The Safehouse Memory
Lex hadn't planned on going back.
But there he was—alone—walking up the cracked stone path to a forgotten safehouse buried on the outskirts of East London. Overgrown ivy crawled along the walls. The windows were boarded. The lock was rusted. And yet, inside, everything was exactly as they'd left it: notes pinned to corkboards, surveillance photos, and one wall filled with red threads connecting names—Cartwright, Muri, Project Eden, and a photo of a vault door with no access point.
Lex slid his key into the hidden drawer beneath the desk and pulled out an old flash drive marked "C-Trace / Eden Fragments".
Plugging it into a dusty terminal, he waited.
The files were mostly encrypted fragments—glitches of erased emails, garbled coordinates, and one repeating metadata tag:
> Subject Origin: Variant-R / Asset: M.R. > Memory Lock engaged.
He exhaled slowly.
M.R. — Muri. Rhea.
"Memory lock," he whispered.
They had wiped her. Or more likely—she had chosen to forget.
A file loaded. Audio only.
> "If this gets out, we're all dead. Rhea knows the location. But she made me lock it. You'll need her heartbeat to open it again."
Lex's eyes widened. He sat back, stunned.
It wasn't just her past they were after.
It was her biometric signature. The baby... may share it.
And someone knew.