2. DIGITAL FOOTPRINTS
"The past is never dead. It’s not even past."
-William Faulkner
A week since her bank accounts vanished. Wiped clean, as if she’d never existed.
A week since she took a beating. Her ribs still ache with every breath.
A week since Owl, her friend and only lead, was murdered.
Murdered by a friend she thought long dead.
Lana Reardon moves through the city like an echo, slipping between neon reflections and digital blind spots where cameras don’t reach. Her breath is steady, but shallow.
Every step is precarious, like walking the edge of the Empire State Building blindfolded.
The city is the same. The game is not.
She’s not just being watched. She’s being rewritten.
She shouldn’t have gone back to her safe house. A run-down apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, her bolt hole for years. A place that had always been hers. Always felt safe.
The locks were untouched. The furniture sat exactly where she left it, gathering dust. But the walls? The walls were bare.
No notes. No maps. No pinned-up photographs. Her files, her thumb drives, even scraps of research stashed under the floorboard gone.
Even the personal details are gone. No junk mail. No half empty coffee cup by the sink. No clothes left in the laundry hamper.
It wasn’t just cleaned out. It was sterilized.
She shouldn’t have accessed her emergency funds. The first ATM rejected her withdrawal: Transaction denied.
The second? It flashed a System Error message before spitting her card back with an angry beep.
The third? It swallowed her card for a long moment, then flashed an error. No credentials. No account. Like the banks thought she never existed.
That was when she knew. They weren’t just locking her out. They were deleting her.
Now, she’s been living in the cracks.
Rotating between dingy motels that take cash. Sleeping in beds that reek of bleach and cigarettes. Wrapping a towel around her to avoid touching the sheets.
Only eating at stalls and food trucks. Using names that aren’t hers. Watching for security cameras when stepping through sliding glass doors.
Lana sleeps fully clothed, knife under her pillow, shoes on, ready to run. When exhaustion takes her, it’s in short restless bursts… never more than a few hours.
She’s running out of money, out of places to go, and most dangerously, out of ways to stay ahead. She can feel it. The walls are closing in.
She first noticed it yesterday. A feeling in her gut, a slight shiver as goosebumps spread across her skin. That wrongness, like an off-key note in a familiar song.
Then she saw it. A black sedan parked across from the bodega she’d been watching. Engine idling. Not moving. Not leaving.
A man leaning against a lamppost, cigarette ember a pulsing warning in the dark. Positioned, not just loitering. He glanced at her with practiced indifference, watching her as she stepped inside.
Still there when she walked out twenty minutes later. Hadn’t moved an inch.
The streetlight on Ninth and Greene? Flickering now. It hadn’t been the night before.
Coincidence?
She doesn’t believe in those anymore.
She changes hotels again, keeps moving. She doubles back through side streets, using alleyways where facial recognition cameras don’t reach. She picks up burner phones, one in Chinatown, another in the Bronx, ditches them after a single use. Every time she checks for tails, she sees nothing. And that’s what scares her the most.
The system isn’t chasing her. It doesn’t have to. It’s waiting. Watching. Letting her exhaust herself until she has nowhere left to run.
She needs a plan. A way back in. A way to stop reacting.
Thompkins.
He’s the last loose thread, the last name they haven’t erased.
Because they can’t find him.
Or because they don’t need to.
Lana exhales, pressing a hand against her ribs, the ache grounding her. If she’s right, finding Thompkins won’t just give her answers.
It’ll tell her if she’s already lost.
The motel room smells like damp carpet and regret. The air conditioner rattles in its casing, struggling against the thick humidity pressing in from the streets.
Lana sits cross-legged on the sagging mattress, laptop balanced on her knees, shoulders tight with exhaustion. Her fingers move fast, scanning through lines of code, buried directories, and forum threads that haven’t seen activity in years.
The only real light in the room comes from the desk lamp; sickly yellow, flickering slightly, buzzing like it’s trying to burn out. She watches it flicker between searches, the irregular pulses making the walls seem like they’re breathing.
She exhales sharply, clicking out of another dead-end page. Encrypted forums, deep-web archives, burner email lists. Nothing. Either Thompkins was never here, or someone scrubbed him so thoroughly that even ghosts would be jealous.
Thompkins’ name should be here. Somewhere. But it’s not.
Lana’s searched every buried database, every leaked archive. Scanned decrypted dossiers, cross-referenced intelligence leaks, burned through backchannel contacts. Nothing.
The problem isn’t that Levi Thompkins disappeared.
The problem is that someone made him disappear.
His digital footprint ends a decade ago. No social media. No public records. No financial activity. Any files that once held his name have been overwritten, redacted, buried behind clearance levels even deep-web crawlers won’t touch.
Officially? He’s a ghost.
Unofficially? He’s still out there. Somewhere.
The only way to track him is through the people who used to know him.
And most of them? Buried or burned.
But Lana has a lead.
Vincent Raines.
Ex-intelligence officer. Former special operations. A man who spent years in the dark, then chose to stay there.
Vincent Raines didn’t just vanish. He evaporated.
He and Thompkins ran together once, back when both were playing roulette with national security; leaking classified intel, selling digital weapons, feeding war machines they had no allegiance to.
Too dangerous to keep. Too valuable to kill.
If anyone knows where Thompkins went, it’s Raines.
Lana pulls up the last trace of him. A rural property deep in the woods outside Beacon, New York. Five years off-grid. No cell activity. No bank records. No utilities. Just a plot of land that still gets its taxes paid: cash deposits, spaced exactly six months apart. No digital signature. No traceable name.
Too clean. Too careful.
A safe house. Maybe his. Maybe not.
Lana exhales, rolling tension from her shoulders. This feels too easy.
But easy isn’t the same as safe.
She closes her laptop and grabs her go-bag. If she leaves now, she’ll hit Beacon by dawn.
She never makes it to Raines.
She barely even makes it out of the city.
It happens on Williamsburg Bridge, just past 3 AM.
Traffic is thin, just a handful of cars drifting across the steel expanse, their headlights casting long, jagged shadows. The East River glows beneath her, fractured neon bleeding across the water.
Then she spots it.
White van. No plates.
“Not tonight,” she mutters, shifting lanes. Just another vehicle in the slow crawl of night traffic. Maybe.
But the movement feels wrong.
It adjusts when she does. Mirrors her speed. Too controlled. Too exact.
A flicker of unease prickles at the base of her spine.
Rearview mirror. Second vehicle.
A black sedan. The black sedan.
She’s seen the same one three times in the last two days.
Her pulse spikes. She exhales slow, steady. Think.
“Just my imagination. Maybe?”
The van speeds up.
Cuts in front of her.
Slows. Slows more.
Shit.
The sedan holds steady behind her. Boxing her in.
“Fuck,” she breathes, grip tightening on the wheel. “This is happening.”
Small gap in the left lane. She takes it. Jerks the wheel, tires growling against the asphalt.
The sedan follows.
The van follows.
Not good.
Her stomach knots. If they wanted to take her, they would’ve done it by now. No sirens. No roadblock.
“Damn it. They’re steering me.”
Then the van slams the brakes.
“Shit… Shit!”
Instinct kicks in. Lana wrenches the wheel. Tires SCREAM against the pavement. A truck horn BLARES, its headlights swallowing her for a split second before she veers past its bumper.
The sedan moves at the same time. Too fast. Too practiced.
They knew what I’d do.
Her car skids onto the shoulder, fishtailing. She fights the swerve, barely stopping before the bridge barrier looms too close.
“I’m fine. I’m fine.” Her breath is ragged, hands locked in a death grip on the wheel.
Rearview mirror.
Empty.
The sedan? Gone.
The van? Gone.
Like nothing ever happened.
She swallows hard, forcing down the tremor in her hands. That wasn’t a botched takedown.
That was a message.
Turn back. Walk away. Stop chasing ghosts.
Lana exhales sharply. Rolls her shoulders. Feels the anger burn through the fear.
“You wanna scare me?” She grips the wheel, a cold smirk creeping onto her lips. “Try harder.”
She yanks the wheel, veering toward the next exit.
She’s not going to Raines anymore.
She’s going after Thompkins.
Because if someone else is hunting him too?
That means he’s still alive.
Pain flares as Lana shifts on the motel bed, her ribs screaming a dull warning. Still bruised from the fight in her apartment, made worse by the seatbelt in the near crash on the bridge. The mattress is cheap, sagging in the middle, but it barely matters. She hasn’t slept more than three hours at a time in days.
Her head throbs. Neck stiff from whiplash. Knuckles aching from gripping the wheel too hard. The aftershocks of survival.
She exhales sharply, forcing herself to focus. The room stinks of mildew and industrial-strength cleaner. The overhead light hums, flickering every few seconds. Her laptop warms her thighs, the screen glow burning into her already-tired eyes.
She didn’t notice it at first. Not until her tired eyes catch on a familiar headline.
One of her own articles.
A five-year-old corporate corruption exposé. An exposé that nearly got her sued. An exposé that made real enemies.
Only… something’s wrong.
A paragraph is missing. A key fact slightly altered.
Her stomach clenches. She shifts again, wincing at the sharp pull in her side. She’s already getting used to being erased. But this? This is worse.
She cross-references the original file on her air-gapped laptop. In her copy, the CEO knew about the fraudulent contracts. In the online one now? He didn’t.
A small change. But deliberate.
Not deleted. Altered.
She exhales sharply, fingers pressing against her temple. They’re not wiping her out. They’re turning her into their mouthpiece.
Then she sees the next hit.
A fabricated interview.
Her name stamped onto an article she never wrote. The words mimic her style, but the content is wrong. Twisting facts, leaning into paranoia, making her sound like a crackpot conspiracy theorist.
Her breath comes faster, tight and uneven. She clicks. Reads. It’s her voice but warped.
The government controls the entire media apparatus. Nothing is real. Everything is scripted.
She never wrote that. She’s spent her career exposing state-sponsored disinformation campaigns. Now, they’re forcing her into one.
Her fingers twitch over the keyboard, but she doesn’t know what she’s looking for. A correction? An edit button? Some way to take herself back. But the words are already out there. Circulating. Infecting.
Her hand turns into a fist, bruised knuckles aching.
The comments are worse.
Figures. Reardon was always a fraud.
Guess she finally lost it.
Jesus, she’s just making shit up now.
She exhales through her teeth, jaw clenched so tight it hurts. This is how you kill credibility. Not with bullets, but with doubt.
She’s written about these tactics before. Manufacture doubt. Discredit. Isolate.
But knowing the playbook doesn’t make it stop.
And then she finds the worst of it.
A death notice.
It’s buried deep in a fringe conspiracy forum, the kind that leaks government blacklists and unverified intelligence chatter.
Investigative journalist Lana Reardon killed in a car accident outside Manhattan. Two days ago.
Her breath locks. Nausea curls at the edges of her bruised ribs. Fingers suddenly cold against the laptop.
The details are too perfect. The make and model of a car just like hers. A clipped photo of a totaled vehicle, barely identifiable, but close enough to make her stomach twist.
It looks real.
Convincing enough that if she weren’t standing here, she might believe it herself.
She scrolls, pulse hammering. No record of the crash in official databases. No news coverage.
But that’s the point.
The system didn’t make her a headline.
It made her an afterthought.
No fanfare. No public erasure. Just a slow, quiet deletion.
Like she was never here to begin with.
She forces herself to inhale.
She can’t panic. Panic gets people killed.
Instead, she focuses. What does this mean?
They aren’t just watching her.
They aren’t just tracking her.
They’re predicting her.
Every move she’s made, every calculated, careful step… was expected.
Which means if she keeps playing by their rules…
She’s already lost.
A new thought slams into her. Hard.
She must change the game.
Lana’s hands tighten on the edge of the laptop. Her body still hurts, still screams for rest, but she ignores it.
No more screens. No more traceable patterns. No more predictable moves.
The system thinks it knows what she’ll do next.
She’s about to prove it very, very wrong.
Lana shoves her laptop into her go-bag and bolts from the motel, breath sharp, heartbeat faster than it should be. Keep moving. No patterns. No habits. No digital ghosts to follow.
She forces herself into the flow of the city. Two blocks north. Six west. A bus going the wrong direction. “Wrong is good,” she mutters, gripping the metal pole as the bus rumbles forward. Ten stops. Off. Back the way she came.
At the station, she pays cash for a train ticket, fingers curling around the paper stub. Just a decoy. Just noise. She tosses it before reaching the platform. A cab next. In, out, gone before the driver even hits the meter.
By the time night falls she’s burning, aching. Legs ache, lungs sting, but it’s working. It has to be.
She slows her steps, blending into the sidewalk’s rhythm, eyes flicking to windows, reflections, the edges of her own shadow. “No one’s following,” she mutters under her breath, but she doesn’t believe it.
The city moves around her. Buses sigh at the curb, neon spills across the wet pavement, a tide of strangers flows past. She watches them, searching for the unseen thread of pursuit.
Nothing.
She swallows, breath unsteady. For the first time in days, paranoia ebbs, just a fraction.
“Maybe,” she exhales, almost to herself. Maybe I lost them.
But as the words slip out, so does the doubt. Would she even know if she hadn’t?
Twenty-four hours pass before she admits the flaw in her plan.
She’s finally untraceable.
Which means she has no way to trace Thompkins.
Lana exhales, sinking onto a metal bench in a Newark bus station, the chill seeping through her jacket. She watches the crowd move. Slumped travelers, coffee-clutching commuters, a kid kicking at a soda can, ordinary lives untouched by the algorithmic warfare closing around her.
She rubs her hands together, fingers stiff. This is the paradox. The more she goes off grid, the safer she becomes. But the safer she is, the colder the trail gets.
Thompkins isn’t leaving a digital footprint. Neither is she.
She stares at the cracked floor tile between her feet, jaw tightening. If Echo Protocol is tracking him, they have real-time intelligence. If she could tap into her network, she might be able to piggyback on their hunt, follow the ripples they leave behind.
But right now?
She’s blind. Just another ghost in a world that doesn’t know she exists.
Her fingers dug into the edge of the bench, breath slow, measured. Has she outplayed herself?
Not for the first time, gnawing doubt slithers in.
The last burner weighs heavy in her pocket.
Lana pulls it out, turns it over in her palm. Cheap plastic, prepaid, never activated. A lifeline. A noose.
Her thumb hovers over the power button.
One call. That’s all it would take. A log-in to a secure channel, a whispered request on the right forum. She could reach out to someone. Cole, maybe. Mendez. Pull the right string, listen for the right echo. Find out if anyone has eyes on Thompkins.
She exhales, jaw tight. And the second she does?
“They’ll have me.”
The words slip out, quiet. Just her and the phone and the knowing.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Lana squeezes it tighter. Echo Protocol has already rewritten her into a dead woman. The moment she pings a tower, they won’t just find her. They’ll make sure she stays dead.
Her finger trembles over the button.
“Stupid.” She mutters it under her breath and forces herself to put the phone away.
She needs a different way in. A new approach. A way to move without being seen.
Her mind shifts, scanning for cracks, for leverage. She’d been tracking Thompkins through people, not data. He had no digital presence, no traceable accounts. But Raines still knew how to find him.
How?
She exhales sharply, running through the possibilities. Raines wasn’t hunting him online. That meant there had to be something else.
A pattern. A failsafe. Something left behind in the physical world, buried where only certain people would know to look.
Lana straightens, shaking off the cold.
“If Raines could do it,” she murmurs, pulling her hood up.
She tugs her bag over her shoulder, steps back into the crowd.
“Then so can I.”
The problem with chasing ghosts is that they don’t leave maps, only echoes.
Lana follows one of the last she remembers. A dead drop.
It’s been six years since she last used it, a hollowed-out electrical box wedged between a row of condemned brownstones in the Bronx. Back then, it was a relic of an older era of journalism, when sources were still paranoid enough to demand physical drops instead of encrypted chatrooms.
She pulls her hood lower as she moves through the city. No digital trail. No predictable routes. Just instinct. The streets hum with artificial life: neon ads flickering against glass, surveillance cameras sweeping the sidewalks. But Lana moves in the spaces they don’t see.
By the time she reaches the drop, her pulse is steady. She scans the street, counts the parked cars, checks the windows for silhouettes. No movement. No signs of watchers.
She crouches, pops open the rusted panel, and reaches inside.
Her fingers brush against paper.
A folded envelope.
Lana exhales, unfolds it beneath the dim glow of a flickering streetlamp.
One word, handwritten.
RUN.
“Fuck,” she mutters.
Her stomach knots.
Then, movement.
A shadow cuts across the pavement.
She whirls, pulse slamming in her ears. Too late.
FLASH a white-hot explosion of light blinds her. A microphone slams against her jaw.
“Lana Reardon, why are you on the run?”
The world detonates around her. Voices crash in from every direction. A dozen figures swarm forward. Shouting, grabbing, flashing cameras explode like muzzle fire.
She stumbles back, hand snapping to her side. Gun, knife, anything, but there’s no threat to fight. Just journalists.
The realization slams into her harder than the lights.
Not an ambush. A spectacle.
Someone leaked her location. Not to kill her, but to frame her.
The cameras aren’t here to catch her. They’re here to redefine her.
Lana locks her jaw, forcing the panic down. One wrong move, one wrong expression, and they’ll sculpt her into whatever they need her to be.
She stands still, head tilted slightly, not defiant, not afraid. Just watching.
They’re baiting her. She can see it in their faces. The sharpened hunger of people who already know the headline they’re writing.
The words will be cut, twisted, reassembled. Footage slowed, zoomed, edited for maximum guilt.
Cyberterrorist. Radical. Traitor.
Lana exhales, steadying herself. The broadcast isn’t live.
No satellite trucks. No breaking news banner. This isn’t about exposure. It’s about control. Someone is curating the narrative before the world sees it.
Which means she still has a window.
A single chance.
She doesn’t answer. Doesn’t blink.
She runs.
Lana shoves past the cameraman, sending him staggering into his own crew. A microphone cracks against pavement. Someone grabs her jacket. She twists, rips free, keeps moving.
Alley. Dark. Narrow. A dead end.
No. Not dead.
She vaults the chain-link fence, metal rattling beneath her grip. Boots hit concrete. Keep going.
The city is a maze of surveillance, but she knows the blind spots.
Down a side street, too narrow for drones. Across traffic taxis brakes hard, horn screaming. She ducks into a market, weaving between vendors, pushing through the crush of bodies.
Don’t run. Not yet.
A rack of sunglasses. She snatches a pair, shoves them on. A clothing stall, a jacket draped over a display. She swaps it with hers in one clean motion.
Silhouette changed.
She doesn’t stop. Doesn’t look back.
By the time the journalists spill onto the main road, Lana Reardon doesn’t exist.
The damage is done.
Lana watches it unfold from the corner of a 24-hour laundromat, hood up, shoulders curled inward, a half-empty cup of burnt coffee going cold in her hands. The television above the dryers flickers, headlines scrolling beneath a loop of her own face.
“Disgraced journalist connected to cyberterrorist cell.”
“Fugitive or whistleblower? The truth behind Lana Reardon’s disappearance.”
Every channel. Every network. Not an arrest warrant. Not a manhunt.
A trial by narrative.
She stares at the screen, barely hearing the hum of the machines around her. This wasn’t about exposing her.
It was about making sure no one would ever believe her again.
She exhales slowly, the weight of it settling in her chest. Why the press? Why now?
Echo Protocol had already erased her. Bank accounts gone, records wiped, even a fake death notice planted online. If the system wanted her completely removed, it could have staged something cleaner. A fatal accident. A closed-case obituary.
Instead, it let her live.
And then it turned the world against her.
Her jaw tightens. Echo Protocol isn’t just deleting threats anymore. It’s replacing them. Controlling how people remember them.
They could have made her vanish without a trace. Instead, they made her a villain. A warning.
She takes a slow sip of coffee, forcing herself to think past the anger. She can’t fight this head-on.
No more predictable moves. No more reacting.
She doesn’t just need to stop looking for Thompkins.
She needs to disappear the way he did.
There are places the system doesn’t see.
Lana moves into them.
Beneath the city, the world rots in forgotten spaces: abandoned tunnels, half-built infrastructure projects, underground corridors that never made it onto official records.
She climbs through a broken maintenance hatch in a derelict subway tunnel, the rusted metal groaning under her weight. Stale air presses in. She forces herself forward.
A passage beneath an old train yard, once meant for repairs. Steam pipes line the walls, some still hissing faintly. She steps carefully, counting her breaths, the metal grates beneath her feet giving just enough to make her second-guess every step.
At night, she sleeps in ventilation shafts, curled between corroded beams, her back pressed to cold steel. The space is cramped, airless, too quiet. But quiet is better than exposure.
She is nowhere.
For the first time in days, the noise stops.
No distant hum of cameras. No altered news articles rewriting reality. No phantom reflections shifting in storefront glass.
The system has lost her.
She should feel relief.
Instead, the unease doesn’t leave.
Something's wrong.
She pauses in a tunnel lined with old service lights, half of them shattered. The air is thick, heavy with the scent of damp concrete and rust.
Then, a noise.
Soft. A scrape.
Lana whirls, knife already in her hand.
Nothing.
She scans the darkness behind her, pulse hammering. The corridor is empty. Still.
Too still.
Slowly, she turns back.
A shape is standing in the tunnel.
Her breath locks in her throat. Tall. Motionless. Featureless in the dark.
Lana reacts on instinct, knife raised, feet braced.
The light flickers and the shape is gone.
Her pulse slams in her ears. Did she see it? Or had it been there the whole time?
She exhales, voice barely a whisper. “Okay. That’s new.”
A nervous chuckle slips out. Too sharp, too forced.
She drags her hand down her face. “Not losing it. Not yet. Just shadows. Just exhaustion.”
Her fingers tighten around the knife. She forces her feet to move.
“Nothing’s down here but me.”
She says it like she believes it.
But she doesn’t look back.
She doesn’t see the faint imprint in the dust where someone had been standing.
Lana almost misses it.
A series of etched lines, shallow but deliberate, carved into a rusted steel beam.
Not graffiti. A message.
She kneels, fingers brushing over the scratches. The metal is cold, damp with condensation. Old, but not that old. Someone put this here recently.
Someone who knew she’d find it.
Her breath slows, mind slipping into old habits, breaking apart the pattern. Layered. Structured. It’s not a sentence. It’s a set of coordinates.
A name.
An address.
And a single phrase, scratched beneath it all:
“You’re late.”
Her pulse spikes.
She tenses, suddenly aware of how exposed she is. The message had been waiting. That means someone else was, too.
She listens. The tunnels stretch in both directions. Silent, empty.
Too empty.
No wind. No shifting rubble. No echoes of rats skittering through the dark.
She swallows hard.
Thompkins was waiting for her to break free.
Or someone wants her to think he was.
Lana exhales, slow and controlled, pushing herself to her feet.
Every instinct tells her to leave.
Instead, she steps into the unknown.
Lana moves. Fast, but not rushed. Every step measured, every shift of weight calculated.
She follows the coordinates from the cipher, weaving through the city’s forgotten skeleton. Sealed subway tunnels, abandoned maintenance corridors, rusted arteries of infrastructure no longer mapped.
No cameras. No data. No future footprint.
A perfect place to disappear. Or get lost forever.
She finds the entrance in a condemned station. A corroded relic buried beneath decades of progress.
A metal security door, tagged with graffiti, half-hidden behind scaffolding.
No handle. No keypad. Just a slit in the steel.
The kind that only opens from the other side.
She knocks once.
A minute passes. Nothing.
Not just silence. Dead space. No movement, no shifting weight beyond the door. If they’re inside, they’re watching. Measuring.
She knocks again. Three short taps. One hard and loud.
The cipher pattern.
Another pause. Longer.
Her pulse ticks upward. Someone is deciding something. Then,a whisper of movement. A shift in pressure. Metal scrapes against metal. A sound too deliberate to be a mistake. A slit in the door slides open. Barely an inch.
A pair of sharp, dark eyes stare out. No curiosity. Just assessment. A voice, low and detached. “Wrong turn, journalist.”
Not lady. Journalist.
Lana doesn’t step back. Doesn’t flinch.
"Looking for Thompkins."
Silence.
A beat. Then another. The kind of delay that forces people to fill the gap with excuses, with weakness.
She doesn’t.
The man exhales through his nose, mutters something under his breath. Another test. Then, a second, heavier scrape of metal. A second lock sliding free.
The door shifts open, just wide enough for her to step inside.
Inside, the air is thick with dust and old concrete. Dim overhead lights cast long shadows across a space that used to be something else. The bones of a club, or maybe a repurposed bunker.
It’s quiet, but not empty.
Figures linger in the dark corners: ex-operatives, ghost agents, people who don’t officially exist anymore. The ones who disappeared before governments could erase them.
In the back, leaning against a metal support beam, arms crossed, weight evenly distributed like a man who never truly relaxes…
Levi Thompkins.
The name she’s been chasing. A ghost now made flesh. No…
The ghost, someone even intelligence agencies couldn’t track.
And now, here he is. Solid. Real.
His eyes are the first thing she registers. Cold, unreadable, the kind of stare that measures people like assets and threats. The kind that’s seen every trick, every lie, every last-minute betrayal.
He’s older than she expected but not worn down. He’s refined, sharpened. Early fifties, maybe. Broad shoulders, lean muscle, built for endurance over brute force.
His skin is weathered, creased at the edges of his eyes, but his movements are precise: military, calculated, always aware of the angles.
A week-old shadow of stubble dusts his jaw, peppered with gray. Not careless… deliberate. A disguise that can be cleaned up in seconds if needed.
His left-hand flexes, a faint, unconscious habit. Scar tissue lines his knuckles, deep enough to suggest old fractures. A fighter’s hands.
The jacket he wears is broken-in leather, scuffed at the elbows, lined with pockets that hang just a little too heavy.
Armed, then. Always.
His boots are military-grade, but worn from running, disappearing, surviving.
And yet, despite the weight of his history, he stands like a man completely in control of the space around him.
He doesn’t react when she steps forward. Doesn’t blink. Doesn’t shift.
Just watches. Measuring her the way she’s spent months trying to measure him.
And then, finally, he speaks.
"You shouldn't be here."
His voice is calm, flat, but there’s an edge beneath it. Not anger. Something closer to calculation.
Lana exhales sharply. “Nice to see you too.”
Thompkins doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink. Just watches her, like he’s still deciding whether or not she’s real.
Then, finally, he shifts. Pushes off the beam, stepping closer. Too close.
Testing her reaction.
"How’d you find me?"
Lana holds her ground. “Had to go analog.”
A flicker, not quite a smirk, but something close. No amusement in it.
“Yeah? And how many safehouses did you compromise getting here?”
She doesn’t flinch. "None."
A pause. A beat of silence meant to unnerve. Then, low, measured: “Mm.” He doesn’t look convinced. His gaze sharpens, like a blade running over a whetstone.
“And what do they know about me now that they didn’t before?”
Lana’s ribs ache.
Because she doesn’t know the answer. She holds his stare, but it’s a losing battle. Finally, she exhales. “I don’t know.” Thompkins nods. Slow, deliberate.
Then, like a hammer dropping.
“Exactly.”
Thompkins exhales sharply, stepping back, shaking his head.
"That's the problem with journalists." His tone is almost bored. "You think you're pulling threads, exposing secrets."
His eyes flick to hers. Cold. Sharp.
"All you're really doing is showing them which leaks to plug."
Lana’s fingers curl into fists. Her pulse pounds in her ears.
"Owl died for this."
The room goes still.
No shift of weight. No breath. Just a heavy, suffocating silence.
Thompkins stares at her, expression unreadable, but something in his jaw tightens.
Lana doesn’t let him look away.
"People are being erased," she says, voice low but firm. "You know why."
A long pause.
Then, finally he exhales.
Slow. Measured.
His voice, when it comes, is quieter. Not softer. Just lowered to a frequency only meant for her.
"You think you're chasing the truth."
A beat. A breath.
"You're chasing a script someone else wrote."
Lana doesn’t blink. Doesn’t waver.
"Then help me rip up the pages."
A pause.
Something shifts in Thompkins’ eyes. Not shock, not agreement. Something deeper. Something dangerous.
For a moment, he just studies her.
Measuring. Weighing. Calculating. Then, he exhales. Not slow. Not controlled. Just a sharp, irritated breath.
He runs a hand over his face, drags his fingers through his graying stubble.
“Shit.”
Not surrender. Not yet. But not rejection either. His gaze flicks over her again, slower this time. Different. Not as a liability. As something else. Then, finally, he nods toward the back of the room.
"Come on, journalist."
A beat. His voice drops lower.
"Let’s see how deep this rabbit hole really goes."
Lana already knows it’s bad. She just doesn’t know how bad. The static clears. The screen flickers. A news broadcast, crisp and clinical. And there she is.
Not the real her. The other her. A perfect replica, sitting stiffly in a dimly lit room, hands folded, posture rigid. Dead-eyed. Lifeless. Her own voice plays back at her: flat, mechanical, just slightly… off.
"Everything they’re saying is true. The cyberattacks, the leaks, the disruption…"
A pause. Too long. Unnatural.
"I planned it all."
The banner below the footage seals it:
LANA REARDON: CONFESSION OF A CYBERTERRORIST
Lana doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t stumble back, doesn’t gasp, doesn’t let it break her. Instead, she exhales sharply. Rolls her shoulders, forcing the tension out.
"Took them long enough."
Thompkins watches her, expression unreadable.
“You’re not surprised.”
She shakes her head. Slow. Controlled. "They’ve rewritten me before."** Her voice is steady, but there’s an edge beneath it.
Her gaze lingers on the screen, studying the copy of herself, scanning for weaknesses.
"This isn’t new."
A beat. Then, lower. Colder.
“The difference is, now they don’t care if I see it.”
That’s what’s really unsettling. This isn’t just an attack on her past. This is an attack on her future.
"They don’t just want to delete me," she says, voice tight. "They want to own me."
Thompkins nods. Not in agreement. just confirmation.
"Now you understand."
Then, he reaches for the remote.
“The confession isn’t the real story,” he says.
His thumb hovers over the button. A beat. A breath.
“This is.”
Click.
The channel flips.
Another news network. Different anchor. Same breaking report.
Different face.
A political activist Lana recognizes, a man who exposed government misconduct last year.
His voice is calm, measured. False.
"I deeply regret my actions. The violence I helped incite was reckless and inexcusable. I urge my followers to abandon our movement."
Click.
A whistleblower. Gone for six months. Now back. Apologizing.
"I was misled. My statements were taken out of context. I see now that my accusations were unfounded."
Click.
A former intelligence officer, once an outspoken critic of mass surveillance.
Blank-eyed. Smiling softly.
"We were wrong. The system isn’t the enemy. It’s the only thing keeping us safe."
Lana stares. Her neck throbs, knotted and tense. This isn’t damage control. This isn’t rewriting people after they become a threat. They’re preemptively neutralizing them before they ever get there.
Thompkins watches her carefully. Measuring.
"Now do you get it?"
Lana swallows hard. The pieces click into place. The pattern, the disappearances, the shifting narratives, not silencing dissent. Replacing it.
Her breath comes tight. Too tight.
"Echo Protocol doesn’t just predict threats." Her voice is barely above a whisper.
"It replaces them."
A slow nod from Thompkins.
"Before they even happen."
Lana forces herself to breathe evenly. Her mind is racing. Echo Protocol doesn’t need assassins. Doesn’t need secret prisons. Doesn’t need blackmail or bribes. It doesn’t have to kill you. It just has to convince the world that you were never real to begin with. That’s why they let her see the deepfake.
They weren’t warning her. They were telling her she was already gone.
She opens her mouth. To say what, she doesn’t know.
But Thompkins’ expression shifts.
Something changes in the air.
His gaze flicks toward the entrance.
His entire body tenses.
“We need to go.”
Lana barely has time to process the words.
Then, a beat. A breath.
The first shot slams into the television.
The screen detonates.
Shattered glass explodes outward, catching the dim light, static hissing like a dying signal.
Lana hits the ground before she even registers why.
The sound isn’t a normal gunshot. Lower. Heavier. A compressed punch of air instead of a bang.
Something slams into the concrete near her head. A deep, solid impact. Not a ricochet. A shot meant to kill.
She barely catches a glimpse, sleek metal, no casing, buried deep.
Thompkins grabs her by the collar, yanking her up.
“Magnetic rounds. Rail pistols.” His voice is calm. Too calm.
“No gunpowder. No muzzle flash.”
Another shot, a metal support beam shudders beside them, sending a shower of sparks into the dark.
Silent. Precise.
These weren’t normal operators.
They sent the real ones.
Lana pushes forward, forcing her body to move.
Thompkins kicks open a side door, metal screaming on its hinges.
No shouting. No commands.
Whoever was coming wasn’t here to capture.
They were here to erase.
The safe house detonates into chaos.
Gunfire, suppressed, near-silent, rips through the air.
Muzzle flashes strobe in the dark, casting split-second silhouettes of bodies moving, falling.
The club’s ghosts fight back. Small arms, makeshift cover, gunfire tearing through the walls. But it’s not a battle.
It’s a massacre.
Through the dust, Lana catches a glimpse. One of the operatives stepping through the wreckage, raising his weapon.
Two silent shots into a fallen body.
No hesitation. No wasted bullets.
Erasure.
Lana and Thompkins tear through the back corridors, boots slamming against old tile.
A bullet whines past Lana’s ear, embedding deep in the doorframe.
No sound. No muzzle flash. Just impact.
They dive through the emergency exit, slamming into the alley.
Thompkins doesn’t hesitate. His hand is already moving.
He yanks a compact device from his jacket and hurls it to the ground behind them.
A grenade. But not a normal one.
The air rips sideways.
A concussive shockwave, pure kinetic force, slams through the doorway. The walls groan. Cracks spiderweb outward.
The club collapses inward.
A kill team operator dives through the exit just as it detonates. Lana catches a glimpse, black tactical armor, helmet visor reflecting firelight. He’s ripped sideways, slammed into the wall with bone-snapping force. His head is 90 degrees to his body.
Dead.
Lana and Levi run.
Up the fire escape. Hands slipping, metal groaning under their weight.
Lana drags herself up, legs shaking, every muscle screaming.
Across the rooftop. The city sprawls below them, glowing, oblivious. Just another night.
Her breath shreds through her throat, raw and burning.
Her body begs her to stop. She doesn’t. Then, a low hum. Rising. Building.
Drones.
The moment Lana registers the sound, Thompkins grabs her arm.
No hesitation. No time to think.
They launch off the edge of the building.
Freefall.
Then, impact. They slam onto an adjacent fire escape, metal rattling beneath them.
Lana rolls hard. A jagged edge slices across her forearm. She hisses through gritted teeth, warmth spilling down her skin. No time to stop.
Thompkins is already moving. They drop again. This time onto a truck parked below. The impact jars her bones. The shock slams through her legs, up her spine.
She barely bites back a cry of pain. Thompkins doesn’t slow. He yanks open the truck’s side exit, hauls her inside. They spill into darkness.
A narrow underground tunnel, old infrastructure, half-flooded with stagnant water.
The air stinks of rust, decay, something foul. Footsteps pound above them. A shadow crosses the grate overhead. They aren’t alone. A silenced shot hisses past Lana’s head.
A heartbeat later a second round punches into the concrete just behind them, sending stone shards slicing through the air.
Then, Thompkins staggers.
Not a full stop. But wrong. Off. Lana’s breath catches as she sees it. Dark liquid, spreading across his shirt, too fast, too much.
Shit.
She grabs his jacket, yanking him forward.
“Keep moving!”
They sprint deeper into the tunnels, boots splashing through stagnant water.
The air thickens. Damp. Choking. Electric with danger.
Then, an impact.A deep, gut-punch explosion. The wall detonates outward. A shaped charge. Placed. Timed. Ripping through decades-old brick like paper.
The shockwave hits like a truck.
Lana is airborne for a second. Then she slams into the floodwater, the impact knocking the air from her lungs. Cold floods over her. Darkness. Silence.
She surfaces, gasping, coughing, choking on dust and stagnant filth. Thompkins… he’s down.
He’s slumped against a support beam, not moving.
Fuck.
Lana scrambles to him, gripping his shoulder.
His breathing is ragged. Uneven.
His hand? Pressed tight to his side, slick with blood.
Maybe not just a graze.
Lana’s pulse spikes.
The tunnel is collapsing.
The kill team is still behind them.
She grits her teeth, yanks him up.
“Come on.”
No hesitation. No time.
She hauls him forward, pushing deeper into the maze.
They stumble through a rusted maintenance hatch, metal groaning under their weight.
The air shifts. Stale, damp, laced with rust and stagnant water.
They’ve emerged into an old drainage chamber, circular, domed, the kind of place built to funnel things away. To forget them.
Lana doesn’t stop moving.
Thompkins leans against the wall. Too heavy, breath unsteady.
Not just pain. Blood loss.
Lana rips his jacket aside.
The wound is bad. Not just a graze. A deep, raw gouge along his ribs.
Too much blood. His entire side slick with it.
And Then, she notices.
Her go-bag. Gone.
Her stomach drops.
No… No. No!
She turns, scanning the wreckage, her brain refusing to accept it.
The blast. The impact. It couldn’t be gone.
But the tunnel behind them was a tomb.
The drive, Owl’s last lead, was buried.
This was worse than dying.
Because now, the only thing left was a story someone else had already written for her.
Lana exhales sharply. Her hands are still shaking.
Proof doesn’t matter.
Narrative does.
Lana doesn’t ask where they’re going.
She just drives.
The old sedan hums beneath her, tires gripping a road that barely exists: cracked asphalt, faded lines, a stretch of highway that time forgot. No traffic cameras. No digital checkpoints. Just miles of nothing, swallowed by the night.
Beside her, Thompkins sits rigid, his breath slow but tight, controlled. His jacket is soaked through, the fabric clinging to his side where blood seeps beneath. His hands rest on his thighs, fingers curled inward, white-knuckled. He doesn’t complain. Doesn’t ask how bad it is.
Lana grips the wheel, eyes fixed ahead. She forces herself to ignore the wet, coppery scent filling the car.
Minutes pass. Maybe longer. The only sound is the rumble of the engine and the faint whistle of wind slipping through the cracked passenger window.
Then, Thompkins speaks, voice low, almost amused.
“You ever stitch up a gunshot wound?”
Lana exhales. “No.” A beat. “But I’ve written about people who have.”
Thompkins huffs a weak, dry chuckle. “That’s comforting.”
She doesn’t slow down. “We’ll figure it out.”
An hour later, they leave the broken highway behind, swallowed by dense forest. The road narrows, turns to gravel, then to nothing at all.
The hunting lodge is barely visible through the tangle of overgrown trees. Forgotten, sun-bleached wood blending into the wilderness. No power lines. No security cameras. No digital footprint.
Lana pulls the car to a stop. Kills the engine. Silence rushes in, thick and absolute.
Not a modern safehouse. A relic.
Built for a time when hiding meant vanishing, not just slipping past an algorithm.
The front door groans as she shoves it open. Inside, the air is cold, stagnant with disuse. A kerosene lamp flickers to life, casting long, restless shadows against dust-covered furniture. Stacks of old file boxes loom in the dim glow. Maps, yellowed with time, are pinned to the walls in a crumbling mosaic of secrets.
Everything here is analog.
Lana exhales, breath misting in the frigid air.
A safehouse with no signals, no connections. The only ghosts in this place are the ones someone left behind.
Thompkins drops heavily onto an old wooden chair, the legs creaking under his weight. His breath hitches, just for a second, before he exhales, slow and measured, masking the pain.
Lana moves. Fast.
She scans the room, finds an old metal case tucked beneath a shelf. Flips it open. The medical kit is outdated but intact—gauze, antiseptic, a needle and thread. Good enough.
She kneels beside him, fingers working without hesitation, unzipping his jacket, peeling back the bloodied fabric. The wound is bad—deep enough to tear muscle, but not lethal. Not yet. Still, too much blood. Too much risk.
“You’re lucky,” she mutters, pressing gauze against the wound, feeling the heat of it beneath her hands. “A few inches over and you’d be dead.”
Thompkins grins, weak but defiant. “I’m always lucky.”
Lana doesn’t respond. She just grabs the bottle of antiseptic and tilts it.
The liquid splashes over raw flesh.
Thompkins sucks in a sharp breath, hissing through his teeth. “Jesus!”
“Hold still.” Her tone leaves no room for argument.
She works fast. Presses gauze into place, wraps the bandages tight, movements efficient but not gentle. Blood seeps through the first layer, but the bleeding slows. It’s enough.
When she’s done, she exhales, leaning back on her heels. Her hands are slick, stained. She wipes them clean with a rag, smearing rust-colored streaks across the fabric.
Thompkins watches her. Exhaustion weighs on him, but his eyes are still sharp, still reading between the lines.
“You’ve done this before.”
Lana shakes her head. “No.”
A beat.
“But I’ve lost people before.”
Thompkins doesn’t press. He just nods, slow and knowing, like that answer tells him more than she intended.
Then, he lifts a hand, gesturing toward the stacks of old paper files, coded logs, and surveillance photos pinned to the walls.
“You want to understand Echo Protocol?” His voice is quiet. “It’s all here.”
Lana doesn’t sit. She paces.
Her fingers trail over stacks of old folders, the paper brittle beneath her touch. She flips through handwritten reports, military records, classified memos scrawled in faded ink.
No computers. No screens. Nothing hackable.
A system built to keep secrets safe.
Thompkins watches her, his gaze unreadable.
“It doesn’t just predict,” he says, voice low, almost distant. “It prescribes.”
Lana stills. “It doesn’t just anticipate threats,” she murmurs. “It neutralizes them before they ever become threats.”
A slow breath. Controlled. Measured. On the outside, she’s steady.
Inside? She’s coming apart.
She thought she was investigating Echo Protocol.
In reality?
She was the test case.
From the moment she opened the first encrypted file, Echo Protocol already knew.
It had mapped her choices before she ever made them. It knew she’d chase the story. It knew she’d dig too deep. It knew she’d find Thompkins.
It had already decided how to erase her.
Lana closes the folder. Her throat is dry, but she swallows anyway. Forces herself to breathe. Forces herself to stay steady.
“So what now?”
Thompkins watches her. The exhaustion is there, buried deep, but his voice stays even. Unreadable.
“You want out?” He pauses. “Walk away. Start over. It’s the only way to survive this.”
Lana exhales.
Her grip tightens around the file, fingertips pressing into the worn edges. Then, she looks up. Meets his gaze. And she shuts the folder.
Firm. Final.
“No.”
A beat.
She sets it down on the desk like a challenge.
“We break it.”
Thompkins barely makes it to the cot before his legs give out.
Lana catches him, just enough to slow the fall. He still hits hard, a sharp exhale escaping through clenched teeth as pain crashes over him.
He doesn’t complain. Doesn’t even curse.
Which is how she knows it’s bad.
She kneels beside him, one hand already at his shoulder, steadying him. “Thompkins. You with me?”
His breath drags through his teeth, shallow and uneven. His eyes are unfocused, flickering in and out of awareness.
“Just... gonna rest.”
“No,” she mutters. “No resting.”
She presses two fingers to his neck. Steady pulse. Too slow. His body is shutting down to conserve energy, running damage control the only way it knows how.
Too soon for him to go into shock. Right?
Lana grabs the old wool blanket from the chair and drapes it over him, tucking it around his frame. The fabric is scratchy, stiff from disuse, but it traps heat. That’s what matters.
He’s not dying.
Not yet.
But he’s out.
And that means she’s alone.
Lana moves to the wooden table, her fingers pressing into the worn surface.
She sees the bottle before she even registers reaching for it.
An old habit.
A bad one.
The glass feels solid in her grip, cool against her skin. She twists off the cap, pours two fingers’ worth, then hesitates.
The amber liquid catches the light, swirling in the glass.
She stares at it.
For a long moment, she just breathes.
Then, finally, she takes a sip.
The burn spreads fast, settling low in her chest.
It doesn’t help. Not really.
Her gaze drifts past the bottle, past the glass, to Thompkins’ workspace.
Scattered files, paper maps, declassified reports spread out like a murder board. String and pins connecting fragmented truths.
It’s not digital.
Nothing in here is.
Lana exhales, rolling out the tension in her shoulders.
Then, she starts reading.
His handwriting is precise but messy, written in quick, sharp slashes of ink.
She flips through old surveillance logs, intercepted memos, psychological reports.
Then, a journal.
She hesitates before opening it.
The first page stops her cold.
PROJECT: ECHO PROTOCOL
Initiated under the pretense of national security.
Early prototypes built within Paragon Industries, later transitioned to intelligence control.
Lana keeps reading.
It doesn’t just predict.
She already knew that much.
But this…
She flips another page.
"Threat neutralization model integrated. Targets preemptively categorized based on likelihood of disruption. Not just existing threats. Projected threats."
Projected. They don’t wait for threats to emerge. They erase them before they even exist.
She flips again.
Handwritten notes, newer. Thompkins’ own words.
"Reardon’s name entered into protocol two years before initial contact. AI recognized pattern of investigative tendencies. Predicted eventual interference. Began neutralization sequence before she was even aware of the program."
Lana grips the pages so hard they nearly tear.
She thought she was investigating Echo Protocol.
In reality?
It had already started erasing her.
Not a test case.
A target.
They ran the model on her before she ever touched the first encrypted file.
She thought she had uncovered something dangerous.
The truth was, they had already written her out of existence before she even knew what she was chasing.
Lana closes the journal, breathing slow and even.
Her fingers tighten around the whiskey glass.
She downs the rest in one burning swallow.
Lana leans back in the chair, exhaling slowly.
The weight of it settles in her chest, heavier than before.
Echo Protocol had been watching her long before she started watching it. It predicted her movements, preemptively classified her as a threat, and began dismantling her existence before she even knew it existed.
And now?
She isn’t sure if she’s outplaying it.
Or just following the path it already laid out.
A groan pulls her from the spiral.
She looks over. Thompkins stirs, shifting against the cot. His face is pale, sweat beading on his forehead, but his breathing is steady. Alive.
Lana moves before she realizes it, grabbing a fresh strip of gauze, kneeling beside him.
“Welcome back.” Her voice is flat, but the relief slips through anyway.
Thompkins cracks an eye open. “Back?” He tries to sit up, winces as the pain catches up.
Lana presses a hand against his shoulder, keeping him down. “Stay still. You lost enough blood to put down a lesser asshole.”
A weak smirk. “Good thing I’m a very stubborn asshole.”
Lana rolls her eyes, but doesn’t fight the small smile tugging at her lips.
She adjusts the bandages carefully, making sure nothing reopened. Thompkins watches her, eyes sharp despite the exhaustion.
“You read my notes.” His voice is quiet.
Lana nods.
A beat of silence.
Then, she sets the journal aside, leans forward, and meets his gaze directly.
Unwavering.
“Tell me everything you know about that vault.”
Catalyst
