Urgency tightened in Dot’s chest. This was the loose thread that could unravel everything — and they had only just begun to pull. Her attention snapped back to the holographic display as it flickered. A brief message flashed across it. Short. Enigmatic. Like a digital whisper.

  I see you.

  Dot felt her blood turn to ice as her eyes locked onto the coded sequence — a code only she, with her Ascendant ability could unravel.

  And only one person ever used that signature with her.

  Nyx watched her carefully. She’d begun noticing the pattern — every time something connected to Cipher surfaced, Dot reacted. Nyx considered saying something, but honestly didn’t know what would help.

  When she sensed Dot’s tension ease slightly, she remembered something she had brought along. She reached into her jacket and pulled out a small device she’d recovered from the man who had broken into her apartment.

  “I have something that might interest you,” she said evenly. “A device with encryption I couldn’t crack. But you…” She tilted her chin toward Dot’s arm. “Now that you’ve got an Ascendant decoder fused to your skin, you might be able to.”

  Nyx extended the device.

  It was the object she’d taken from the brute responsible for her attack, earlier. Dot turned it between her fingers. The surface was seamless — no buttons, no visible interface. Only a smooth indentation at its center, like an eye without a pupil.

  She didn’t ask or request instructions. She felt — or somehow instinctively knew — that the device required no commands, only permission. She was beginning to grow accustomed to that thing she still referred to, with a lingering thread of sarcasm, as her “Ascendant supernatural instinct.”

  The mark on her arm burned faintly, and a subtle sound — almost a whisper — slipped from the metal, as if it had recognized something in her.

  Or someone.

  The device opened with a sharp click, and a small holographic projection rose, unstable, sketched in a dirty green glow. Nothing clean. Nothing simple. Lines of code tangled with words fractured by synthetic voices. Like a secret trying to speak with its mouth sewn shut.

  But Dot’s glyph reacted — realigning the lines, correcting the code — until at last it generated audio.

  “...access verification: Ascendant class confirmed...”

  Dot and Nyx didn’t move.

  The light flickered. A name emerged through the broken static, trembling but sharp enough to pierce.

  “Cipher.”

  Dot swallowed, though her shoulders remained steady.

  “...exchange authorized... Vex trace active...”

  The next phrase surfaced through layers of interference, as if the device resisted its own disclosure.

  “...Vault compromised...”

  Images formed and dissolved in a chaotic stream of data, oscillating between static and failed reads. In front of them, fragments assembled — like old videos recounting stories in distorted fashion, brief and disjointed pieces: shadows of figures in metallic corridors, blinking panels in a cold, distant facility, hands typing too fast to follow. Everything dissolving before memory could fully grasp it.

  Nyx only watched, caught between fascination and disbelief. Data logs, generic prompt strings, cascading code — even for her, someone who prided herself on mastering systems and infrastructure, it was unreadable at the speed racing before them.

  That didn’t seem to be the case for Dot.

  She looked immersed — as if decoding everything in real time. Nyx studied her with quiet curiosity. The glyph on Dot’s arm rotated in a steady rhythm along its own axis, like interlocking gears turning into place.

  Dot frowned, eyes consumed by amber, staring into what had been a projection as if she could rupture the thin membrane of code with her gaze alone.

  “...partial access complete. Incomplete read. Confidentiality preserved.”

  The hologram retracted in silence, and the room returned to nothing more than a dim, breathing shadow.

  Dot closed her hand around the device. Its surface felt colder now. Or maybe she was simply burning.

  Nyx stepped closer, tension sharpening her expression. She hadn’t seen anything truly substantial, only fragmented phrases stripped of context.

  But Dot’s face told another story.

  It said, without words, that she had heard — perhaps even read — far more.

  Nyx finally broke the silence.

  “What did you see?”

  Dot took her time, as if still processing — finishing the last threads of decryption, and even more so, of understanding. At last she answered, eyes still fixed on the empty space ahead.

  “A name I don’t like remembering.” Her gaze shifted to Nyx, blinking slowly, as though still piecing everything together. “And another… that doesn’t feel so unfamiliar anymore.”

  She slipped the device away, as if unwilling to surrender any of it to the world just yet. The name Vex echoed in her mind, more unsettling than Cipher, at least in that moment.

  Her visual memory had never failed her. Amid the chaos, she had recognized her again: the woman of impossible beauty, red hair cascading in soft waves, deep green eyes that seemed almost unreal.

  She had seen her before — the last time she stood inside the Echo Room.

  But now she could finally anchor the name to that delicate, devastating face.

  The days that followed Marrow still refused to grant Dot any peace. The image of the red-haired woman — calm, composed — standing amid the chaos of Cipher’s laboratories beneath his cold, measuring gaze, lingered like an itch beneath her skin. One question circled endlessly: who was she? what was she to Cipher?

  Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

  And more than that: why had both Nyra and Ghost avoided the subject of whatever had been extracted from that place? Why did they shut down every time it surfaced?

  Dot possessed an almost flawless visual memory. Sounds, however, were another matter. It took time — hours of silent replay — before something clicked into place. That name. She was certain she had heard it before. Inside the Vault.

  Spectrum.

  During one of their early training sessions, he had mentioned it casually — too casually. He and Vex had been the only ones, up to that point, to destroy the Vault’s training center.

  Dot exhaled sharply, dragging a hand through her hair. If there was one thing capable of knocking her off balance, it was the sense that information was being withheld from her.

  Important information.

  “We’re going back,” she murmured at last.

  Brooding over names and fractured recollections wouldn’t produce answers. With abrupt resolve, she pulled out her communicator and began typing. Nyx crossed her arms, tension lining her posture. Before she could speak, her own device chimed. A direct message flashed onto the screen — no intermediaries.

  It was Spectrum.

  [Private Message Received]

  “You’re opening a door that could crush you.

  There are things in there even the Vault won’t touch.

  Think carefully about what you’re doing.”

  — S.

  The warning, blunt, unfiltered, thickened the air between them. They exchanged a look.

  They were going to have to talk to the Incursors.

  What neither of them realized was that, in the far corner of the room, a faint light from a discreet camera continued to blink, steady and persistent, apparently resistant to the pulsing interference of Josephine.

  ? ? ?

  The Vault’s meeting room lay submerged in darkness and silence. Only the steady hum of the monitors and the precise rhythm of keys beneath Ghost’s fingers disturbed the stillness. On the screen before him, grainy footage flickered — an old warehouse on the outskirts of the city, discreet, nearly invisible to ordinary eyes.

  Ghost did not possess ordinary eyes.

  He didn’t need to strain to notice something off in the way they moved. Dot’s posture carried tension coiled too tightly beneath her skin. And Nyx… Nyx had never been particularly skilled at masking anything, no matter how hard she tried. That, at least, was consistent.

  From the moment he’d been informed of the hacker’s temporary integration into the Vault, he had anticipated complications. The tracker installed on her bike hadn’t been impulse — it had been precaution. Keeping her within his radar was simply standard procedure.

  And Dot driven by curiosity paired with Nyx chasing answers was hardly the most stable combination imaginable.

  When they stopped and dismounted, the tracker automatically linked to the warehouse’s external camera. A new feed opened. Ghost watched in silence as they approached the entrance. Additional internal cameras flickered online, one by one.

  His gaze sharpened when he saw Nyx retrieve a device from her jacket. A sharp burst of interference cut through the audio. The screen glitched flickered, distorted, fragmented into a smear of green light that slashed across the frame before dissolving into static.

  Ghost crossed his arms, posture rigid.

  The hiss faded. One feed returned shaky, unstable, but functioning. He didn’t bother refining the clarity. If he was right about the device in Nyx’s hand, visual quality was no longer the primary asset.

  The audio returned as well — muffled, warped — but sufficient.

  Their silhouettes reappeared inside the warehouse, half-swallowed by shadow. Ghost tilted his head slightly, observing the residual interference crawling along the edges of the frame.

  “Signal jammer…” he muttered under his breath as the conclusion settled into place. The corner of his mouth twitched faintly. “Poorly calibrated.”

  Nyx had talent. Crude-looking electronics that worked far better than they had any right to — much like Spectrum’s improvisations.

  But everything could fail.

  And the fact that she had deliberately chosen distance from the Vault, securing privacy in a remote location, unsettled him — not overtly, but enough for his jaw to harden.

  Without urgency, he stepped back from the console and sent a message to Dot.

  On-screen, he watched her lift her wrist communicator. He caught the brief tightening of her jaw. The fractional shift of her gaze away from Nyx. He read microexpressions effortlessly, even through compromised resolution.

  It was part of what made him dangerous.

  Ghost activated a secondary channel. A click — and their voices sharpened, clearer now. He listened as they spoke about Zero Point. Arms crossed once more, he leaned his weight against the edge of the table behind him, gaze unblinking.

  Then the unstable image captured something that stilled him.

  In Nyx’s hand — a small metallic device — passed to Dot.

  Ghost narrowed his eyes.

  Lightweight, yes. But its architecture resembled components from an old Ascendant data core. He had seen others like it. One still existed within the Vault. Designed to open only for specific Ascendant signatures.

  For a fleeting second, as Dot took it, the glyph on her arm reacted. Even through distortion, he saw it. Her pulse lit in a faint, organic glow. An unstable hologram flared to life from the contact point between skin and metal. Data lines spiraled outward in layered fractals, forming patterns he recognized, unwillingly.

  Patterns he had hoped never to see again.

  Ghost’s posture shifted almost imperceptibly, as though his entire body had entered a reading mode. His eyes darkened for a fraction of a second — too brief for anyone who didn’t know what to look for. The iris seemed to drink in the hologram’s light, as if the data stream were not merely visible, but legible on another frequency.

  It wasn’t the same kind of reading Dot performed — not organic, not instinctive. His understanding had been forged through control: patterns memorized through repetition, through the violence of learning, through fluency in languages that moved between analog, digital… and something beyond.

  He held his position, the furrow in his brow deepening as he parsed the chaos of signals and distortion. His lower eyelid twitched, a single muscle betraying the discomfort of recognizing names. Faces. History.

  He leaned back harder against the edge of the table. His stare remained fixed, unblinking.

  The sound of the door opening pulled his gaze aside just slightly.

  Spectrum walked in, chewing another strip of synthetic candy with his usual cultivated nonchalance.

  “So…” he drawled, glancing at the screen before looking at Ghost with a crooked grin. “You notice the girls slipped out?” His gaze flicked back to the monitors. “Thought you’d be spiraling. But look at you... already here, stalking them.”

  Ghost returned his attention to the feed.

  “They didn’t say where they were going. And Dot…” A short breath escaped him. “She doesn’t ignore anything that leads to Cipher. Especially not when it pokes at her curiosity.”

  Spectrum stepped closer, interest sharpening as he dropped the candy wrapper onto the central table.

  “And Nyx finally decided to show what she’s been hiding?”

  Ghost didn’t answer immediately. He simply raised the volume. The next fragment of audio cut through the room:

  “...the project template, designated A01, appears to be missing...”

  Spectrum went rigid. Ghost’s eyes left the screen for a moment, staring into nothing, as if the realization had dropped straight down his spine. They had crossed that information before. Years ago.

  Together, with Nyx.

  The following line was worse.

  “...exchange authorized... Vex trace active...”

  The air seemed to fracture.

  “Tell me I heard that wrong,” Spectrum said, his tone stripped of levity.

  Ghost straightened slightly, one shoulder tightening as though absorbing a muted blow. Spectrum swore under his breath, his gray eyes darkening.

  “No… no, not that—” he muttered, already pulling up his wrist communicator.

  Ghost didn’t stop him. He watched as Spectrum turned away, typing with restrained fury, fingers slicing across the screen. On the monitor, Ghost now saw only distortion and data noise, but Dot went further: she was reading it.

  There was a brief exchange between the two women before Nyx glanced down at her wrist. She read. Didn’t reply. Simply turned back to Dot, her face heavy with something unspoken.

  Ghost exhaled slowly, folding his arms.

  “They’re coming.”

  Spectrum let out a humorless laugh.

  “They’ll come in hot.”

  Ghost didn’t disagree. He remained where he was, eyes on the screen. Seconds later, Dot began typing on her communicator. Then both his and Spectrum’s devices chimed.

  Spectrum huffed a tight, knowing sound before striding out of the room, heavy steps echoing behind him. Ghost stayed, silent. Just watching. Calculating and somewhere beneath the surface, already preparing. Because if Vex was back on the board...

  None of them were ready for what came next.

  ? ? ?