Rain sliced the streets of Berlin.
Evan moved through the crowd in Alexanderplatz with his hood up. Juno tracked him from a rooftop half a block away. Maya kept mobile — walking in large loops, hand always brushing her concealed sidearm.
They weren't here for a fight.
They were here for a name.
The dead drop came in a cracked payphone. Not digital. Not wireless. Just a paper folded inside the coin return.
Evan read it once, silently.
Then again.
It wasn't a name.
It was a code: Echo-17. And a GPS tag—rural Norway.
Juno's voice came over comms. "Echo files were Cain's blackbox archive. Thought they were all destroyed."
"They weren't," Evan said. "And someone wants us to find it."
Forty-eight hours later, they stood outside an old observatory buried in a frozen hillside.
The door was open.
Inside: no guards. No cameras. Just one woman, sitting in a rusted metal chair, wearing a coat three sizes too big.
"Evan Mercer," she said without looking.
Maya stepped forward. "Name."
She turned. Dark hair. Scar running from ear to jaw.
"Lyra Voss. Echo handler. Former Pale Court sleeper — burned out after the Circuit War."
Juno blinked. "The Circuit War wasn't real. It was a cover op."
"Exactly," Lyra said. "I wrote it."
Lyra unlocked a back room with her fingerprint and a phrase: Silence is proof of control.
Inside: a vault.
One drive.
One screen.
She plugged it in.
A file loaded — not numbers, not blueprints.
Video.
Footage of Evan's father — alive, speaking to the camera.
"This is Echo-17. If you're seeing this, it means Asher bypassed Cain and went independent. It means he started recruiting outside the lab. Look for the Orion signature. That's how you'll know it's him."
The screen flickered.
More images.
Children.
Each tagged with different project names. "Nova." "Frost." "Halcyon."
Each file labeled ACTIVE.
Signal stood in the doorway, silent. Her hand trembled.
Juno scanned the data.
"There are more of you," she whispered.
Signal said nothing.
Lyra leaned forward. "Asher scattered them. Not just to hide them. To train them. Each in a different method. Combat, code, finance, politics. He built a distributed Court."
Maya checked the timestamps. "These files are only two months old. He's already operational again."
Evan turned to Lyra.
"You worked with him. You know how he moves."
She nodded slowly.
"I do."
Maya asked, "You willing to go back under?"
Lyra smiled faintly. "Didn't crawl out of the ice just to die here."
Back at the safehouse, Juno found something else embedded deep in the drive. A phrase, in the metadata of every document.
The Harrow Protocol Begins.
Signal stared at it.
"That's not a name," she said. "It's a countdown."
Evan leaned closer. "To what?"
Signal looked up, eyes full of something he hadn't seen before — fear.
"To when they stop hiding."