The transport van rattled through the dark, its tires bouncing over cracked asphalt and forgotten city roads. Inside, Elara stared out the narrow rear window. Her breath fogged the glass. She hadn't spoken since they left the ruins of the water plant behind.
She'd seen it go up.
Felt it in her bones.
The fire. The sound. The light.
Jack was gone.
Nobody. No confirmation. Just a seismic reading and a system blackout.
Kael sat across from her, reloading silently. Lena hunched over a console, scanning for any remaining Raven chatter. Ezra hadn't said a word since they left.
No one knew what to say to her.
She was awake, yes.
But awake in a world where the man who broke into hell to save her didn't come back.
Except…
She couldn't shake the feeling he had.
In a dream, maybe.
Or something deeper.
She turned suddenly. "Stop the van."
Kael frowned. "We're almost at the safehouse."
"Stop the van."
Kael sighed and hit the brakes.
She climbed out before the vehicle even fully stopped, boots landing in a spray of gravel. The road was silent. The fog is thick. She walked to the center of the road and looked around.
Nothing.
But something pulled at her.
Then—
The van's lights flickered.
Then cut out completely.
"Lena?" Kael called from inside.
Static burst through the console speakers.
Lena tapped the screen. "Something's interfering—"
Then a voice came through the speakers.
Low.
Ragged.
"…This is Jack Stone…"
The van went still.
No one moved.
"…If you're hearing this, it means I didn't make it out. But I'm not gone. Not entirely…"
Elara's heart stopped.
She stepped closer to the console. "Jack?"
The voice continued.
"I merged with the echo system before the failsafe triggered. The blast didn't destroy me. It digitized me."
Lena blinked. "He uploaded himself?"
"No," Ezra said. "The Core… it copied him. Jack's psyche. His choices. His regrets."
Kael leaned in. "Are we saying Jack's alive?"
Ezra shook his head slowly. "No. But… part of him is."
The voice shifted again.
Clearer now.
"I'm inside their system. A ghost in the machine. I can see their archives, their plans. They think they wiped me, but I left myself behind. Like a crack in the mirror."
Elara whispered, "Why?"
The voice paused.
Then: "Because you needed to finish it."
Lena swallowed hard. "He's in the Raven Network. Hiding in the digital remains of the Echo Core. That's why the system went offline instead of exploding."
Kael glanced toward the horizon. "Then we've got a problem."
Ezra nodded. "They'll find him. And when they do, they'll either erase him—or weaponize him."
The message ended with one final line.
"Don't come looking for me. Unless you're ready to lose me again."
The van lights flickered back on.
But the damage had been done.
Elara stood in the quiet for a long time, listening to nothing and everything.
She wasn't just fighting for herself anymore.
She was fighting for the last real piece of Jack Stone still left in the world.
And the war had just changed.
The van lights flickered back to life, casting a pale glow across the cracked road and skeletal trees. Elara didn't move. She stood still in the open air, arms slack at her sides, heart caught somewhere between disbelief and devastation.
Jack's voice still echoed inside her head.
A ghost in the machine.
Not dead.
But not alive.
She turned back toward the van.
Lena had lowered her eyes to the console again, replaying the final seconds of the audio.
"Don't come looking for me. Unless you're ready to lose me again."
It wasn't a message.
It was a warning.
Kael leaned against the doorframe, rubbing his jaw.
"So what the hell are we looking at? Some kind of… AI imprint?"
Ezra shook his head. "Not artificial. Not in the traditional sense. This wasn't planned. The Core was collapsing. Jack must have interacted with one of the deeper mirrors—got caught in the conversion stream."
"You mean he accidentally uploaded himself?" Kael asked.
"Not an upload," Lena cut in. "A bleed. The Echo Core didn't just record him—it absorbed him."
She looked up at Elara.
"He's fragmented. Whatever version of Jack exists in that system… it's real. But it's incomplete."
Elara moved toward the van slowly. Her voice was quiet.
"Is he conscious?"
Ezra hesitated. "Maybe not all the time. He might not even know what he is yet. Think of it like… an echo of his mind. Pieces drifting through broken code. Memory. Instinct. Emotion without structure."
Kael crossed his arms. "So what? He's some half-dead whisper floating in a dead system?"
Lena's hands danced across the console. "Not dead. Jack's presence just reactivated the root grid. It's why the Raven Circle hasn't made a move yet. Their own network is hesitating. Like it's waiting for something."
"Or someone," Elara whispered.
She climbed back into the van. Her knuckles were white on the handlebars. Her voice steadied as she spoke again.
"We're going after him."
Ezra raised his brows. "That's suicide. You heard him. He said not to come."
"He always says that," she snapped. "He also ran into the Echo Core alone when everyone told him not to. Now he's stuck inside something the Raven Circle built—something designed to weaponize identity."
She stared at the floor for a long moment.
"They won't just delete him. They'll learn from him. Use him. Twist his instincts into something they can control."
Lena nodded, understanding dawning in her eyes. "Jack's brain wasn't just trained for investigation. It was optimized through trauma. Pattern recognition, emotional profiling—if they decode that, they can create a synthetic operative as dangerous as the real thing."
Kael grunted. "Perfect. A programmable Jack Stone. Just what this world needed."
Ezra looked out the window. "It might already be happening."
They all turned to him.
Ezra continued, voice low. "You've seen the reports. Sleeper agents activated. Contacts going dark. Relic activity is spiking in isolated districts. And all of it follows one pattern."
Lena whispered, "Jack's pattern."
Ezra nodded. "Tactical logic, moral grey zones, legacy code embedded into active field agents. Someone's mimicking him. Using his strategies."
"They're testing him," Elara said.
Her voice broke a little.
"Somewhere in that network, Jack's still alive enough to fight. To sabotage them. But he can't do it alone."
Kael looked at her.
"And what exactly is your plan? Hack into a corrupted Raven AI net and have a tea party with his ghost?"
She met his gaze with fire in her eyes.
"No. I'm going to walk in. And bring him out."
The silence that followed wasn't resistance.
It was respect.
Kael stepped back. "Then we'll need a new site."
Ezra pulled a drive from his coat. "I've been tracking Raven black-box backups. There's a fractured server in the subway ruins below District Nine. Used to be a signal relay hub. It went dark two days after the Echo Core burned. Could be where Jack's echo migrated."
Lena tapped the van console. "If we link to that site and inject a clean signal pulse, it might give Jack's consciousness an anchor. Something stable. A digital mirror that doesn't collapse."
Kael raised a brow. "You can do that?"
"No," Lena said. "But Elara can."
Elara blinked. "Me?"
"You're the only one the system still recognizes. You were the original source code for Rhea's prototype. That connection might still be buried in the stream. You're his last familiar signature."
"You want me to… what? Interface with him?"
"More like trigger a response," Lena replied. "If the network sees you, it might let him surface."
Ezra added, "If we do this, we'll need to move fast. Once the Raven Circle realizes he's alive inside the grid, they'll hunt him. Not because they want him back…"
"But because they're afraid of what he knows," Kael finished.
Elara stared out the window again.
Fog swallowed the trees.
But somewhere beneath it all, in the veins of cables and ghost-coded mirrors, the man she loved—what was left of him—was still fighting.
Still remembering.
Still refusing to let go.
"We move tomorrow," she said. "And we don't stop until I hear his voice again."
Lena nodded.
Ezra slid the drive into the console.
Kael leaned back against the wall.
And outside, something unseen blinked back into existence.
A flicker.
A heartbeat.
A shadow with Jack's voice whispering across the data stream like a warning—
Or a promise.
The war had just changed.