General Briggs came storming out of his office, red-faced. “Who authorized a lockdown?” he screamed. A team of MPs in full tactical gear sprinted down the hall. But they didn’t stop at me. They surrounded the General.

“Sir, step away from the desk,” the MP Captain ordered, his hand on his holster. “have you lost your mind, Captain?” Briggs roared. “I am the base commander! That woman is just a clerk!”

The Captain didn’t blink. He handed Briggs a classified folder that had just come through on the secure line. It was marked ‘EYES ONLY – PROJECT SIERRA’. “She’s not a clerk, Sir. And you just assaulted the highest-ranking asset in this hemisphere.”

Briggs laughed nervously and flipped open the file. His laughter died instantly. His face went pale as a sheet. His hands started to shake so hard the papers rattled. He looked at my photo in the file, then up at me.

“My God,” he whispered, his voice cracking. “I thought you were dead. You’re…”

“…You’re Echo One.”

I don’t respond. I simply hold his gaze, watching the color drain from his face as reality crashes through his arrogance like a battering ram.

“Take him,” the MP Captain orders.

Two armed MPs move in and seize the General by both arms. He resists, but only out of reflex. His strength has turned to dust under the weight of that single name.

Echo One.

The moment it’s spoken aloud, the temperature in the corridor seems to drop ten degrees. Everyone stops moving, stops breathing. That codename hasn’t been uttered in a decade—at least, not anywhere above Level 5 clearance.

Briggs is dragged past me. He stumbles, eyes still locked on mine like he’s trying to reconcile the woman whose hair he just mutilated with the specter standing before him. I don’t flinch. I don’t blink. I watch him disappear into the elevator, and only then do I allow the faintest breath to leave my lungs.

The Captain salutes me. “Ma’am, Taskforce Zenith has been alerted. We have a Blackbird en route. Estimated arrival: ten minutes.”

“Good,” I reply. “Pull my files from Vault Zulu and erase every record from this facility that ever placed me here. If it’s not burned, it didn’t exist.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I turn and head back toward the General’s office. It’s still reeking with ego and lemon polish, but I walk inside and close the door behind me. I sit in his chair. My hair is uneven now, but it no longer matters. My cover’s blown. What comes next won’t require a bun or regulation-length anything.

I tap a button beneath the desk, one only a commanding officer would know. A hidden drawer slides open, revealing a secure terminal and a retina scanner. I lean forward, let the scanner verify me, and the monitor flashes green.

Welcome, Echo One.

A soft beep, then a series of encrypted files flood the screen. I ignore most of them—status updates, budget reports, petty command squabbles—until one file stands out like a bloodstain on white linen:

PROJECT THORNSHIELD – ACTIVE ASSETS ENGAGED

My stomach knots.

I tap into the file. What I see twists that knot into a fist.

There’s footage. Surveillance. From three days ago.

A convoy in Belarus. Burned out. Men in black tactical gear—too well-trained to be local—moving like ghosts through a snow-covered forest. One of them carries a small crate marked with biohazard symbols and a strange crest: a serpent wrapped around a broken satellite.

And then I see her.

Lieutenant Mara Chen.

The last surviving member of my old unit.

My voice catches in my throat as I watch her limp toward a chopper, blood soaking her arm. She looks up once, as if she senses the camera, and then vanishes into the trees.

She’s alive.

They lied.

They told me she died during Operation Emberwake. That I was the only one left. But she’s out there—and worse, she’s in the middle of something huge. Something buried so deep even my clearance barely scratches the surface.

I slam the terminal shut and stand. There’s no time for slow channels or Pentagon delays. The Blackbird can take me halfway, but the rest… the rest I’ll have to burn through on my own.

When I step out of the office, the hallway is already clear. MPs are sweeping the building. Everyone below Level 7 is being evacuated. The Captain intercepts me near the loading dock.

“We’ve arranged the jump protocol,” he says quickly. “You’ll be above Belarus in eight hours. We’ve cleared airspace with NATO, but you’ll be flying dark after Warsaw.”

“Perfect,” I reply. “Gear?”

“In the crate.” He nods toward a matte black container on a dolly. “Everything you need. Including—”

He hesitates.

I raise an eyebrow. “Including what?”

“Your sidearm. The original one. From Emberwake.”

My throat tightens.

He opens the case. Nestled inside the foam is a matte gray Beretta M9, etched with the call-sign Echo One on the grip. The weapon feels colder than ice when I pick it up.

I holster it, my hand steady now. The past is a ghost that finally has a face again.

“Who’s running Thornshield?” I ask.

The Captain frowns. “Langston.”

The name is a punch to the chest.

Langston was our handler. Mine. Chen’s. He was also the reason half my unit ended up in body bags. He went off-grid five years ago—burned every bridge, disappeared like a shadow. If he’s back…

I nod once. “Then this ends tonight.”

We move fast. The flight is silent. No one speaks. I sit strapped into the jump seat, going over the satellite feeds and terrain maps with the precision of a machine. My mind wants to drift—to think about Mara, to replay that moment Briggs sheared my hair like I was a child—but I don’t let it. The mission needs me cold.

Over Belarusian airspace, the Blackbird stalls into a glide. Rear doors open. The red light turns green.

I jump.

The wind is a scream in my ears as I plummet through cloud cover, the night air slicing through my gear like a knife. I deploy the chute seconds before hitting treetop level and land hard in a clearing thick with frost. I unclip and vanish into the woods before the chute even hits the ground.

Every step is muscle memory.

Within an hour, I reach the last pinged coordinates of the Thornshield convoy. Charred earth. Frozen blood. Tire tracks that vanish into a slush-covered road.

I follow them north, silently, until I see the compound.

It’s an old research facility—Soviet by design, buried into the side of a rocky ridge. There are guards. Cameras. Drones overhead.

But there’s something else.

A pulsing energy. Like static in my bones.

Biotech.

Thornshield isn’t just a weapons project. It’s a hybrid program. Weaponizing synthetic organisms and pairing them with neural-linked combatants. It’s the kind of thing Congress pretends doesn’t exist. The kind of thing Mara would have tried to destroy.

So why is she here?

I get in through the vent shafts. Classic, but effective. I drop down behind a server room and tap into their network. The screens glow. File after file.

And then—I hear it.

Footsteps. Deliberate. Calm. Someone who knows the place. Knows the dark.

I pull my sidearm and wait.

Then the door opens.

She steps in.

Mara.

Her face is leaner, her left eye replaced with a glowing cybernetic implant, but it’s her. She stops mid-step when she sees me.

“Echo?” she breathes.

I lower my weapon. “What the hell are you doing here?”

She doesn’t answer right away. She moves closer. “I thought you were dead.”

“They told me the same about you.”

She nods slowly, eyes flicking to the screens. “They lied to both of us.”

And then—gunfire.

Alarms wail. The compound erupts in chaos.

I grab her hand, and we run.

She leads me through twisting hallways, deeper underground, toward a lab filled with glowing tanks and whispering servers. Inside, suspended in liquid, are prototypes—human-machine hybrids. Sleeper agents. Grown, not recruited. Programmed from conception.

“Langston wants to replace soldiers,” Mara says breathlessly. “Not train them. Just… grow them.”

I turn to her. “Why didn’t you destroy this place?”

Her voice cracks. “Because I needed proof. And you.”

She pulls a flash drive from her pocket. “This has everything. But it needs your retinal scan to unlock.”

I take it. Insert it into a console. Lean in.

SCAN COMPLETE.

The files unfold like a map to hell.

Langston’s signature is everywhere. Funding, planning, even test subject logs—names I recognize. People I thought I’d buried.

“We have to end it,” I say.

Mara’s jaw clenches. “Then let’s burn it.”

We set the charges ourselves. Floor by floor. Lab by lab.

By the time we reach the surface, the compound is groaning under the weight of its own secrets. Choppers scream overhead—our extraction. NATO insignias. Clean-up crew.

We board as the charges detonate, fire and ice swallowing the ridge in a single, glorious inferno.

As we lift off, Mara looks at me. “What happens now?”

I stare out the window, the flames still reflected in her cybernetic eye. “Now?” I say quietly. “We stop pretending we’re dead. And we start hunting.”

She nods.

And just like that, the world remembers Echo One. Not a clerk. Not a ghost.

But the storm that ends everything corrupted.

And starts something new.