THE VOICE FROM THE ARCHIVE

Ronan kept one headset pressed to his ear, half-listening to the noise that followed the Kara broadcast. Reporters were dissecting every frame, security analysts were replaying facial micro-expressions, and the university had gone completely dark—no statements, no emails, no denials.

Adrian leaned against the console. “They’ll have to respond soon.”

“They already are,” Ronan said. “In silence. It’s the only move left.”

Elena stood motionless in front of the frozen live-feed screen, Kara’s departing silhouette still reflected in the glass. “She’s not the villain,” Elena said quietly. “She’s evidence that survival can be rewritten into loyalty.”

“You can’t save her from the contract she signed,” Adrian replied. “You can only keep the next woman from signing one.”

The lights flickered.

Ronan frowned. “That’s not the grid. That’s the uplink.”

He began typing furiously. “Someone’s probing our archive node.”

Elena turned. “From where?”

“Not the university,” Ronan said. “External IP—encrypted, bouncing through a dozen proxies. Whoever it is knows our system.”

A small message appeared on the auxiliary screen: I was there.

Adrian’s pulse jumped. “There?”

Ronan expanded the packet. A single video file. No metadata, no signature.

Elena hesitated only a second before playing it.

The image was grainy, night-vision static. A hallway, narrow and sterile, light leaking under a row of closed doors. A woman’s voice—thin, tired—whispered over the footage: “They said it was a wellness stay. They said I’d be out in a week. Please… if you see this, my name is—”

The recording cut to black.

Ronan stared at the screen. “Timestamp’s eighteen months ago. That’s one of the missing five.”

Elena’s hands tightened around the console edge. “She’s alive,” she whispered. “Or she was.”

Adrian looked at Ronan. “Can you trace the sender?”

“Trying,” Ronan said. “Whoever sent it wiped their return route, but there’s a residual signature—looks like it came from an old government archive mirror. Someone with clearance.”

The screen blinked again. A second line appeared beneath the first message:

They moved us. I can’t hold signal long.

Elena leaned closer. “Can you send text back?”

Ronan typed: Where are you?

No reply.

Then—three words before the connection severed:

Check the basement.

The feed collapsed into static.

Adrian straightened. “Basement of what?”

Elena didn’t answer right away.

She was staring at the dark screen, lips moving silently as she replayed the grainy hallway, the faint hum of fluorescent lights, the sound she’d heard once before in recordings from campus maintenance tunnels.

“The university library,” she said finally. “Under the archive wing. They built the new wellness office right on top of the old restricted stacks.”

Ronan looked horrified. “You think they’re still down there?”

“I think,” she said, turning toward the camera still broadcasting live, “we’re about to find out.”

She hit the uplink key.

The world saw her face come back into focus—pale, determined, eyes steady.

“To everyone still watching,” she said, “the story isn’t finished. If the basement exists, so do the women.”

Then the alarm sounded somewhere deep in the building—metallic, echoing, unmistakably close.

Ronan froze. “That’s not a broadcast alert.”

Adrian’s voice dropped to a whisper. “They’re coming up from below.”

Elena met his eyes. “Then the basement isn’t just storage.”

The siren rose, drowning out the static.

The last image before the feed cut was Elena reaching for the handheld camera, turning it toward the corridor, and saying quietly:

“Let’s show them what they buried.”