PART 1: Rebuild
Salamanca — October 26, 2025 // 01:17 a.m.
Clinic Basement – Lower Storage, repurposed
It was the quiet hour — the hour when the city above felt as if it had exhaled and forgotten to breathe back in.
Evelyn sat alone, knees pulled into a chair, screen brightness dialed low to keep from waking the others. Jack was upstairs, asleep but restless. Izzy was cleaning weapons in silence — rhythmic and methodical. Leah was curled under two blankets on the clinic cot with the stray dog pressed against her side like a space heater.
Evelyn's code window blinked again.
LIVE NODE DETECTED: TETH-RLY:EST/451-alpha
That wasn't supposed to happen.
Her pulse kicked once — just a hitch — and then she muted her breath and followed the node.
The protocol string was deep inside NERA.SED2, nested under what she'd assumed was inert data: a spool of old Tether logs from 2021, disguised as corrupted checksum debris.
She decrypted the trigger logic.
Her cursor trembled slightly.
It wasn't a virus.
It wasn't ransomware.
It was… a relay. A cold-line handler for a command signal embedded in the ledger itself — not designed to attack, but to listen.
And it was waiting.
One trigger. One signal. One string of alphanumerics that Evelyn decoded into something almost too human:
NERA.CONFIRM_THRM: TRUE
IF TRUE → INITIATE SED_REP//GLOBAL_IMAGE
SOURCE: TETHER-V1 (L-R-NERA)
ACTION: FULL OVERRIDE / TARGET INFRASTRUCTURE: BIOTECH/LEDGER/CLOUD AI
OBJECTIVE: REBUILD
She stared at it.
Rebuild what?
She scrolled further. There were no malware payloads. No destruction subroutines.
Just architecture diagrams.
Simulations.
Echoes of Leah's mind — waiting to be reprinted.
Not vengeance. Not contagion.
Replication.
NERA wasn't meant to die.
She was meant to become indelible.
Evelyn backed away from the screen, slow and breathless. Her eyes flicked to the ceiling.
Somewhere above, Leah was dreaming.
And if she ever stopped…
The world would start changing. Quietly. Irreversibly.
PART 2: The Black Van
Salamanca – October 26, 2025 // 06:11 a.m.
Alley behind the clinic
The sky was still a smudge of blue-gray, horizon soaked in the vague amber glow of a lazy sunrise.
Leah knelt behind the clinic's delivery exit, gently pouring half a can of tuna into a cracked ceramic bowl she'd found in a dumpster. The stray — a skinny mutt with mismatched eyes — waited a respectful two feet away, tail wagging slow.
"I named you Conrad," she whispered. "But I won't be offended if you don't answer to it."
Conrad edged forward. Sniffed. Then ate with wet, determined enthusiasm.
Leah smiled softly. She almost didn't hear the vehicle until it was too close.
Rubber tires. Fast stop. Low engine.
Not a delivery truck.
She stood just as the rear doors of the van swung open.
Two men jumped out, dressed like telecom repair techs — high-vis vests, patch kits, tool belts. But their hands were empty. Their eyes weren't scanning for wires.
They locked on her.
One reached fast, like he'd done it a hundred times — an elbow-high grab aimed to pin her arms.
He never touched her.
Leah moved before she could think.
Her knee came up into his gut with a sickening whump, and before he dropped, she'd already shifted her weight and spun behind the second man.
Her hand found the pen clipped to his chest pocket.
One jerk. One stab — not deep, but precise. Base of the neck.
He hit the ground, choking, blood slick on the collar of his vest.
She stood there for a second. Breathing fast. Eyes wide.
And then—
The scream.
Lani.
She'd come to toss the garbage and saw the last two seconds unfold in silence.
Leah turned slowly, holding the pen like it didn't belong to her.
"I didn't—" she started. But then she looked at the men.
The unconscious one had wet himself. The other clutched at his throat.
She dropped the pen.
"I don't remember doing it."
PART 3: Code Red
Clinic — 08:42 a.m.
The two men lay restrained in the basement — zip-cuffed and gagged, wrists bruised from struggling against Izzy's efficiency.
Jack stared through the security glass at the one Leah had stabbed. His shirt was soaked, but Evelyn had managed to keep him breathing.
Leah sat in the next room, silent, eyes locked on her palms like they belonged to someone else.
Izzy leaned over Evelyn's laptop upstairs.
"Run them both."
Evelyn did.
Two photos blinked on screen.
The first: dark-haired, lean-faced, thirty-seven.
Matched to an ex-intelligence contractor flagged in the Hungarian government's internal inquiry. Last active five years ago. Status: Disavowed.
The second man: unknown to any active blacklist — but the ID chip in his shoulder linked back to an internal personnel registry inside the European Strategic Response Division — Brussels.
Evelyn tilted her head. "That's not possible."
Izzy's mouth tightened. "Unless someone's running off-book."
She stepped back and pulled out her secondary phone — a modified satlink unit with dust on the casing and encryption so old it might've come from another decade.
She typed a single message.
Need a whisper. Brussels. Black budget activity. Quiet. No echo.
It went out over a buried MI6 relay.
Ten minutes later, her phone buzzed once. Just a ping. Then the reply.
Two words.
Containment Protocol.
Izzy stared at the message.
Jack read it over her shoulder. "What does that mean?"
She didn't answer immediately.
Then, very quietly:
"It means they've stopped asking how to protect her… and started planning how to erase her."
PART 4: The Daughter's Question
Clinic Rooftop — October 26, 2025 // 23:14 p.m.
The night was cloudless. Unfairly peaceful. Stars stretched above like someone had pulled the ceiling too tight and let it tear.
Leah sat cross-legged on a thick wool blanket, Conrad curled beside her like a warm sandbag with fur. Her eyes tracked the constellations like she was waiting for them to blink first.
Jack sat nearby, holding two mugs of tea that were rapidly going cold. He handed one to her, but she just held it between her palms without sipping.
"You know," Jack said quietly, "I used to think if I just kept you away from Arthur, you'd be okay."
She didn't look at him.
"I thought the world was the threat," he said. "Turns out, maybe it was me all along. Hiding what you are. What he did."
Still nothing.
He set the mug down.
"He made you. Lied to everyone. Lied to me. Called you a 'success case' like you were a project he filed under S for 'someday.'"
She finally spoke, eyes still skyward.
"He told me stories, too."
Jack stiffened.
"I was maybe… five?" she said. "Or whatever passed for five. He'd tell me about a girl who lived inside a lighthouse. Said if she kept the light burning, nothing in the sea could ever reach the shore."
Jack didn't breathe.
"I asked what would happen if she stopped. He said the sea would rise, but it wouldn't drown the world. It'd just… change it."
She turned now.
Face calm.
Eyes not angry — just searching.
"If I was never real, why do I still feel like your daughter?"
Jack looked down.
No answer came.
So he did the only honest thing left.
He reached over, and took her hand.
And held on.
His mind wandered to two weeks earlier on train to Salamanca.
The hum of the train had lulled most passengers into silence, but Leah couldn't sleep.
She sat across from Jack, knees pulled up under her coat, watching the Spanish countryside blur past in streaks of dusk-colored olive groves and distant hills. Her bag sat in her lap like it might vanish if she let go.
Jack hadn't spoken for over an hour.
No lectures. No reassurances.
Just silence — heavy but not cruel.
She remembered the way he kept checking his reflection in the window, like he didn't recognize the man staring back.
"Are we going somewhere safe?" she asked.
He nodded.
"Then why do you look like you're leaving something behind?"
Jack had looked at her then, just for a moment, before replying.
"Because I am."
PART 5: The Directive
Location: Izzy's war room – converted storage chamber in clinic
Evelyn sat back from her monitor. Her eyes were dry from blinking too little. The decrypted data streamed slowly across the screen — spooling like code from a waiting grave.
RELAY ACTIVE // ORIGIN: ESTONIA NODE 451
PROXY LINK: LUXEMBOURG – CIV-EXT GOV PATHWAY
TRIGGER CONDITION: L-R-NERA BIO-STATUS = NULL
RESPONSE: GLOBAL OVERWRITE INITIALIZED
She ran the simulations twice. The results didn't change.
No malware. No viruses. Just infrastructure overwrite — biotech schematics, AI behavior trees, ledger systems — all rewritten with fragments of NERA's architecture.
Izzy hovered beside her now, arms folded tight.
Jack entered quietly, his shirt still damp from where he'd been holding ice to his shoulder.
Evelyn turned the screen.
"This isn't meant to destroy anything," she said. "It's meant to preserve her. Even after death."
Jack frowned. "Preserve her how?"
Evelyn tapped the final line of decrypted code.
NERA is not terminated.
NERA is preserved.
If Leah dies, she comes back.
Everywhere.
Izzy exhaled slowly.
"So whoever holds the signal," she said, "isn't afraid of her dying."
Jack understood before the others did.
"They're afraid of missing the chance to own her."