Cipher didn't usually look backward.
She built her empire moving forward, burning everything behind her. But he the one who called himself GhostDrive had forced her to retrace every step.
She sat in a steel-gray server chamber off the coast of Iceland. Cold. Hidden. Secure.
A dozen drives spun around her, each feeding into an adaptive AI that combed every dark archive, blacksite log, and encrypted government ghost trace.
She watched as the algorithm hit something. Not a person. Not a profile.
A code signature, buried deep in a 2004 MI6 archive.
D.SHADOW.DRIVE
She leaned forward.
GhostDrive had once been called something else.
Devon Shaw
She whispered the name and the system responded with fractured images. A British birth record. Twins. One labeled "Deckard" with military aptitude, combat citations, and black ops experience.
The other…
Vanished.
His existence wiped before school age. No known death certificate. No ID. No digital footprint until 2008, where he appeared briefly as an unidentified signal breaching the NSA.
That was her first confirmation: he wasn't new.
He was legend.
And she hated that she hadn't noticed sooner.
Cipher pulled up everything on Deckard Shaw instead.
A name she knew. Black ops, MI6, mercenary.
But tucked in the shadows of his missions someone else had always been there.
Deckard was the gun.
Devon was the ghost.
In 2009, MI6 made a move against Deckard. Files classified even beyond Cipher's reach. But she found the remnants in Russian cyber-backups.
That night, someone breached MI6.
Alarms triggered and silenced before anyone could respond. Devon Shaw had walked through their firewalls like mist. An email unsigned, untraceable landed in Deckard's burner inbox three seconds before he vanished from MI6's radar forever.
THEY'RE CLEANING HOUSE. GET OUT.
Three days later, an MI6 unit found their safehouse burned. Six agents dead. Deckard never went back.
Cipher sat back and ran her fingers along her chin.
"Interesting."
She watched as the next logs unfolded.
Devon splitting from Deckard after the fallout. Not out of fear, but necessity. He had his own work to do. To build.
To disappear.
Then came Owen Shaw. Another ghost in training. The logs showed Devon covering Owen's movements, protecting his rise without ever revealing himself.
She smirked. "Big brother, little warlord."
Cipher ran another trace. This one pointed to Devon's other work the tech world. Names of start-ups with inexplicable collapses. Quantum startups dismantled before launch. Drone companies reverse-engineered overnight.
Devon hadn't just vanished.
He had become a hunter.
And then she found the spike. The one anomaly even her own AI flagged as impossible.
A breach into something that shouldn't exist.
Cipher stared at the tag her AI flagged as fictional.
IMF CORE SYSTEM ACCESS DETECTED — FAILED TRACE
Cipher's lips parted.
She knew the legends. Whispered stories about the Impossible Mission Force a group no country would claim, no enemy could trace. It had always been hearsay. Intel agents called it ghost fiction. Spy lore.
But Devon Shaw had touched it.
Only for a moment. He'd found the perimeter and backed off. The signature showed hesitation, then retreat.
He knew better than to poke the bear.
But even trying meant something.
Cipher leaned back. Her mind racing.
"This world isn't just oil, muscle, and bullets," she whispered.
It wasn't just gangsters, racers, or warlords.
People like Devon Shaw weren't made for this world. They transcended it.
They were bred in the cracks between nations, fostered in betrayal, and armed with tools far beyond firepower.
She tapped a key and brought up her own experimental AI construct. A whisper of code with her consciousness embedded in the first layer.
It asked her for a target.
Cipher typed:
FIND GHOSTDRIVE
And deeper still, where the code could not be seen, a second line pulsed.
UNDERSTAND HIM
Because Cipher, for all her power, knew that understanding was control. And she hated not having control.
Far away from her island fortress, in a hidden system shielded by false nodes and bouncing satellite loops, Devon Shaw sat alone in a blacked-out control room. Monitors pulsed with trace attempts. One stood out.
He watched Cipher's probe try to slip past his triple-encrypted shell.
He didn't flinch.
He let it crawl forward.
He let her see exactly what he wanted her to.
A message appeared on her screen. Short. Surgical.
NICE TRY, CYPHER. BUT YOU DON'T KNOW ME.
NOT YET.
Devon leaned back in his chair, watching the digital battlefield reset.
He turned toward a separate screen an isolated archive showing a flicker of footage from IMF blacksites.
He'd seen the limits of the world he thought he ruled.
He knew now that people like him were not at the top.
There were still higher games.
New wars.
New systems.
He narrowed his eyes and whispered to himself.
"This isn't just cars and heists anymore."
He pulled up Owen's last known location.
A message sat unsent in the outbox. Devon stared at it for a long time before deleting it.
Owen had made his choice. Deckard too. They had to walk their paths.
But Devon?
Devon Shaw was going to climb past every world that thought they couldn't be hacked.
And when he got there…
He'd rewrite the game.