They didn't sleep.
From the moment they left Marseille, everything accelerated. Jet-black SUVs, unmarked helicopters, encrypted calls that rang only once before connecting. Audrey and Sebastian moved like fugitives and predators all at once.
They weren't running.
They were hunting.
They landed in Zurich just before dawn. The air was thinner here—colder, sharper. It bit through the seams of Sebastian's coat as they stepped out onto the private airstrip, escorted by a silent man in tactical gray.
"Contacts say Lucien's already breached the Geneva server," Sebastian said, scanning the perimeter as Audrey checked her sidearm.
"That's the last Project cache in Europe," she replied. "He's consolidating—erasing the past before we can weaponize it against him."
"Then we take it first."
Audrey nodded. Her body was tense, but not afraid. She'd moved past fear. Somewhere between the ashes of Marseille and this frigid runway, she had made peace with what had to be done.
They weren't just chasing Lucien anymore.
They were dismantling everything he'd built.
The facility in Geneva was buried under a corporate shell—a biomedical research center called HelixGene. But its roots were Heretic. A legacy node hidden beneath years of falsified grants, medical ethics panels, and hollow patents.
They approached it at night.
Sebastian and Audrey split up—he took the perimeter, disabling motion beacons while she slipped inside through a ventilation shaft only someone of Heretic training would even notice. It was narrow, humid, steeped in the metallic scent of stale oxygen.
She dropped silently into a sublevel.
There, behind a biometric glass door, was what Lucien wanted.
The Core Matrix.
A black obelisk of data, standing in the center of a hexagonal room, humming with a low-frequency pulse. It was elegant—obsidian-like surface lined with thin veins of white light, like a machine breathing in stillness.
Audrey exhaled slowly. She approached, placing her hand flat against its surface.
USER VERIFIED: DELACOUR.A
HERETIC CLASS: EX–SIGMA
ACCESS LEVEL: REVOKED
OVERRIDE: [PENDING...]
"Come on," she whispered. "You opened for me once. Don't make me beg."
The surface shivered. And then—
TEMPORARY OVERRIDE GRANTED
WARNING: EXTERNAL BREACH INBOUND
Audrey's blood ran cold. "Shit."
Lucien was coming.
Sebastian had barely made it to the secondary ingress tunnel when he heard it: boots. Not just one or two. A coordinated team.
Through the scope of his silenced rifle, he confirmed them—six men in unmarked gear, moving like shadows. But they weren't local military. They had the twitch of ex-special forces. Americans, maybe. Or private.
Sebastian ducked back into cover and activated his comm. "Audrey. Company inbound. Not police. Heavy kit."
Her voice crackled in his earpiece. "Confirmed. Lucien triggered remote access. I have five minutes before the Matrix purges itself."
"You need more than five."
"No," she said calmly. "I need four."
He smiled tightly. "Copy that."
Sebastian adjusted the dial on his rifle—setting it to kinetic burst. He didn't have time for subtle.
The first guard didn't hear the shot. Neither did the second. But by the time the third went down, the others were ducking, radioing in. Too late. Sebastian was already repositioning, slipping like a ghost from one angle to the next. For every bullet they fired, he returned silence and precision.
But they kept coming.
"Damn it," he muttered. "There's a second team."
Audrey's voice was rushed now. "I'm unlocking the central log. I've got names—coordinates, old ops files. Sebastian, they didn't just build Heretic from scratch."
"What do you mean?"
"They had prototypes. Failed ones. Before us. Before me."
His heart kicked. "What kind of prototypes?"
She was typing faster now, almost frantic. "Blacksite footage. Subject logs. Geneva was a testbed. And Lucien's unlocking the other sites—he's not just trying to rewrite Heretic. He's rebuilding it."
Sebastian's jaw tightened. "Then we torch this place before he gets the blueprint."
A detonation rattled the facility.
He was already inside.
Audrey froze as the lights flickered. Emergency locks snapped into place—clamping the entryway. The Matrix began to vibrate.
She turned to run—
—and came face to face with him.
Lucien.
Tall, lean, dressed in a civilian coat over tactical gear, and entirely out of place in this sterile crypt of memory. His hair was darker than she remembered, slicked back. But it was the eyes that broke her breath.
No emotion. No regret. Just ice.
"Adelle," he said softly.
Her name. Her real one. It hit like a punch.
"You always loved the dramatic entrance," she muttered, keeping her distance. Her hand hovered near the small holster at her side.
"I loved the truth," he said. "And I hated watching you forget it."
Audrey didn't move. "You've gone too far, Lucien. Whatever this was—you lost the right to call it control."
"This isn't control," he replied. "It's resurrection."
"You're building ghosts from corpses. That's not power. That's insanity."
He stepped closer. "You were born in the dark, Audrey. They took that from you. Made you weak. Emotional. Human. I'm giving it back."
"I don't want it."
"You will. When you see what's coming."
Her weapon was out in a flash, leveled at his heart. "Then show me."
Lucien didn't flinch. "Pull the trigger. Let's end this. I'd rather die here than watch you die slowly trying to pretend you belong in their world."
Something cracked in her chest.
He always knew how to cut the deepest.
"Why me?" she asked, voice shaking. "Why always me?"
He didn't smile. "Because you're the only one I couldn't break."
Sebastian's voice screamed in her ear.
"AUDREY—NOW!"
She dove sideways just as the Matrix ignited. Sebastian had wired the external generator to overload—fusing every connected line of data. The room burst with blue light. Lucien shielded his face, yelling something inaudible.
Audrey hit the ground, rolled, and fired. One bullet—clean.
Lucien stumbled backward, hit in the shoulder. Not fatal. But enough.
Sebastian burst through the lock as the room filled with smoke.
He saw Audrey on the floor, hand pressed to her ear, coughing blood and sparks. He ran to her, grabbed her by the collar.
"We have to go! Now!"
Lucien was gone—vanished into the smoke, the way he always did.
The obelisk was cracked. Useless. But it was enough.
They ran as the Geneva core burned behind them.
Hours later
They regrouped in a safehouse near Lake Como. Remote, silent, surrounded by dense pine and fog. Audrey stood on the balcony overlooking the lake, wrapped in a heavy sweater, her body exhausted.
Sebastian handed her tea.
She accepted it with a nod. Her voice was hoarse. "I saw it all. The old projects. The children they tested on. The chemicals. The drills. It was never just a defense initiative. It was genetic warfare. Behavior control. And they used us to beta-test it."
He watched her. "You still think this ends with Lucien?"
"No," she whispered. "It ends with whoever funded him."
Sebastian leaned beside her, setting his cup down. "Then we keep going."
She looked at him. There was something raw in her gaze now. Not fear. Not rage.
Conviction.
"Next is Cairo," she said. "That's where he'll go to finish what he started."
Sebastian nodded once. "Then we go to Cairo."