The Arctic facility collapsed hours after Cain's neural death.
Juno triggered the final blackout code. The remaining acolyte husks disintegrated as their synthetic links failed. Maya burned every terminal. Signal stood still, watching the snow fall through the cracked dome above.
The extraction came from a Nordic recon team. A favor Juno called in from her last debt.
They didn't ask questions.
Didn't speak.
By the time the plane touched down in Sweden, international feeds were ablaze. Satellite pulses had stopped. Signal patterns disrupted. Entire regions woke from years of quiet manipulation.
The world didn't understand why. But it felt the shift.
The Pale Court was gone.
A week later, Evan sat at a table in a stone house outside Uppsala.
Signal sat across from him, drawing again. Same spiral. But now it was whole.
"Why that symbol?" Evan asked.
Signal didn't look up. "It's the waveform my mind creates when I'm free."
Juno walked in. Tossed a file on the table.
"Interpol raided six more sites. All off-grid. All dead. But one thing survived." She opened the file.
Inside: a photo.
Cain. Years ago. Standing beside Evan's father.
And beside a third man — face blurred, but the file listed a codename: ASHER.
Maya stepped forward.
"He was the funding arm. Oversight. Cain was the tool. But Asher… he was the architect."
Juno frowned. "Every route we hit — every facility — he was three steps ahead. Always gone. He was never purging the system. He was testing Cain's limits."
Signal's voice dropped. "He's still running models. Probably with a new host."
Evan closed the file.
"Then we weren't the end. We were the start of a new phase."
Juno nodded. "The Court isn't coming back. But its math... its logic... it's already been sold. Pieces of it. In the hands of governments. Corporations."
Maya set her rifle down.
"Then we track the pieces. We break the network, node by node."
Later, Signal stood alone on the balcony, overlooking the forest below.
Evan joined her.
"You don't have to stay with us," he said. "You're free."
Signal nodded.
"But the network's still out there. Asher's still out there."
"You want revenge?" he asked.
"No," she said. "I want him to feel something."
She turned to Evan. For the first time, her eyes held a trace of something human. Not emotion. But memory.
"I want him to remember what he built. Then watch it burn."