The underground heat lingered in Ash's lungs like smoke as he emerged into a long, empty corridor. The air smelled of metal and sterilized silence. His footsteps barely echoed on the pristine floor, but every step sounded loud in his mind. The facility beneath the financial district—the one he and Rika had discovered through encoded blueprints hidden in Solomon's archives—was far worse than either of them had imagined.

He pressed two fingers to the side of his neck, where a skin-thin comm device hummed under his collar. "Rika, I’m in. West wing corridor, Section C. You?"

A short pause. Then her voice came, clipped but steady. "North wing, approaching what looks like a surgical archive. Motion sensors disabled."

Ash let out a breath and continued. The deeper he went, the more the environment shifted. Walls that had been concrete became glass panels. Behind them, vats of pale-blue fluid pulsed softly. Inside some floated indistinct forms—shapes not yet given names. Limbs without faces. Eyeless heads. Experiments.

One panel blinked to life beside him, lighting up with biometric readings. It tracked him instantly, as if it had been waiting. A line of code scrolled beneath:

> SUBJECT 01: ACCESS GRANTED

"Rika," he muttered, frowning. "Something weird. This place knows me."

"Be careful. If it recognizes your biometrics, they might have programmed something into your DNA. A key, maybe. Or worse."

He didn’t respond right away. His hand hovered over a control panel by a sealed door. He could hear a faint humming behind it—a low vibration, like a heartbeat amplified. He entered, stepping into a chamber that felt like the inside of a mind.

Light poured from hundreds of crystalline cores along the walls, each projecting scenes—memories? No, surveillance footage. People entering and leaving rooms. Some of the footage was years old. He saw a younger version of Solomon. He saw himself. And then—

He stopped.

One core projected a memory he had no recollection of: Ash as a teenager, sitting in a white room, speaking to someone through a glass wall. His face was calm, even kind. But his eyes... were empty.

"What the hell is this..."

He reached forward, touched the projection. The image distorted, and a voice clicked on—his own voice.

"They keep asking me who I am. I told them—I'm the shadow of someone who was never born."

Ash staggered back, breathing hard. The realization slammed into him like cold water. He wasn’t just part of the project. He had been its beginning.

Meanwhile, Rika moved swiftly through the northern corridors, bypassing layers of reinforced doors with surgical precision. She had found something too—an archive of test subjects. Files filled with names, dates, genetic data. The cryo-child they'd rescued weeks ago had a name now: Subject 47-K.

Rika snapped images, downloading files into her wrist drive. Her breath hitched when she found her own file, misnamed as Subject 99-B. Her photo was attached. The notes underneath read:

> TRAITOR BLOODLINE. SPARED FOR STUDY. MONITORED THROUGH FIELD UNIT 1A.

"They’ve been tracking me," she whispered.

She looked up. A sound.

Someone else was in the archive.

She slid behind a row of servers, silent, hand on the grip of her silenced pistol. Through the reflection of a glass panel, she saw a man in white—Dr. Halden. The lead geneticist who had vanished after Solomon's fall.

Rika stepped out. "Don’t move."

He froze, hands rising slowly.

"I didn’t run," he said calmly. "Because I knew you'd come."

She approached, gun steady. "Talk fast."

"Solomon is gone, but the Order isn’t. His brother—Michael—is worse. He’s not building a new world. He’s trying to replace this one."

"With what?"

"Copies. Duplicates. Better versions of us. He believes memory is all that makes identity. If you can copy memory... you can overwrite a soul."

Rika’s eyes narrowed. "Where is he?"

"Gone to activate the final phase. But he left something behind. For Ash. In the memory vault."

Ash, still in the vault chamber, was already unlocking it. A central pillar rose from the floor. Inside: a case. Not locked. Not trapped.

He opened it. Inside was a small vial and a folded letter.

The letter read:

You are the first success. The only one who broke free. But you were never outside the system, Ash. You were its crowning achievement. Now choose—destroy what made you, or use it to become what they fear most.

Ash clenched the vial. It glowed faintly—raw memory essence. It could rewrite the mind of anyone. Even himself.

His comm buzzed. Rika again.

"They’re triggering something big, Ash. A city-wide overwrite. They’re going to broadcast memory signatures into the water system."

Ash stared at the vial.

"Then we overwrite them first," he said.

Dr. Halden guided them to the control chamber. The broadcast core. All around, security systems began rebooting. Michael had left behind failsafes.

Ash set the vial into the core’s interface. The system read it instantly.

> INPUT MEMORY SIGNATURE: ASH-PRIME

"Once this starts," Halden warned, "you'll no longer be off-grid. Every system will see you."

Ash nodded. "Good. Let them see what they created."

He initiated the transfer. Across the city, memory nodes lit up. Surveillance blackouts flickered. The Order’s imprint began to scramble. The overwriting had begun—in reverse. Ash was replacing the virus with his own signature. A signature of rejection. Of rebellion.

Rika watched him, quiet. "You sure you’re okay?"

He gave her a tired smile. "I was born in a lie. This is just... rewriting the truth."

As the chamber lit up in white, the system roared. Outside, the sky over the city shimmered. The control the Order had was breaking.

But deep in the network, far beyond Ash’s reach, something stirred. A second broadcast queue. One built from another DNA chain.

Michael’s.

And his countdown had already begun.