The corridor was too quiet.Fluorescent lights flickered above, casting an unnatural pallor across the white-tiled floor as Savannah moved deeper into the belly of Echo. She kept one hand on the cool cement wall, the other gripping the small syringe Rhett had given her. Its liquid shimmered faintly—something between amber and smoke.Behind her, Colton’s footsteps paused.“Do you feel that?” he asked.Savannah didn’t answer. She felt it too—something vibrating in the air, a static presence not quite sound, not quite scent. The hairs on her arms stood.Then came the voice.“I knew you’d come back.”Mira.She emerged from the shadows like a ghost given flesh—pale, rail-thin, her long hair tangled, eyes red-rimmed and luminous. She stood behind a wall of reinforced glass, fingers poised over a red trigger mounted beside a panel. The lab behind her pulsed with energy: wires, test tubes, glowing vials suspended like trapped fireflies.Savannah’s breath caught.“You rigged the lab?” Colton s
That evening, Savannah reviewed the blueprints of the escape plan—boats in Santorini, villas booked in Tuscany, passports waiting in hidden safes. But the legacy map haunted her. All of it was bleed by Bloodline protocol.She took the pen to a world map and drew a line connecting Echo’s network of labs—black sites hidden under code names: Project Helix, Codex B, Nursery Seven. The line ended in Colorado.Colton joined, gently taking the pen from her. “We’ll destroy it,” he said. “Erase the DNA leaks.” His eyes were red-rimmed. He meant it.They traced the lines together.But as Savannah touched the paper, the map blurred… like blood dissolving into paper.Olives and waves. But also, genes.Downstairs, Eva awakened.“Mags says the roots are talking,” she whispered, and set her feet to the floor without help. She held Savannah’s notebook, open to the drawing of the twin ghost-line map.Savannah realized she was trapped.Not by a family name.But by a legacy programmed above her womb.An
Savannah stared at the vault door, its cold steel surface etched with decades of fingerprints, each smudge a silent testimony to the sins stored within. Lightning flashed outside, momentarily illuminating the complex grid of gears concealed behind the wall. She could hear the hum of electricity behind the heavy door, like the pulse of a dormant heart.Colton placed his palm on the keypad. Fingers brushed old scars. With a low mechanical groan, the vault door swung inward.They descended into silence—an airless corridor scented faintly of dust and memory. Each step echoed with the weight of secrets unearthed. Metal shelves lined the walls, now mostly empty, save for a layer of grime. A single sliver of polished box lay in the center clearing: silver, cruelly beautiful, inscribed with the Briggs serpent crest.Inside: a blood-stained ribbon and a brittle note.Savannah’s throat tightened.“Aunt Magnolia,” Colton whispered.“This was hers,” she said, voice tight. “The night she vanished.
Savannah stood motionless in the corridor of the private med-center, watching the glass doors close behind the nurse wheeling Eva inside. Everything in her body screamed to follow, to cradle her daughter, to pretend this was just a flu, a fever, something fleeting. But her instincts told her otherwise. Something in Eva’s body—no, her blood—wasn’t just malfunctioning. It was engineered.“Do you trust them?” Colton asked, quietly. He hadn’t let go of her hand since they arrived, and now his fingers clenched tighter, as if trying to read her pulse.“No,” she whispered. “But I’m out of options.”They had tried every pediatric specialist in New York. What had started as Eva drawing ‘imaginary friends’ had quickly turned into her speaking to unseen companions in languages Savannah didn’t know—ancient codes, fragments of Latin, words like “reticulin” and “helix field modulation.”And then… the seizures began.The blood test results had come in that morning. The markers had been there all alo
The laboratory lights buzzed faintly overhead, casting a sterile glow over glass panels and humming refrigeration units. In the center of the room, Eva sat on a padded exam table, swinging her legs absently. She didn’t cry or squirm like a typical four-year-old might during a blood draw. Instead, she watched the needle pierce her skin with eerie calm, as if she'd done this many times before in another life.Dr. Sylvie Chen, geneticist on contract for the private clinic Colton had insisted upon, frowned at the test results populating her screen. The markers were faint, nearly indistinguishable from background noise. But she had seen this code before—in a classified dossier buried within the Department of Human Genetic Security. Her fingers froze above the keyboard."Is something wrong?" Savannah’s voice carried quiet panic.Dr. Chen looked up slowly. "Your daughter... her blood contains dormant markers. Old ones. From a sequence not found in standard human genomes. Project Helix."Sava
The air in Echo’s underground headquarters was chilled with recycled secrecy, thick with the clinical scent of bleach and quiet dread. The walls pulsed with low-level server hums, and the hallways seemed carved not just from steel and concrete, but from decades of buried sins. Surveillance monitors blinked in rows—glowing orbs that blinked like mechanical gods.Inside the central operations room, files were being shredded behind bulletproof glass. Operatives in black murmured over encrypted transmissions, their eyes darting. There was movement everywhere, and yet no sound beyond the digital heartbeat of the building.Then the reinforced door hissed open.She entered like a bloodstain spreading across white silk—draped in crimson, her silhouette long and exacting, like a blade hidden inside a prayer. Every footstep echoed. Every breath in the room seemed to still.The woman in red didn’t need to speak. Her presence alone created silence.Even the most hardened operatives stiffened. One