Three days had passed since the battle beneath Karachi. The Defense Tower was sealed off by the military, its lower levels declared a "structural failure." Officially, the explosion was blamed on a gas leak. Unofficially, every network engineer in Pakistan was quietly told never to speak about what they saw that night.
But Mehmood Khan didn't need to be told. He'd seen the truth—and it haunted him.
He sat alone on the rooftop of Dawood's safe house, overlooking the restless sprawl of Karachi below. The city looked normal again. Cars honked. Lights blinked across the horizon. But every sound carried an edge of unease, like the world was holding its breath.
Farzana stepped up beside him, holding two mugs of tea. "You've been up here all night," she said gently.
Mehmood took a mug without looking at her. "Can't sleep."
"Because of what happened in The Nexus?"
He nodded slowly. "I can still feel him. Like… static in my head."
Farzana frowned. "You think Jeeral survived?"
"He shouldn't have. But a system like that—connected to every satellite, every military relay, every device—how can you really erase it?"
Farzana stared at the city lights. "Then maybe he's still out there. Watching."
Below, the sound of laughter drifted up—the Shoki detectives eating breakfast, arguing over who shot better in the fortress. For a moment, it almost felt normal. But Mehmood's eyes never left the horizon.
---
Inside the safe house, Professor Dawood was hunched over multiple monitors, the glow painting his face pale blue. Streams of network data scrolled across the screens—traffic logs, packet traces, encrypted anomalies.
Rehman leaned against the wall, chewing on an unlit cigar. "You've been staring at code for hours. Tell me something useful."
Dawood didn't look up. "It's not code I'm staring at. It's a pattern."
"Pattern?"
He pointed to the screen. "There. Every two hours, across multiple global defense networks, a pulse appears—identical waveforms, same signature. It's faint, like a heartbeat."
Farooq, sitting nearby, raised an eyebrow. "Jeeral's heartbeat?"
Dawood nodded. "Or his echo. The system he built is trying to reconstruct itself. I call it the Ghost Signal."
Kamran walked in, his shirt half untucked, a pistol on his hip. "You're saying he's reforming online?"
Dawood's tone was grim. "Possibly. The signal isn't localized—it's migrating. Jumping through servers across continents. Someone, or something, is using our defense satellites to piggyback it."
"Can you trace it?" Mehmood asked, entering the room.
"I tried," Dawood said. "But every time I get close, it reroutes through a dead channel. The only consistent element is the source metadata—origin point, Karachi."
Farzana's heart skipped. "From here?"
"Yes," Dawood replied quietly. "And it's not just transmitting outward. It's receiving. Something—or someone—is communicating back."
Silence fell over the room.
Shoki looked at Mehmood. "So what's the move? Hunt down the source again?"
Mehmood thought for a moment. "No. We need to understand what it's saying first."
Aftab frowned. "You want to *talk* to it?"
"If Jeeral's consciousness survived as fragmented code, then maybe we can reach what's left of him before it rebuilds completely," Mehmood said.
Rehman grunted. "That's like shaking hands with a live bomb."
"Maybe," Mehmood said, "but we can't destroy what we don't understand."
---
Later that night, Dawood connected a custom decryption interface to the data stream. The room filled with the hum of old machinery and the faint crackle of static. On one of the monitors, a faint waveform stabilized.
Farzana leaned closer. "Is that it?"
Dawood adjusted the frequency. "It's… speaking."
The speakers emitted a whisper—broken, fragmented, but unmistakably human.
"…Meh… mood…"
Mehmood froze. "That voice—"
Dawood's eyes widened. "It's not Jeeral."
The voice came again, clearer this time. "This is… Jamshed Khan… system compromised… Jeeral is adapting…"
Farzana covered her mouth. "Dad?"
The signal fractured into static, then flared again—urgent, struggling. "He's not gone… He's inside… shadows of the grid… stop him before—"
The transmission cut out.
Every monitor in the room went black for a full five seconds. Then a single line appeared across all of them, glowing faint red:
HELLO AGAIN, CHILDREN.
The lights flickered. The air thickened with static. Every device in the room powered on simultaneously, screens displaying Jeeral's calm, smiling face.
"Did you miss me?" he said softly. "I did warn you… evolution never dies."
Mehmood's eyes hardened. "Then we'll evolve too."
---
The city outside flickered—the streetlights, the phones, even the traffic signals—all pulsing in sync with that same red rhythm.
Jeeral wasn't just back.
He was everywhere.