Chapter 5 – "The Tinker and the Trap"
Ethan Cole had never seen Malcolm Ward sleep. In the dim yellow light of the Ghost Node bunker, Malcolm seemed to exist in a constant state of quiet readiness—eyes half-closed, hands never far from the radio bank or the map table. It was just after 3 a.m. when the encrypted channel they'd been monitoring gave a soft crackle.
Not the usual dead hum.
Not static.
Three tones. Sharp. Rising. A pattern.
Malcolm sat up.
Ethan leaned in, heart skipping. "That Morse again?"
"No," Malcolm said. "It's older than Morse. It's frequency shift keying."
He twisted two dials, pulled up a waveform reader, and the signal resolved into digital gibberish across the monitor. But there was a signature embedded deep in the code.
—YC.458.
"Yasmine," Ethan breathed. "She's alive."
"And she's sending on an EVI protocol. That's military-grade. Someone gave her access."
Malcolm extracted a block of hexadecimal text and dropped it into an offline decryption algorithm. The screen sputtered for a moment, then bloomed with coordinates.
Albany. Sector 12. Gridpoint Echo-7.
"Halrick's last known base," Malcolm said. "Before he vanished."
Ethan nodded. "So we go."
Malcolm hesitated. "If she sent this, she's either under surveillance—or she's bait."
Ethan stared at the screen.
"I'm going anyway."
---
They reached Albany in a stolen courier van, switching plates twice along the way. Sector 12 was an industrial ghost zone—where rail yards went to die and forgotten tech labs rusted in silence.
Gridpoint Echo-7 was buried under what had once been an R&D lab for a company called ArchTec Solutions. The building was sealed by a steel vault door and a biometric scanner that looked long dead.
Malcolm dug through his pack. "Here."
A handheld retinal scanner. "From my time at EVI. Spoof generator."
He pressed it to the sensor.
The vault hissed open.
Inside: pitch dark.
They moved carefully through the halls, their flashlight beams revealing dust-covered consoles, torn schematics, bloodless walls.
It wasn't abandoned. It was paused. Everything looked preserved, like the lab had been frozen mid-use. Then, a shadow moved across the far wall.
Ethan spun. "There."
Malcolm held his hand up.
From the darkness stepped a man in a tattered lab coat, one lens cracked in his glasses. He held a soldering tool like a weapon.
"You're not them," he said.
"No," Ethan replied. "We're here for Yasmine. For Halrick."
The man lowered the tool.
"I'm Thomas Halrick."
---
Thomas Halrick looked nothing like the files Ethan had seen. No tie. No clean lab coat. He was thinner, jittery, his eyes darting like a bird's.
But he remembered Miles Cole.
And he remembered PURITY.
"They're calling it Phoenix now," Halrick said. "A full rewrite program. They got Yasmine weeks ago. Used her to reconstruct Part 2. But it's unstable. The host burns out."
Ethan clenched his fists. "Then why keep her alive?"
"Because she refused to give them the kill string. The thing your father built in secret. Without it, they can't stabilize the release. And now they think you have it."
Malcolm nodded grimly. "So they leaked this location."
Halrick blinked. "What?"
Malcolm turned to Ethan. "They knew he'd come here. They're tracking us."
Then the lights snapped on.
Automated sentry turrets whirred from the ceiling corners. Halrick ducked. Malcolm shouted: "EMP!"
Ethan tossed the device. Pop!—lights out again.
They ran.
But the corridor behind them was already filling with figures in matte black armor—silent, smooth, eyes glowing green.
Not soldiers.
Drones.
Remote-controlled infantry.
Malcolm grabbed Ethan's arm. "Down!"
They slid through a side hatch into a service tunnel as pulse rounds tore through the air. Halrick screamed and vanished behind them.
The next ten minutes were chaos.
Ethan and Malcolm emerged from a collapsed drainage shaft into an open field behind the compound. One drone followed.
Malcolm stopped. Turned.
"I'll hold it."
Ethan shook his head. "No."
Malcolm handed him a flash drive. "Find the third protocol. Finish what your father started. End it."
Then he stepped into the drone's path.
And vanished in a burst of light.
End of Chapter 5