Kaelion.
The name blinked back at Elias like a warning.
It hadn't come up often in the files he'd collected, but when it did, it was never casual. Always mentioned in whispers—oblique references in donor transactions, encrypted communications with half-scrambled headers, an occasional redacted name attached to personnel transfers that didn't make sense. And now, here it was again, not buried in code, not tucked behind ciphers—but sitting plainly beside Reynold's and Cassius's.
A pattern was forming. One that Elias had only seen fragments of until now.
He narrowed his eyes and expanded the data set.
Kaelion appeared connected to several secondary projects once considered offshoots of Helix—initiatives codenamed Aegis Bloom and Hound-Variant—programs that had supposedly been dismantled during the global biomedical crackdowns twelve years ago. Most had been written off as myth, dead-end experiments, or smokescreens meant to confuse investigators.
