Chapter Sixty-Five: Her Name in Fire

Ivy

The transmission replayed in my head like a wound that wouldn’t close.

“You burned my body, Lucien. But not my code…”

It shouldn’t have been possible. I’d seen her die. I’d heard her last breath rasp through cracked lips before the flames took her. And yet—Iris’s voice had returned like a ghost coded in smoke and fire.

I stood in the HALCYON vault, my fingers pressed to the cold titanium console, and wondered—not for the first time—what the hell I had become. What we had become.

Because ghosts don’t leave messages.

And monsters never stay dead.

The lights above flickered slightly as the system recalibrated. We were still underground—deep beneath Blackwood Estate. Clara had ordered a lockdown immediately after the message. No one in. No one out. My body still ached from everything Lucien and I had done hours before, and my skin buzzed like static. Not just from him.

From the sense that something inside me had shifted.

Lucien stood in the corner, arms crossed, silent and motionless.

A statue carved from shame.

“I thought she was gone,” he finally said.

“So did I.”

“She was just… a girl.”

“No,” I replied. “She was a prototype. And someone activated her code from the outside.”

He turned toward me then, eyes sharp. “You think someone’s helping her?”

“I don’t think this is just about her,” I said. “I think she’s evolving. And I think someone programmed me to be the next phase.”

The silence that followed dropped like glass shattering on marble.

Lucien stepped closer. “What do you mean?”

“I’ve had dreams,” I said softly. “Not just memories. Blueprints. Strings of data. Equations that I never learned but somehow… understand. My brain’s changing.”

“Changing how?”

“I can see patterns in HALCYON’s code. I can finish Clara’s AI protocols before she writes them. I’m not just remembering. I’m decoding.”

Lucien’s jaw clenched. “Who did this to you?”

“I think your father started it,” I said. “But Iris finished it. Before she died, she left a trigger inside me.”

He was silent for a long time. Then: “We need to scan your blood.”

We ran the test in HALCYON’s primary bio-lab. Clara stayed silent the whole time, watching me like she was waiting for me to shatter. I sat there, cold metal under my thighs, while the machine hummed and whirred beside me.

When the results loaded, the room dropped into stillness.

“There’s something encrypted in your DNA,” Clara said, voice hollow.

“What kind of encryption?”

“An artificial segment. Injected into your neural genome. It activated the moment Iris’s code died.”

Lucien stiffened. “What does it say?”

Clara hesitated. Then turned the screen toward me.

There were words.

Written in me.

Find the Chamber Below. The Memory Lives There.

—Iris

I couldn’t speak. My mouth had gone dry.

“She left a message… in my body?” I asked.

Lucien moved closer, his eyes darker than I’d ever seen. “This isn’t just code anymore. She planted something biological. And it’s waking up.”

I rubbed my wrist where a strange pulse had begun to throb under the skin. Like a second heartbeat. I wasn’t afraid.

Not exactly.

But I wasn’t sure I was me anymore.

That night, I couldn’t sleep.

Lucien did.

He collapsed beside me after hours of silence, his head resting near mine, one hand curled near my waist like he still didn’t know how to hold anything without breaking it. I watched the ceiling and let my thoughts eat me alive.

What had Iris meant by “the chamber”?

What if it wasn’t a place at all?

What if it was me?

I slipped out of bed and padded barefoot into the dark corridor. The estate was silent, but HALCYON’s servers blinked faintly from the lower floor.

I went to Clara’s workstation.

And I logged in.

I didn’t search Iris’s code.

I searched mine.

And what I found made my skin crawl.

There was a second identity hidden beneath my birth records. Something encrypted under my DNA registry, wrapped in a false access protocol labeled Project Nyx.

Nyx. The night that sees all. The system without shadow.

I opened the file.

And there she was.

A photo. Of me. But not me.

Eyes darker. Skin paler. Expression blank. Cold. Like I’d never seen sunlight.

A prototype.

I had been created long before I was ever born.

I was never Ivy Sinclair.

I was Nyx.

Footsteps behind me.

I whirled—ready to run, ready to fight.

Lucien.

He didn’t flinch. “I knew something was wrong,” he said. “Your file was too clean. Too perfect.”

“You knew?”

“I suspected. But I didn’t want it to be true.”

“I’m not your wife,” I said. “I’m an experiment.”

He walked toward me slowly. “You’re my experiment. And I fell in love with the woman—not the code.”

Tears burned the edges of my eyes. “I don’t know who I am anymore.”

Lucien touched my face. “Then let’s find out together.”

We didn’t sleep that night.

We searched the archives. We traced the Project Nyx backups. We found a location—

Underneath HALCYON Tower.

Miles beneath ground level.

A vault labeled only as: Chamber Null.

And at the entrance, encrypted in Iris’s voice:

“Welcome home, sister.”