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Chapter Sixteen
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2025-06-07 19:05:13
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Cold Hands, Warm Lies Chapter Sixteen
The drive clicked into place.Sera sat in a locked room beneath one of Lucien’s oldest dead-grid safehouses no signal, no surveillance, no one watching.Except her.The screen lit up.A single folder.> [C:CALDER // PRIVATE // E_DUVALL // 0427]Her fingers hovered.She opened it.VIDEO LOG TIMESTAMP: 2 years ago, 04/27 3:03 a.m.The footage was grainy. Black and white. But real.Lucien’s penthouse.Night vision.One camera angled from above.Elise stood at the edge of the room. Hair tied back. Eyes sharp.Lucien stood across from her, bleeding from the mouth.They were arguing.But the footage had audio.> ELISE: “You think you can protect her from this? From you?”> LUCIEN: “She doesn’t need to know how deep it goes.”> ELISE: “That’s the problem. She’s already in it.”> LUCIEN: “Because you dragged her into it ”> ELISE: “Because you funded it.”Sera froze.The audio kept going.> ELISE: “You knew what Project Halo was built for. You knew what they were doing with the ghost file
Cold Hands, Warm Lies Chapter Fifteen
Sera didn’t sleep.She didn’t need to.The burn in her blood was stronger than caffeine. Stronger than guilt. Stronger than the echo of Elise’s voice in her mind saying, “You’ll become what I couldn’t.”She already had.East Brooklyn – 6:14 A.M.The safehouse was one of Lucien’s oldest shadows. Abandoned. Forgotten. But wired directly into Halo’s old black-channel routes.She accessed the console on the floor manual switchboard, no digital trace.She didn’t want surveillance.She wanted silence.And in that silence, she deployed her first ping.A code Elise had embedded years ago.A ghost line. A sister-specific tracer.It didn’t track locations.It tracked patterns.Specifically, Elise’s.The places she avoided. The moments she paused. The cities she didn’t touch.A predator doesn’t leave footprints when it runs.But it does leave gaps.And Sera was done chasing ghosts.She was going to chase the absence.Lucien – Same HourHe stood at the window of a different safehouse. Watching th
Cold Hands, Warm Lies Chapter Fourteen
The first alert hit at 2:13 a.m.A red pulse blinked through the stronghold's comm wall.Lucien woke instantly.He’d learned to read the color codes without checking the screen.Red meant priority. Red meant burn.And this red wasn’t about Sera.It was about Elise.Stronghold – Command RoomLucien pulled the alert into view.The system Sera had rewritten now quietly pulsing across servers she didn’t even know she’d infected had flagged a Level One Containment Breach.One name was attached:> DUVALL, ELISETagged: Disinformation ArchitectLocation: UnknownRisk Level: IrreversibleDirective: EXPOSELucien stared.Sera’s system hadn’t just tagged Elise as a threat.It had activated a dead man’s switch buried deep in Halo’s old public network structure, something meant to go off only if a high-level agent crossed a specific moral boundary.Elise had tripped it.And now, if Lucien didn’t shut it down…The entire world would know exactly who Elise Duvall was.What she’d built.And what she
Cold Hands, Warm Lies Chapter Thirteen
The following morning, Sera didn’t wait for Lucien.She was already gone.Left no note.Just a single command line left open on the console:> > RUN SERA_PROTOCOL_01Lucien stood in front of it, jaw locked, blood roaring in his ears.She hadn’t just activated a trigger.She’d written her own.Elsewhere 6:17 A.M.Sera moved through the old infrastructure tunnels beneath Midtown like she belonged there.She kind of did.The paths had been used by Halo’s surveillance scouts, black-badge drop runners, and quiet government ghosts. Elise used to joke about them being veins of power no one saw pumping.Sera didn’t smile at the memory.She moved fast. Focused.Coordinates from the drive led her here.Not to a person.To a server.Buried behind an old telecom grid. Completely offline. Never touched by any traceable Halo node.Inside it?A shard of Halo’s learning AI. Still alive.Still evolving.Still recording.She powered it up.A flicker of light ran across the server’s glass panel.A voi
Cold Hands, Warm Lies Chapter Twelve
The next morning, the world looked the same.But Sera wasn’t.She stood at the edge of Lucien’s command room, bathed in low light, her arms crossed tightly as if she were holding herself together with pressure alone.Lucien entered silently.Paused.He didn’t ask if she’d slept. They both knew she hadn’t.“She gave me more than a message,” Sera said without turning.Lucien approached slowly. “What else?”“Coordinates. Embedded in memory triggers.”She faced him now, eyes sharper than he’d ever seen them.“She coded them into me repetition, visual anchors, old lullabies. I didn’t realize it until I saw the necklace again.”Lucien’s mouth tightened. “How many locations?”“Three. One is local.” She pulled a slip of paper from her pocket. “Abandoned comms tower in Hudson Yards. She used it as a relay hub. It’s likely still hot.”He scanned the coordinates.“Looks clean on satellite. But that doesn’t mean anything anymore.”“I want to go alone.”Lucien gave her a long look. “No.”“I wasn’t
Cold Hands, Warm Lies Chapter Eleven
The meeting was arranged with three words.No codes. No aliases. Just a message sent through a dead drop Sera hadn’t touched in years.> “Sunset. Battery Park. Come alone.” ELucien didn’t say no.But he didn’t say anything else, either.He watched her from the top floor of the stronghold as she walked out, black coat billowing behind her, no weapon, no comms, no backup.Just a burner phone with no number attached, and Elise’s voice in her head like a ghost with unfinished business.Battery Park. 5:58 PMThe water looked like steel.The wind had claws.Sera stood near the old benches, where the city frayed into quiet. The Statue of Liberty blinked faintly in the distance like a dying memory.And then She felt her before she saw her.“Elise.”She turned.There she was.Same face. Same posture. Same shadow behind her eyes.But the woman standing in front of Sera wasn’t the sister who used to braid her hair during storms or sneak her notes during finals.This Elise was carved from glas
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