Argus stood in the half-lit corridor, watching the sealed metal door that supposedly led nowhere.
Chen stared at the panel beside it no badge reader, no keypad, just an old analog latch sealed with a reinforced bolt. "This isn't on any precinct schematic."
"Because it's not supposed to be," Argus muttered.
Behind them, Myles leaned against the wall, pale, still shaking. "I've worked here five years. There's no sublevel."
"There is now," Argus said, slipping the Pandora drive from his coat and plugging it into the mobile decryptor clipped to his belt. "Theta didn't just duplicate your badge he built an entry route."
Chen angled her flashlight at the ceiling. No security cameras. No sensor lights. The corridor was dead. That meant off-grid wiring manual overrides, probably custom-wired by someone with deep internal access.
Probably someone like Mirelli.
Argus opened the drive and selected the encrypted Theta-Δ keycard they had pulled from the last Reyes fragment. The interface blinked.
Key Detected: Theta-Δ
Secondary Lock: Morain Root Cipher Required
He frowned. "Morain buried a failsafe. Original layer. Needs an authentication trigger."
"What kind of trigger?" Chen asked.
"Verbal," Argus said. "A phrase from my past. One only someone like me would know."
Chen's eyes tightened. "You mean something Cutter knew."
He nodded once.
The interface awaited input.
A slow breath left his lungs. He stared at the screen, then spoke the words:
"East 38th and Liberty."
The drive chirped once. Unlocked.
Chen's voice was low. "That where it happened?"
He didn't answer.
The bolt on the door clicked. Metal scraped against itself. Slowly, the latch slid open with a reluctant groan.
Argus pushed the door open. The stairs beyond dropped steeply into darkness.
He turned on his flashlight.
Concrete steps. No rails. Water dripped somewhere below.
"This wasn't part of any original build," he said. "It was added after the precinct was finished."
"Why?" Myles asked.
"To house something that doesn't exist," Argus said.
They descended in silence. One flight. Then two.
The temperature dropped. The light grew colder. At the bottom, a single metal hallway stretched forward just long enough to make you doubt what was at the end.
Then they saw it.
A chamber, maybe twenty by twenty feet.
Clean floors.
Flickering white lights overhead.
And mirrors.
Twelve of them, fixed to the walls in pairs. All cracked. All angled toward the center of the room.
Argus stepped in first.
His own reflection watched him fracture twelve ways at once.
In the center of the room stood a chair.
Someone sat in it.
Hooded.
Silent.
Four screens flickered around him hanging by wires, patched into rusted terminals. Each showed a face.
One was Reyes.
One was Myles.
One was Chen's brother.
And the last one was him.
Argus walked closer, jaw locked.
"You're Theta?"
The figure didn't move.
Then
"You took Lawson's body," the figure said in Argus's own voice. "I took everything else."
Chen stiffened behind him. Myles gripped the wall.
Argus stared. The hood didn't hide the voice. Didn't hide the cadence.
It wasn't just a mimic.
It was him.
Chen stepped beside Argus. "That's a playback. It has to be."
The figure laughed once low, glitched at the edge.
"Playback would be safer. But safer doesn't teach."
Argus moved to the left. His reflection shifted across the mirrors. So did the figure's.
The hood turned slightly.
"You're late, Cutter," it said. "And I'm not alone this time."
The line repeated. Exactly. Tone. Inflection. Timing.
But Argus had heard that same sentence before they even opened the stairwell.
"That wasn't your voice earlier," he said slowly. "It was a trigger. A seed."
The figure nodded once.
"You triggered the rest when you opened the vault."
"Rest of what?" Chen asked.
The figure lifted its head.
The hood fell back.
His face was familiar.
But broken.
Skin that didn't hold steady. Eyes flickering. Features twitching between Cutter and Lawson, then someone else someone older, darker. A face Argus didn't recognize. A memory that hadn't belonged to him.
"You brought Pandora out of the dark," the figure said.
"And now?" Argus asked.
"Now we feed it."
The monitors flashed red.
One word blinked across all four screens:
SYNC INITIATED.
Then a new voice echoed through the mirrors.
Chen's brother. Whispering:
"Amy... you shouldn't have followed him."
"Amy…"
The whisper clung to the walls like mold.
"…you shouldn't have followed him."
Chen's breath hitched.
Her brother's voice. Quiet. Familiar. Real.
But he'd been dead for five years.
Argus shifted in front of her, weapon half-raised. "That's not him."
Chen didn't answer. Her eyes stayed locked on the cracked mirror just behind the seated figure.
It flickered again no camera, no display. Just light, bending wrong.
Then the mirror moved.
It didn't shatter. It didn't swing. It shifted, like the surface was water, rippling as a new face pushed through.
Her brother's face.
Younger. Clean-shaven. Smiling.
Then gone.
Argus grabbed her shoulder. "Chen."
She blinked. Stepped back. "I saw him."
"No, you didn't. You saw what Theta built from what it stole."
The figure in the chair stood.
Not fast. Not aggressive. Just upright.
The monitors behind him changed no longer static faces. Now they played moments.
Reyes, holding a gun to his own temple.
Myles, staring blankly into a precinct interrogation room.
Chen's brother, on a medical table, restrained.
And Argus
pulling a trigger.
Point-blank.
A faceless man dropped on-screen.
The video looped.
Chen backed up a step.
"That's not possible," she whispered.
"I never"
"I know," Argus cut in. "It's a fabrication."
But his jaw tightened.
He'd done worse.
The figure turned. For a moment, its face smoothed out neither his nor anyone else's.
Just blank.
Then it changed again. This time into Lawson. The real Lawson.
The version from his badge photo. The one who'd died so Argus could wake up.
"You didn't kill me, Argus," the Echo said.
"You buried me."
Argus raised his pistol. "Stop talking like you know me."
"I am you," it said. "And Lawson. And Reyes. And Brian Chen. The echoes don't disappear. They stack."
Chen stepped forward. "Then where's my brother?"
The Echo smiled. "He asked about you every day. Until he didn't remember what your name meant anymore."
"Where is he?" she snapped.
"He's in the walls now," the Echo said. "Like all of us."
Then the monitors flared again white static pulsing once, twice
and the chamber's lights cut to black.
"Move!" Argus shouted.
He grabbed Chen, pulled her down as the nearest mirror exploded glass flying across the room in sharp, high-pitched shatters. The Echo had vanished.
No footsteps. No exit door.
Gone.
Only one thing remained on the seat: a black keycard glowing faintly red.
Chen reached for it. Argus caught her wrist. "No. Let me."
He picked it up with gloved fingers and slid it into the drive.
The screen on his decryptor lit up instantly.
ECHO ID: 077 – VESTIGIAL HOST
Memory Set: Combined / Corrupted
Status: Transferring...
Target: NYPD CITY GRID – Admin Sync Port Active
Chen stared at the log. "He's uploading himself."
"No," Argus said. "He's duplicating."
Myles' voice came weak from the door. "He's going to ride the NYPD admin grid copy himself into any system with badge access."
"Which is half the damn city," Argus muttered. "Every patrol car, every precinct terminal, every court login."
Chen's face was pale. "We're not just chasing a ghost anymore."
"We're chasing a virus."
The drive beeped again.
Secondary Echo Trigger Detected. Grayridge Confirmed.
Argus stared at the code string. It was tied to Sasha Mirelli.
She hadn't just maintained the Vaulted Echoes.
She'd activated one.
A live one.
He looked at Chen.
"We end it at Grayridge."
Chen nodded, her hand tight around her sidearm.
But the chamber wasn't done.
Behind them, another monitor flared to life. Not video. Not a face.
Just text.
"You can kill the Echoes, Cutter."
"But you'll never kill what made them."
Mirelli
Then the wall behind the mirrors groaned and began to slide open.
A corridor extended beyond the wall. At the far end, a clean metal elevator.
A fresh fingerprint scanner beside it.
And above the door, a phrase etched in steel:
RECLAIMER: GATE 1