Rain fell differently now. It no longer roared against glass like it used to in Havencrest; it whispered. As if the city itself was afraid to make too much noise, scared it might wake ghosts it wasn't ready to face. Six months had passed since the fire, since Division Nine burned and the man she swore she hated vanished into the smoke.
Sera Donovan stood on the balcony of her new apartment, eyes tracing the skyline where the towers once gleamed silver. The rebuilt district glowed with artificial calm—neon signs flickering over puddles, sirens echoing far away. The world had moved on. But she hadn't.
The wind tugged at her hair, lifting strands of copper in the pale light. She had grown thinner, sharper somehow. Her reflection in the window was no longer the woman who had fought beside Kael—or against him. This one had hollow eyes and a stillness she didn't recognize.
A notification blinked on her wrist console. Broadcast Interview: 20 minutes.
Right. The city's favorite survivor. The woman who exposed the corruption buried inside Division Nine. The hero who lost her partner in the fire.
She laughed under her breath, the sound brittle. "Hero," she muttered, grabbing her coat. "Yeah, sure."
Inside, her apartment was a study in minimalism: dark glass, silver furniture, everything sterile enough to hide the chaos in her mind. The only personal touch was the tiny metal coin resting on the counter. Kael's coin. A relic from a world that no longer existed.
She picked it up, turning it over in her palm. The edge was charred, fused with ash. She'd told herself a thousand times to throw it away. But she couldn't. It was all that remained of him.
The studio lights were too bright. The interviewer's smile too polished.
"Agent Donovan," the woman began, voice dripping with admiration, "Havencrest owes you everything. Exposing Division Nine saved countless lives. How does it feel to be the symbol of truth?"
Sera smiled—tight, professional. "Truth doesn't save anyone," she said softly. "It just exposes what's already broken."
There was a flicker of discomfort, then the interview moved on to numbers, rebuilding progress, government reform. Sera answered on autopilot, her mind elsewhere—on the message she'd received that morning from an anonymous encrypted source.
Code: 92347-K. Origin: Unknown.
But she knew that code. She'd seen it hundreds of times before. Kael's encryption key.
The thought made her chest ache. It couldn't be him. He was gone—his body never recovered, his signal lost in the firestorm. Still, a small part of her refused to believe the silence that followed.
When the interview ended, she stepped outside the studio and into the chill night. The streets buzzed with hovercrafts and glowing advertisements, the air thick with city haze. She pulled her coat tighter, her pulse still unsteady.
Someone was watching her.
She felt it—a presence lingering in the crowd, familiar and cold. She turned sharply, scanning faces. Nothing but strangers moving fast through the rain. Still, the feeling stayed, crawling up her spine.
Sera started walking.
Her apartment door slid open with a low hum. She tossed her coat aside and sank into the couch, opening the encrypted message on her tablet.
Lines of code scrolled across the screen, forming a short message in Kael's style: clean, direct, impossible.
If you're reading this, you were right not to trust them. Division Nine isn't dead. Neither am I. — K
Her breath caught.
It had to be a trick. A deepfake, a manipulation—her enemies trying to pull her back into the chaos she'd barely escaped. But every line of that code screamed authenticity. No one could write like Kael. No one but him.
She leaned back, staring at the ceiling as the city lights bled through the blinds. Her heartbeat echoed in her ears, too loud.
"Kael…" she whispered. The name tasted like fire and regret.
She tried tracing the message origin, but it led nowhere—bounced through hundreds of nodes, vanishing into ghost servers. Whoever sent it knew what they were doing.
She shut her eyes, pressing her palms against them. "You're dead," she whispered. "You're dead, and I'm losing my mind."
But the next line of code appeared before she could close the file. A fragment hidden beneath the signature.
Meet me where it ended. 0100 hours. Come alone.
Her fingers trembled. The place where it ended—the ruins of Division Nine's headquarters, now sealed off by government patrols.
She shouldn't go. She knew that. She should delete the message, report it, burn every trace of the past. But logic had never won against her heart. Not when it came to Kael.
The clock struck midnight when she reached the ruins.
Rain blurred the world into streaks of light and shadow. The building's skeleton loomed ahead, half-collapsed, wrapped in caution tape that fluttered like ghosts. She climbed over the barricade, boots sinking into the wet ash.
Her flashlight cut through the smoke. Every step echoed against broken concrete. Memories rose unbidden—Kael's voice, his smirk, the way he'd said her name like a challenge.
Then she heard it.
A sound—faint, rhythmic. Like breathing.
"Kael?" she whispered, the word breaking in the middle.
No answer. Only the wind.
She took another step forward, the beam catching on something half-buried in debris. A mask. His mask.
Her pulse roared in her ears. "This isn't real."
A figure moved in the shadows. Tall. Familiar.
Her light flicked upward—catching a silhouette before the beam sputtered out. The world fell into darkness.
"Sera," a voice said, deep and roughened by smoke and silence. "You shouldn't have come."
Her breath froze.
She couldn't move, couldn't speak. Every nerve screamed, He's dead. He's dead. But that voice—she'd know it anywhere.
The darkness shifted. And when he stepped forward, illuminated by the pale burn of a flare, her world cracked open.
Kael was alive.
But he wasn't the same.
His once-clean uniform was shredded, marked with scars that told stories of survival no human should endure. His eyes—those sharp, silver-gray eyes—held something colder now.
"How—" she started, but her voice faltered.
He looked at her, not with relief, but with warning. "They're watching," he said quietly. "They never stopped."
"Who?"
"The ones that rebuilt Division Nine. They buried it under a new name. New orders. But it's the same machine."
She took a step closer. "Then why contact me?"
"Because you're the only one who can stop them," he said, his tone low. "And because they're coming for you next."
The flare hissed between them, the smoke curling like ghosts. Sera searched his face for the man she'd known—the man who had fought her, saved her, almost loved her. He was still there, beneath the scars and silence.
She wanted to touch him, to believe this wasn't a dream spun from grief and guilt. But before she could speak, a distant drone shrieked through the air.
Kael's expression hardened. "They found us."
He grabbed her wrist, pulling her behind a crumbled wall just as bullets tore through the rain. Sparks lit the darkness, slicing through the ruin.
"Kael!"
He pushed her down, firing back with precision born of old instincts. "Still asking questions at the worst times," he muttered.
She almost laughed through the panic. "Still bossing me around like you own the place."
He turned, meeting her eyes for a heartbeat that felt like six months collapsing into one second. "Maybe I never stopped."
The drones exploded in the distance.
When the smoke cleared, Kael looked at her, his face pale beneath the firelight. "We don't have much time," he said. "If you want answers, you'll have to trust me again."
Sera swallowed hard. "After everything?"
His jaw tightened. "Especially after everything."
And just like that, the silence of six months shattered.