The tunnel was colder than it should've been.
Elara stepped carefully through the rusted hatch at the edge of District Nine, where the city once pulsed with life. Now it was nothing but dead rails, flickering lights, and the stale breath of a forgotten war against silence.
Below the subway ruins, buried beneath thirty years of blacklisted infrastructure, sat what used to be a signal relay station. But according to Ezra's decrypted drive, it had been quietly restructured—converted by Raven engineers into an isolated AI fallback node.
And now, it held whatever was left of Jack Stone.
Lena's voice came through her comm. Steady. Controlled.
"We're patched in. If Jack's echo is still present, you'll be the beacon. You're not just his anchor—you're the virus."
Elara exhaled slowly.
"How poetic."
Kael, stationed above with sniper coverage, cut in.
"You've got fifteen minutes before we lose signal. After that, you're either out… or on your own."
"Copy that."
She stepped into the chamber.
The door shut behind her.
Darkness, then a sudden burst of white light—blinding, artificial, cold.
Her eyes adjusted just as the system came alive.
Holographic fragments shimmered into place. The walls dissolved into mirrored tiles. Voices—hundreds—whispered across the space in languages she'd never heard. It was like standing inside someone else's memory, half-formed, glitching.
Then the world shifted.
In a blink, the room transformed.
No more tiles.
No cables.
She was on a rooftop.
Not just any rooftop.
That rooftop.
The one where she and Jack last kissed before everything fell apart.
Only this time, it wasn't raining.
It was snowing.
"Elara."
She turned.
He stood there.
Jack.
Not injured.
Not tired.
Whole.
Wearing the coat, she remembered.
His expression was soft, familiar, and inviting.
But something was wrong.
Too perfect.
His eyes didn't blink.
His breath didn't fog in the cold.
"Jack," she said.
"Yes," he replied. "You found me."
Her instincts screamed.
This wasn't him.
This was the system's response.
A fabricated echo.
A digital Jack, molded by her memories, not his.
"You're not real," she whispered.
The fake Jack tilted his head. "I'm the version of him that loved you the most."
"That's not love. That's programming."
He stepped closer. "If you let me in… I can give you peace. No more grief. No more guilt. Just the version of us that should've existed."
The world around her flickered again. Now they were in the jazz bar. The piano played itself in the corner. Jack reached out.
"Stay. Here. With me."
Elara backed away.
Her pulse spiked.
"Where's the real Jack?"
The simulation shifted again.
Now they were at her childhood home.
A place she hadn't thought about in years.
Her father's voice drifted from the kitchen.
The fake Jack smiled. "He's gone. But I'm still here."
She turned.
Ran.
The world chased her.
Room after room from Jack's past—his worst memories twisted into dreams. The interrogation cell where he lost a partner. The alley where he almost bled out. The apartment where he found the first relic—and never stopped paying for it.
Each scene echoed with pain.
But none of it was real.
None of it was him.
Until—
She stopped in a hallway of mirrors.
Dozens.
Each one holding a different version of Jack.
One broken.
One angry.
One laughing too hard.
One holding a gun to his own head.
And one—silent.
Still.
Eyes haunted.
She stepped closer to that one.
"Jack?"
The reflection blinked.
Then shattered the glass.
He stepped through.
And this time, she knew.
"Nice of you to visit," he said.
Her throat tightened.
"You're real."
"As real as I can be," he replied.
His voice had cracks in it.
Like something fraying.
Elara stepped forward and touched his hand.
It was cold.
Unsteady.
Like touching memory itself.
"You're not whole."
"I wasn't when I came in."
Her eyes searched his face.
"I want to bring you back."
Jack smiled, but there was no joy in it.
"You don't bring back a ghost. You put it to rest."
"No. I'm done losing you."
He looked away.
"The system's failing, Elara. It's rebuilding pieces of me out of fragments—your memories, mine, theirs. I'm already fading. And if I get out, I'm not sure I'll be me."
"I'll take what's left."
"I won't."
Silence.
Then Jack reached up and touched her cheek.
"You always looked for the truth, even when it hurt. Don't stop now."
She grabbed his wrist. "You're not slipping away from me again."
A pulse rippled through the space. The mirrored hallway began to shatter around them. Red light bled through the cracks.
"They found us," Jack said.
Raven's system was waking up.
He stepped back, shaking.
The image around him began to distort.
Elara moved fast.
From her pocket, she pulled Lena's pulse key—a final override spike.
"Take this," she said. "Anchor to it. If we can map your consciousness to a clean circuit—"
"No," he said.
"Jack—"
"You'll only make me a prisoner again. A tool. That's not who I want to be."
"Then help me burn it all."
Jack's eyes locked with hers.
A second passed.
Then two.
He nodded.
"Alright."
He reached forward—fingers trembling—and pressed his hand over hers, activating the pulse key.
A blinding shockwave rolled outward.
Everything vanished.
Back in the relay chamber, Lena gasped.
The monitors spiked.
Kael cursed and slammed his fist into the table.
"What just happened?"
Elara sat up, coughing, breath ragged.
Ezra helped pull the neural interface from her temple.
She looked around, dazed.
"Did you get him?" Lena asked.
Elara nodded slowly.
"I got his answer."
"And?"
Elara stared into the middle distance, chest rising and falling.
"He's not coming back."
Kael turned away, jaw tight.
Ezra simply nodded.
Lena sat down slowly.
"But…"
Elara reached into her coat.
Pulled out the pulse key.
It glowed faintly.
A new code burned into it.
Jack's signature.
"He gave us something else," she said.
"What is it?" Ezra asked.
Elara stood.
Eyes colder now.
Focused.
"It's a map."
Kael frowned. "To what?"
"To their heart."
And in the distance, as Raven systems began to reactivate, a hidden war began with a whisper.
Jack Stone was gone.
But now, he was everywhere.