The car cut through the winding streets of Geneva with smooth, silent grace. Snow-laced trees blurred past the window, their limbs skeletal in the winter dusk. Ethan sat rigid in the passenger seat, every muscle wound tight, as if expecting a bullet through the glass at any moment.
Inside the cabin, the air was warm but suffocating. He could still hear the encrypted voice from the Zurich node echoing in his head:
"They'll come from above, not below. From allies, not enemies. And from Cassian."
Cassian.
The name now tasted bitter on his tongue. And Ghost 02—whoever they were—had issued the kill order.
Ethan clenched the edge of his seat. "They knew we were coming."
Darius didn't respond. He kept his gaze fixed forward, hands steady on the wheel. His jaw was tight, and the tension in his shoulders had not relaxed since they left the node.
After a long silence, he said quietly, "There are only three people in the world who could've known about the Zurich access node. One of them's dead. One's me. And the third…"
"Is Ghost 02," Ethan finished.
The vehicle turned down a narrow alley lined with dumpsters and flickering yellow lights. The silence outside was unnerving—too quiet for a city that never really slept. Darius pulled up beside an old garage with rusted steel doors.
"This way."
They exited quickly. The cold slapped Ethan in the face, but it did little to clear the fog of betrayal settling in his mind. He followed Darius around the side of the building to a steel door embedded in aged brick, nearly invisible beneath years of grime and dust.
Darius keyed in a six-digit code.
The lock clicked. The door creaked open.
They stepped into a different world.
The safehouse smelled of old metal and cold concrete. A faint trace of oil and electronics lingered in the air. The fluorescent lights flickered overhead, casting a pale, artificial glow across the room's surfaces. It felt like stepping into the skeleton of a bunker abandoned decades ago.
The floor was concrete, cracked in places. Maps covered the left wall—some old and curling at the edges, others marked with pins and red lines that crisscrossed cities Ethan hadn't even heard of. In one corner, a cot sat neatly made, military style. The desk beside it held a burner phone, a half-burned notebook, and an ashtray filled with unused matches.
Darius closed the door behind them and armed three different deadbolts.
"This one's off-grid," he said. "No uplink. No Wi-Fi. No surveillance. Only landline connection to two other nodes."
"Which ones?" Ethan asked.
"Lisbon. And Sapporo."
"Far apart."
"That's the point."
Ethan ran his hand over the edge of the map table. It was scratched and dented, clearly repurposed from military surplus.
"This looks like it hasn't been touched in years."
"Because it hasn't," Darius replied. "Marcus never brought anyone here but me."
Ethan turned to him. "Then why now?"
Darius leaned on the table. "Because Ghost 02 has resurfaced. And that changes everything."
He gestured to a monitor built into the wall. It booted with a low whine and displayed a satellite feed over Geneva.
Ethan stared at it, mind still churning. "Tell me about Ghost 02."
Darius's face was unreadable. "They were one of us. Part of a covert asset group Marcus assembled during the Black Sun expansion. Not a field agent—an architect. They coordinated infrastructure, intelligence drops, cross-border logistics. Ghost 02 built the invisible roads."
"And now they're using them to hunt us?"
Darius nodded grimly. "It's like being killed by your own reflection."
Ethan dropped into a worn chair. "So what broke them?"
"No one knows. After a failed extraction in Kuala Lumpur, they vanished. No death report. No trace. Marcus sealed all links."
"But not completely," Ethan said. "Because someone activated Project Sigma."
Darius turned to a file cabinet and pulled out a thick folder. "Marcus suspected that if he were eliminated, Sigma would be triggered from within."
He opened it and slid over several grainy photographs—satellite images, thermal scans, a shipping manifest from a warehouse in Tangier.
Ethan scanned them. "All tied to LionSphere?"
"Worse," Darius said. "Tied to something deeper. LionSphere is just the suit. The organism's bigger."
Ethan leaned forward. "You said Marcus made three failsafes."
"I was one. Ghost 02 was another. The third…" Darius paused. "He called it 'Helix.' A protocol. A person. Maybe both. Marcus never fully explained it."
Ethan's hands curled into fists. "So we're chasing ghosts, shadows, and riddles."
"No," Darius said. "We're pulling the mask off the machine. And you're the only one who can do it."
Ethan stood and paced. The concrete echoed beneath his boots. "Why me? Why not Cassian? Or you?"
"Because Marcus chose you. He trusted you'd see things we couldn't. You grew up outside the system. You don't carry our scars—or our pride."
Ethan stopped near the window, where blackout curtains hung like a shroud. "And what if I fail?"
Darius stared at him. "Then the game resets. And the next Ethan Alden never gets the chance to ask why."
A long silence followed.
Ethan finally nodded. "We hit LionSphere. Tomorrow. But we do it our way."
Darius tapped the map. "Then we start with their relay. Intercept the feeds. Monitor staff movement. If Ghost 02 is using them as cover, they'll leave digital fingerprints."
Ethan took the burner phone and placed it next to the pin on Geneva.
"Then we find the fingerprints. And set the whole thing on fire."
Outside, the wind howled softly against the bricks.
And far away, a hidden watcher tapped into a dormant feed—and smiled.