The lab footage blinked out. The war room dimmed to static.
Jack sat motionless in silence, the glow of the monitors casting sharp angles across his face. Selene's presence still clung to the air, sterile and suffocating, like formaldehyde sealed into every circuit. It wasn't just that she didn't bleed.
It was that she never stopped calculating.
She'd watched the world shift and rot for over a century and never changed her tempo. And now she was letting it burn, one controlled collapse at a time. That was what haunted him most.
She wasn't just letting it fall apart.
She was studying it.
Jack straightened, shoulders tight with restraint, and exhaled through clenched teeth. The breath came sharp and thin, half exhaustion, half fury. Enough reminiscing. Enough awe.
Selene could rot in her lab with her silent monsters and her god complex. He had something she didn't: urgency. A clock ticking down. And one variable had still been unaccounted for.
One man in the wreckage who could be cornered and turned.
His fingers snapped into motion, sharp and surgical. The touchscreen flared under his hand as he bypassed the standard channels, diving into a directory so deeply buried it didn't even show up on most security trees.
Firewalled six times over, ciphered in legacy code from the old network before the last purge.
OP-CINDER // LATCH.KEY // RED-ROOT ACCESS.
Jack didn't flinch as retinal verification flashed. The scanner swept across his eye with a soft chime. A string of dead protocols unraveled like a whispered confession.
This wasn't a line meant for communication. It was meant for containment. For a crisis. As a last resort, the old directors built in case the White Angels ever began to eat their own. And now they had.
A warning blinked.
Command will bypass all formal oversight. This action is final.
Continue?
Jack tapped Yes without hesitation.
The room dimmed again. Oxygen levels shifted slightly, cold and metallic, like being dropped into a surgical theater. The encrypted comm spun to life in the corner of the screen, pulsing slowly, struggling to make the connection.
It had been years since this channel had seen daylight. Years since Jack had allowed himself to open it. Not because he was afraid of the man on the other end, but because using this meant there were no more illusions. No diplomacy. No fallbacks.
He was calling Marlow.
And that meant the war was starting.
PROJECT CINDERFALL
Access: Tier Prime+ Clearance
Verify retinal sequence...
A scanner blinked red.
The war room adjusted. Oxygen levels dipped just slightly, an automatic response to the classified channel that had just activated, a Tier Cinderfall thread, unlisted in any standard registry. The air seemed to thicken. Lights dimmed further as the walls sealed.
The emergency line began to hum, raw and unstable. The encryption was so deep that the connection shuddered with latency, as if the frequency itself resisted being heard.
Then a voice cut through the static, rough as sandpaper, carved from the inside out.
The comm cracked again, filtering static like breath through grit, followed by a low voice stretched thin with exhaustion, or perhaps something older. Something eaten by time and purpose.
"...Took you long enough," Marlow muttered.
His tone wasn't different. Not surprised. Not angry. Just… tired. Too tired to lie.
Jack didn't blink. "You were supposed to contain Subject Eight."
A pause answered him. Long enough to be deliberate. Long enough to irritate.
Then:
"He's not just disobedient," Marlow said, and there was a rasp in his voice that hadn't been there before, like someone speaking through a cracked rib cage. "He's remembering."
Jack's eyes narrowed to slits. "Impossible. The collar…"
"Wasn't built for memory," Marlow interrupted, a soft scorn threading through his words. "Only control. You wanted a beast, not a man. But your handlers broke it the second they underestimated his capacity to survive.
Jack's fingers curled against the console. "Then finish it. No more stalling. Find Gene. Find Subject Eight. And if containment fails..."
Marlow's voice dropped a half-octave.
"Use lethal force. I know."
Another pause. This one stretched further. Jack's jaw ticked as he waited.
Marlow exhaled, but it wasn't quite a sigh. "You do realize what you're asking, don't you?"
"I'm not asking," Jack growled. "I'm cleaning house. And if you don't have the stomach for it…"
"I have the stomach," Marlow cut in. But the tone was... strange. Cold, yes. But also amused. Or maybe resigned.
"Do you want open war?" he asked, but the question came flat, not fearful, not dramatic. As though he already knew the answer. As though it was already happening.
Jack leaned back just slightly. His voice dropped into something lethal, private.
"No. I want closure."
The words were settled like poison in water, slow and heavy. A purge disguised as an order.
There was a pause again, long enough this time for Jack's fingers to twitch.
And then:
"Understood," Marlow said. Clean. Emotionless.
But something was off.
Too clean.
The channel blinked out before Jack could reply. Dead air replaced the hum.
For a moment, the war room was still again, only the faint blinking lights, the half-scrambled security feeds, the ghost of Marlow's last word echoing faintly in the vents.