The first snowfall in years dusted the rooftops of the underground city.

Ash stared out through the cracked window of the safehouse, a thin trail of vapor leaving his lips. Behind him, a portable heat lamp hummed weakly, the only sign of life in a place long forgotten by warmth.

The truth in the crystal had been overwhelming—Solomon’s experiments, the Silk Network's real purpose, the broken children left behind.

Ash had watched them all in frozen images—test subjects numbered, cataloged, and categorized by potential obedience. They weren’t creating agents. They were creating ghosts.

And he had been their most successful phantom.

“Are you sure this is the place?” Rika’s voice broke through the fog in his mind.

Ash turned. She had returned with Zian, both carrying bags filled with tech parts, cold food, and an old cyber-core drive from a back-alley trader.

“This is the place,” Ash confirmed. “But it’s not just a location. It’s an imprint—Solomon embedded the protocol into a physical code base. Something we can only trigger from one of the old Silk terminals.”

Rika frowned, dropping the bag with a soft thud. “There are barely any terminals left. They were all decommissioned or locked by the AI after the Divide incident.”

Ash reached into his coat and pulled out a small silver shard—the key he had extracted from the memory crystal.

“Not all of them.”

---

That night, they traveled deeper underground.

The Silk terminals weren’t just machines. They were entangled code altars—part-psychic, part-organic, wired into the consciousness of every operative the project ever birthed. Most had been buried beneath collapses, shutdown by automated purges. But Ash remembered one.

“Station 0-9A,” he murmured. “Back where it started.”

Zian checked the map. “That’s outside the safe zone. Border of the Null Zone.”

Rika pulled her jacket tighter. “That’s where they dumped the failures.”

“No,” Ash corrected. “That’s where they hid them.”

---

The Null Zone was silent.

No streetlights. No drones. No network signals. The city’s digital pulse ended here, as if the very fabric of the world stopped recognizing its own skin.

Ash, Rika, and Zian moved in shadows, past ruined buildings and crumpled statuary.

Eventually, they reached it.

A faded metal door, barely taller than Ash’s shoulders, half-buried in rubble. The number etched in broken code: 09A.

He reached out, brushing his fingers against the cold steel.

Instantly, something clicked inside his mind—like a string pulled in the depths of memory. The neural key began to glow faintly in his palm.

The door opened without resistance.

---

Inside, it was pitch dark.

Rika lit a small flare, casting sharp, flickering light against the rusted interior. Ash stepped forward first, drawn by something both familiar and foreign.

The chamber was circular, lined with empty chairs and a large central console, still humming with dormant power. Wires curled like veins, some of them pulsing faintly under the dust.

Ash stepped up to the console and inserted the silver shard.

The machine exhaled.

Then a voice—not Solomon’s, not the AI’s—one he had long forgotten.

> “Operative 01: Initiating Ghost Protocol.”

The console lit up.

A holographic interface unfolded around Ash—hundreds of files, looping code spirals, schematics of other operatives. Ghosts.

Ash reached toward the data, then hesitated.

“I need time,” he said.

Rika nodded. “We’ll watch the perimeter.”

---

Time bled away.

Ash was inside the system now, moving through the raw nerve of the network. The Ghost Protocol wasn’t just a kill-switch. It was a safeguard. A log of everything Solomon had buried—even the aborted attempts.

Ash saw their names—children taken from wars, prisons, schools. Some had vanished entirely from the world. Others had been rewritten, like him.

But what drew his attention most was something called Project Mirrorfall.

It was locked behind a triple-code. He tried his access key. Denied. He used the crystal data. Denied.

Only one key remained.

His own blood.

He bit his thumb, pressed it to the sensor, and the lock clicked open.

What unfolded was a full-spectrum dossier of himself. But not just him—his twin.

Ash stumbled back.

“Rika!” he called out. “Get in here.”

She ran in, weapon ready, eyes wide. “What is it?”

Ash pointed to the display.

“Solomon didn’t just choose me for the project. He split me. There were two personalities. The Mirror and the Flame. I was the Mirror. But the Flame...”

Rika read the file, lips parting in disbelief.

“He’s still alive.”

---

Outside, Zian shouted, “We’ve got company!”

Ash grabbed the data core from the terminal. “Get ready to run.”

Rika peered through the cracked slit of the entrance.

“Not drones. People.”

They moved like shadows—hooded, silent, with reflective lenses. Ten, maybe twelve of them.

Ash’s grip tightened around the shard.

“Silk Operatives. Old-gen. They’re here to erase the Ghost Protocol.”

Zian looked at him. “You know them?”

Ash nodded. “I trained them.”

---

They moved fast. Ash led the escape through a forgotten maintenance tunnel that ran parallel to the underground tram lines. The echo of boots followed them, but Rika and Zian laid down interference devices as they ran.

When they finally surfaced again in an abandoned subway station, Ash dropped to one knee, clutching the side of his head.

“Too many memories,” he muttered. “The merge is accelerating.”

“You need rest,” Rika said.

“No,” Ash panted. “I need to find the Flame.”

---

Back at the safehouse, Ash decrypted the rest of the data core.

The Flame—the other half of his personality, or perhaps his genetic twin—had been relocated after the Mirror project collapsed. Unlike Ash, he hadn’t become a field agent. He had been converted into a contingency plan.

A walking override.

If Ash ever went rogue, the Flame was designed to neutralize him.

“Where is he now?” Zian asked.

Ash looked up, his eyes burning with cold fire.

“Varna Sector. Cryo Facility Omega-1.”

Rika frowned. “That’s deep in Solomon territory. We’d be running straight into the lion’s den.”

“Not we,” Ash said. “Me.”

---

That night, Ash stood alone in the snow-covered ruins of the city.

The cold bit into his skin, but he didn’t flinch.

He remembered something Eight had said before he died.

> “You’re not just an echo. You’re the whole sound.”

Ash closed his eyes.

He could feel the Flame out there—like a heartbeat mirroring his own. The only other person who truly understood what it meant to be made, not born. Broken, not raised.

But there was something Solomon hadn’t accounted for.

Ash had chosen not to be a weapon anymore.

He had chosen to be a man.

And now, he would meet the other half of himself—not as prey. But as reckoning.