There are moments you remember in perfect clarity—not because they were loud, but because the silence before them was too quiet.
This was one of those.
The hallway leading into the basement lab felt colder than before. Hana and I moved in silence, our footsteps soft against the concrete. Sergeant Kane was behind us, weapon holstered but ready. This time, we weren't just here out of curiosity.
We were hunting.
The same door I once found ajar—back in those early days, when all this felt like a mystery I didn't ask for—now stood shut, its steel frame blinking with a new biometric lock.
"It wasn't here before," I whispered.
"No," Hana said, voice tight. "Which means they're trying to keep someone out… or something in."
Kane stepped forward, producing a military-grade override tool—something that looked like a cross between a flash drive and a scalpel.
"Give me sixty seconds."
The machine hissed. Beeped. Clicked.
Then opened.
Inside, the room had changed.
No longer a cluttered workshop of sketches and blueprints. It was pristine now. Surgical. Polished metal tables. Monitors lined the walls, displaying code, test data, and biometric profiles. In the center: a raised platform holding a sleek black container.
But it was what hung on the wall that made my blood run cold.
Photos.
Of me.
Of Hana.
Of Wilburt.
All connected by red threads, annotated in a language I didn't recognize—until Hana muttered, "Khmer."
"Cambodian," she said. "Encrypted dialect used by syndicate handlers in black ops."
I moved toward the wall.
The most recent photo of me was from the night of the party.
They were watching us. Still watching us.
Kane began sweeping the room for hard drives, evidence, anything we could use to bring this place down.
Then I saw it. A journal on the desk. Thin, leather-bound.
Wilburt's.
Hana opened it. The handwriting matched the pub journal from earlier chapters—but the entries weren't full of fear. They were clinical. Cold. Confessions in disguise.
Day 67 – Lucas fits the cognitive pattern. Emotional variance: unusually high.Day 75 – Successfully baited subject. Eye reacts to exposure without fail.Day 83 – Disinformation embedded. Target now believes I've been taken.
I staggered back. "He… he planned this?"
Hana said nothing. She was frozen, eyes on the last page.
Day 92 – Final phase begins. If they follow the breadcrumbs, they'll walk straight into the fracture point.
"What's the fracture point?" I asked.
Kane turned toward the screen. "It's not a what. It's a where."
He tapped the blinking red dot on a satellite map feed—an offshore location. Island. No name.
Just coordinates.
"Whatever Project Aeon really is," Kane said, "it's not here. It's out there."
Hana closed the journal slowly.
"Then that's where we go."
I swallowed hard. My hand drifted to the patch over my eye.
For the first time in weeks, it didn't feel like a flaw.
It felt like a trigger.