uniforms swallowed by the night wind.
A moment later a man stood in the garden, broad-shouldered, alert as if hunting something. He scanned the area with the confidence of someone used to being in control.
"Who would've thought," he sneered, voice carrying up to me. "Archer — the Black Mist who ruined my plans."
Narion stepped into view now, pistol leveled, eyes hard. "Nice to finally meet you."
There was someone behind him — liable to ruin the whole thing. I didn't hesitate. I hurled a dagger from my hidden angle. It found its mark, sinking into flesh with a soft, deadly sound.
The foliage hid me; thick leaves from the old narra tree kept my silhouette broken. I moved like a shadow: silent, fast. I slipped down behind the man and drove my palm into the back of his skull. He crumpled at my feet, out cold before he hit the soil.
The world tightened to the sound of his body collapsing and the distant whine of helicopters approaching. Adrenaline tasted metallic in my mouth. I stayed still for a beat, listening for any sign that someone had seen me.
No one had. Not yet.
I wiped a smear of soot from my cheek and watched Narion's shoulders relax slightly. The game was not over — but for now, we had taken the first move.