The Halvern Consortium didn't just scrape the sky—it swallowed it.
From afar, its mirrored towers looked like frozen lightning, each spire reflecting the city's sunrise until the skyline itself seemed to burn. Drone lanes shimmered between the structures, their flight paths weaving neon ribbons through morning mist. Beneath it all, fountains hurled arcs of light and water in programmed choreography, spelling out the same glowing motto again and again:
Chloe Halvern walked through the main gates, Elijah at her side, the echo of their footsteps lost beneath the hum of machinery and human ambition.
To outsiders, she was the Halvern heiress—cool, untouchable, born in glass and grace.
To herself, she was a ghost wearing her own skin.
The elevator walls were polished chrome—she could see their reflections ripple with each floor they passed, distorted and multiplied like a fun house of corporate perfection. Elijah stood beside her, coat half-zipped, the hint of grease under his nails betraying the hands-on nature of his work in robotics.
"Your world smells like disinfectant," he teased softly.
"Yours smells like motor oil," she countered without missing a beat.
He grinned, that crooked smile that made her forget where she was. "So together we make a complete apocalypse."
Chloe's laugh came unguarded. It startled her—warm and human against the clinical hum around them, like a crack of sunlight through storm clouds.
When the lift paused, Elijah leaned in, brushed his lips against hers—brief, claiming, electric. For one stolen moment, nothing else existed. Not the Consortium. Not her name. Not the weight of expectations that pressed down on her shoulders like invisible hands.
Then the chime sounded, and reality resumed its rules.
"This is my stop," he murmured, stepping out onto the robotics floor where machines hummed their eternal song.
"Stay safe," she said before she could stop herself. The words came out softer than she intended.
His eyes softened in return, that rare gentleness he saved only for her. "Always do. You, on the other hand…" He tapped the elevator door as it began to close. "Try not to start a civil war upstairs."
The doors slid shut, sealing his grin behind mirrored glass.
Chloe watched her reflection multiply in the chrome—a thousand versions of herself, all wearing the same mask.
Her floor unfolded in perfect symmetry: white corridors, glass partitions, soft blue light that never quite felt natural. Workers rose as she stepped out, a coordinated wave of respect and fear.
"Good morning, Director Halvern."
A hundred voices in practiced harmony, each one identical in tone and inflection.
Chloe nodded once, the motion precise and economical. The air in her office adjusted automatically to her body temperature, perfumed faintly with rose and ozone—expensive, artificial comfort. Beyond the panoramic window, the city glittered like circuitry beneath a storm, tiny lights blinking in patterns that almost looked like thoughts.
She had barely set down her bag when the door swished open with a pneumatic hiss.
"Morning, Madam C!"
Kalisto Ren swept in like a theatrical breeze—burgundy suit sharp enough to cut, gold pin gleaming at his collar, carrying too much energy for any reasonable morning hour. He deposited a stack of holo-files on her desk with the flourish of a magician revealing his final trick.
"Crisis o'clock," he announced cheerfully, as if disaster was just another item on the day's agenda. "Stocks are bleeding, tabloids are foaming at the mouth, and guess whose name is trending again? Ours! The fabulous, scandal-baked Halverns."
Chloe pinched the bridge of her nose, feeling the familiar pressure building behind her eyes. "Spare me the opera, Kal."
"No can do, sweetheart. Word is, Lucian Freeman—the psycho of the decade—escaped containment last night. Maximum security just... poof. Gone." He snapped his fingers for emphasis. "People are connecting dots that shouldn't even be in the same coloring book. Murdered investors, missing files, the Lockridge fiasco—guess who the internet thinks pulled the strings?"
"Us," she said flatly, without surprise. It was always them.
"Bingo." He leaned on her desk, voice dropping into something more serious, more real. "They're saying the Azaqor killer was one of ours. That Halvern money cleaned it all up. Made it pretty and tied it with a bow."
Chloe exhaled slowly, forcing her breathing to stay even. "And my father?"
"In emergency talks as we speak. The investors want blood—or at least a statement from you by noon. You're the 'face of innovation,' remember? The pretty princess who makes the future palatable."
Her jaw tightened until her teeth ached. "Innovation can't fix idiocy."
Kalisto raised a brow, but the joke never formed on his lips. His gaze caught on the photo near her keyboard—a younger Chloe beside a smiling boy barely older than she was, both of them laughing at something long forgotten. The image was slightly faded now, worn by too many glances.
"You still keep his picture," he said quietly.
Chloe's throat constricted, words sticking like broken glass. "He was family."
"And Lucian took him away," Kalisto said, even quieter now.
Her hands curled into fists on the desk, nails digging into her palms. "Lucian Freeman deserves a cage. A dark one. Forever."
"Assuming it was really him."
That snapped her attention up sharply. "*What* are you saying?"
Kalisto hesitated, uncertainty flickering across his usually confident face. "Rumor says someone on the inside helped him disappear. The pattern's too clean, too coordinated. Like someone left a door open and painted arrows on the floor."
"Enough." Her voice cut like ice, sharp and final. "File the reports, stabilize the boards. I don't have time for ghost stories and conspiracy theories."
He gave a small salute, all theatrical show again. "Yes, ma'am. Your wish, my command, et cetera."
When he left, silence returned—sterile, perfect, suffocating. The kind of quiet that made her skin crawl.
Chloe turned to her screen, desperate for the comfort of predictability. Charts. Data. Numbers that never slept, never lied, never disappointed. She focused on them, let their cold logic drown out thought.
Then the screen blinked.
Once.
Twice.
A pulse of static crawled across the glass like an infection, turning blue into crimson. Lines spiraled outward from the cursor, twisting into a symbol she'd hoped never to see again—an inverted spiral inside a triangle of eyes, each one weeping black digital ink that dripped down the screen.
A chill rippled down her spine like ice water.
Her earpiece hissed with white noise.
Then—
"Been a while, Lolo."
Her blood froze in her veins. "Who is this?"
A laugh—soft, boyish, *terribly* familiar. Like hearing a ghost speak your childhood nickname. "Don't pretend. You know me. Your favorite uncle."
Her nails dug into the desk hard enough to leave marks. "Lucian."
"Ouch." The voice deepened, playful slipping into menace like a knife sliding from its sheath. "You sound angry. I just wanted to say hi. Maybe remind you that perfection cracks. Everything does, eventually."
"Where are you?" she demanded, heart hammering against her ribs.
"Closer than you think. Closer than you'd *like* to think."
Her screens erupted with movement—blueprints, source code, classified files from the Consortium's most private servers spilling open like veins cut wide. Secrets bleeding across her displays in cascading waterfalls of data.
"Stop it!"
"Tell your father I've come home," the voice purred, saccharine and poisonous. "And tell your boyfriend to keep his clever hands out of the robotics core. Wouldn't want anything… *unfortunate* to happen. Such delicate machinery down there."
Her heart hammered like it might break through bone. "What do you *want*, Lucian?"
He laughed again, childlike now, the pitch twisting unnaturally high—the sound of innocence corrupted. "A reunion, Lolo. Bring the other Ever-Thorne survivors. The place Abby marked. You remember, don't you? How could you forget?"
Static cracked through the line like breaking glass. "Or your towers fall like dominoes. One by one by one. Tick tock."
The screens went black—then flashed a single word in bleeding red letters:
From outside her office came a scream that turned her blood to ice.
Chloe bolted into the corridor, heels clicking frantically against marble.
People clustered in panic around a collapsed figure, their voices rising in a cacophony of fear and confusion. Someone was crying. Someone else was on their phone, voice shaking.
"Move!" she shouted, forcing her way through the crowd with elbows and authority.
Kalisto lay on the marble floor, limbs arranged too carefully, eyes half-open and glassy. A faint smile still ghosted his lips, frozen there like a mask. Someone knelt beside him, fingers pressed desperately to his neck, searching for something that wasn't there anymore.
The verdict came in a whisper that seemed to echo forever:
"No pulse."
Noise flooded the hall—gasps, cries, the shuffle of terrified footsteps backing away from death. The sound built and built until it was almost unbearable.
Chloe's legs trembled. The world tilted sideways, sound dimming to a dull roar like being underwater. Her vision tunneled, edges going dark.
Then, in her earpiece, the child-voice returned, sing-song and cruel:
"Careful, Chloe. Glass breaks easy."
A burst of giggles followed—bright, innocent, horrifying. The laugh of a child who'd just pulled the wings off a butterfly and found it beautiful.
Her knees weakened. She clutched the nearest wall, nails scraping uselessly against polished glass that offered no grip, no comfort, no escape.
Outside, the building's lights flickered—once, twice, then in a cascading wave that swept through the Consortium like a pulse. Somewhere deep within the steel heart of the building, alarms began to wail, their cry rising and falling like mechanical grief.
And as the power dipped, the mirrored walls caught her reflection—dozens of her faces staring back from different angles, each one twisted just slightly differently, each one smiling a fraction too wide.
Not her smile.
Never her smile.
---
The Spiral had already begun to turn.
And Chloe Halvern realized, with terrible clarity, that she was standing at its center.