Prague.
They hadn't meant to stop here. But Cipher's key had embedded metadata — a dead link pointing to a location: an abandoned research wing beneath Charles University.
Juno recognized the string immediately.
Her old clearance tag.
Before she was a field operative, before Pale Court fielded Cain — she was part of Project AURELIA.
A project erased from existence. Or so she thought.
The university's underbelly was cold and dry. Stone corridors swallowed sound. The team moved without speaking.
Evan at point. Maya limping less now, blade drawn. Signal behind them, processing.
Lyra watched the rear.
Juno stopped at a rusted iron door.
"Room 8B. This was where they kept the minds."
Evan: "The what?"
She opened the door.
Inside: rows of tanks, now drained. Remains of artificial growth mediums. Wires. Screens burned out.
At the far end, someone moved.
An old man. Thin. Beard like chalk dust. Blind in one eye.
He turned toward them, blinking hard.
"I know that step," he said. "Juno Reiss. They said you were dead."
Juno stepped forward slowly. "Professor Kroll."
Dr. Emil Kroll. One of the last surviving architects of the early neural bridge tech.
He walked with a limp, tremors in his left hand, but his mind hadn't dulled.
"You're not here for history," he said. "You're here for the Ash Map."
Signal leaned forward. "What is it?"
Kroll tapped his temple.
"It's not a map of places. It's a map of people. Coded into memory fragments. Pale Court installed them in early assets. Some like Cain. Some like you."
He looked at Signal.
"You carry one, don't you?"
She hesitated. Then nodded.
Kroll pulled out a scanner. Old, wired.
"If we're lucky, the fragments are still active. The network relies on them to rebuild structure. Remove them, you break the next phase."
Juno interrupted. "Why hide them in people?"
Kroll gave a bitter smile.
"Because no server is as secure as a brain in denial."
The scan took two hours. During it, Signal barely blinked.
Kroll muttered as symbols flickered on screen. Hex values. Neural indexes. Grid sequences.
Then something clicked.
"I've got one," he whispered. "It's buried under a false trauma — your year in Novaya Zemlya."
Signal's breath caught. "That never happened."
"Exactly. It's the shell."
Kroll copied the fragment. Plugged it into a decryption model.
A new string emerged.
Coordinates.
A mountain range in Kyrgyzstan.
And a phrase:
"CHILDREN OF VELLUM: BASELINE 03."
Juno backed away from the console.
"Vellum wasn't just research. It was cloning. Behavioral cloning. That's where they trained sleeper agents. Signal's not the only template."
Evan: "How many more?"
Kroll looked exhausted.
"Dozens. Maybe more. All waiting for the Harrow Protocol to wake them."
Signal stood.
"No. Not waiting. They're already moving."
Outside, as they emerged from the lab, Maya whispered:
"We need to go dark."
Lyra: "We won't get far. Not with that name in the wind."
Signal's voice was quiet.
"Then we go loud."
Juno nodded slowly.
"If we draw them in... we make them move too soon."
Back in Geneva
Asher stared at the activation logs.
One line blinked red.
SIGNAL'S MAP DECODED.
He turned to a new figure entering the room.
Young. Military precision. Burn scar over his left eye.
Asher spoke calmly.
"Wake Frost. Deploy the mirror team."