PART 1: Cross the Border
Over the Moselle Valley — October 28, 2025 // 04:26 a.m.
Unregistered private charter – en route to Luxembourg
The small turboprop banked low over a sleeping ribbon of vineyards and dark hills, skimming just beneath air control. No transponder. No manifest. Just an old French tail number and a cockpit crew who asked zero questions.
Izzy sat up front, one hand resting on the bulkhead, the other gripping the seat like she didn't trust air or altitude. Jack was behind her, half-asleep, head against the window, jaw clenched like he was grinding old guilt.
Evelyn sat with her tablet balanced on her knees, tapping furiously through layers of recompiled metadata.
They'd only been airborne forty-five minutes when she spoke.
"I found the ghost signal."
Izzy turned.
Evelyn didn't look up.
"Comes from a decommissioned facility outside Junglinster. Former biotech R&D hub. Went dark three years ago. On paper, it's been vacant ever since."
Jack opened one eye. "And off paper?"
Evelyn tapped once. The tablet chirped. A logo spun across the screen:
NERA VENTURES LTD
A Division of Rourke Global – Europe
Jack sat up.
Evelyn scrolled through the registry. "It was listed under a Luxembourg tax shell. No personnel, no revenue, no patents. Just one invoice — recurring — paid quarterly from a Rourke sub-holding called Lindgard Advisors."
Izzy leaned over. "Lindgard's one of Arthur's shadows."
Evelyn nodded. "Last payment was five weeks ago."
Jack blinked. "So someone's still funding it?"
Evelyn smiled grimly. "Someone's still waiting for it to do its job."
The plane dipped lower.
Outside, the tree line broke — and a pale strip of highway unwound like a cracked spinal cord through the dark.
Luxembourg was close.
So was the signal.
PART 2: Meeting at the Edge
Luxembourg City — October 28, 2025 // 07:02 a.m.
Sculpture Garden at the Centre de Création Contemporaine
The park was nearly empty at this hour — a quiet sprawl of steel installations and frost-dusted benches nestled in the fold between a low museum complex and the forest's edge.
Izzy stood alone near a massive concrete monolith carved with negative space — a brutalist cube with hollowed ribs.
A figure approached from the mist.
Androgynous, narrow-shouldered, wearing a long gray coat over formal wear that hadn't been ironed. A scarf wrapped around their throat three times, too tight to be accidental. One hand clutched a smart case, the other a steaming takeaway cup.
"I expected you to be dead by now," Moth said flatly.
Izzy smirked. "I like disappointing people."
They embraced. Briefly. One-armed. The kind you don't survive long enough to fake.
Jack and Evelyn watched from behind the installation. Jack whispered, "That's Moth?"
"Try not to blink," Evelyn said.
The conversation was fast and clipped.
"I can give you three minutes," Moth said, lighting a clove cigarette with a shaking hand. "Then I disappear again. No follow-up, no favors, and if I hear you said my name out loud—"
"You won't," Izzy cut in.
Moth passed her a small card. It wasn't paper. A dark polymer with no writing — just a faint pulsing glyph, like a sound wave frozen in light.
"What is this?" Izzy asked.
"Touchpoint registration mark," Moth said. "Your girl was flagged four years ago."
Izzy froze.
"Wait— flagged by who?"
Moth looked away. "She was part of a test set. All of them were cloned from the same neural tree. Each seeded with different social adaptations. Yours—Leah—was the only one that survived recursion."
Evelyn stepped forward. "What happened to the rest?"
Moth exhaled a long stream of smoke.
"They weren't deleted."
Jack stepped closer now. "Then where are they?"
Moth looked straight at him.
"You think Leah's the first.
She was just the one who didn't break."
PART 3: The Other Names
Underground Archive Vault — beneath the sculpture park
October 28, 2025 // 07:43 a.m.
The elevator creaked open with a sigh of recycled air and low halogen lighting.
Jack stepped out first, flashlight raised, revealing an antechamber dressed in industrial beige. No markings. Just a single reinforced door with a worn numeric pad and fingerprint sensor.
Evelyn plugged in a bypass stick.
The lock disengaged without complaint.
Beyond it: a long corridor, concrete sealed and lined with power conduit. No guards. No cameras. Just stillness — like the place had been forgotten on purpose.
At the end, a server wall blinked faintly. Dust shimmered in the beams from their lights.
Evelyn found the console.
"This node's dead," she muttered, powering it manually. "But the drives still mount."
Izzy glanced around. "No backup redundancy?"
Evelyn gave a thin smile. "Moth told me they weren't deleted. That doesn't mean they're here."
She tapped.
A root index blinked to life.
PROJECT NERA V-SEED CATALOGUE / EXTERNALIZED COHERENCE MODELS
:: V1-LEAH / Status: Touchpoint
:: V2-CARA / Status: Dormant
:: V3-DIANE / Status: AWAKE / Paris
:: V4-SAV / Status: REJECTED
:: V5-ENA / Status: IN TRANSIT
:: V6-TARA / Status: ERROR / N/A
:: V7–? / Status: UNKNOWN
Evelyn's voice dropped.
"Two are active."
Izzy leaned closer. "Diane and Ena."
Jack pointed. "What's 'Touchpoint' mean?"
Evelyn didn't answer at first.
Then slowly: "It's a reference marker. The one the system uses to compare the rest. The original checksum."
Jack blinked.
"You mean the benchmark?"
"No," Evelyn whispered. "I mean the template."
They stared at the list.
Six known names.
Two active.
One in Paris.
One in transit.
But Leah — the only one they'd ever known — wasn't even considered online anymore.
She was something else now.
Something foundational.
Touchpoint.
PART 4: The Missing Window
Clinic — Salamanca, Spain // Backtrace Analysis
October 28, 2025 // 08:57 a.m.
Evelyn sat at her terminal, headphones slung loose around her neck, eyes locked to the waterfall of raw packet data streaming down her screen.
The connection logs looked clean at first — no spikes, no outbound anomalies. But then she saw it.
A single irregularity.
Just 93 seconds.
A period during which no packets were logged at all — not dropped, not delayed. Just… absent. Like the firewall had blinked.
She rewound the buffer. Cross-referenced power draw. The clinic had no power issues that night. No tampering. No forced breach.
Just a gap.
An intentional silence.
Evelyn leaned in.
There was no attack signature. No command injection. No executable payloads. Just one open port, during one precise interval, logged under a nondescript string:
TOUCHPOINT_SYNC_CALL // HANDSHAKE_ACCEPTED
Response: Valid
Latency: 0.83s
User: LRN-ERA-1
She whispered it out loud.
"Leah didn't get hacked…"
Her fingers trembled slightly on the keyboard.
"She answered."
She pushed back from the desk, already shouting.
"Izzy—get upstairs."
Jack came in at a jog. "What is it?"
Evelyn's voice was tight.
"Leah wasn't taken.
She got a call.
And she chose to pick up."
PART 5: Gone
Clinic – October 28, 2025 // 09:12 a.m.
The first thing Izzy saw was the open window.
The second was the dog — Conrad — curled up on the cot, undisturbed. Still asleep, tail twitching.
No broken latch. No footprints. Just the absence of Leah.
She was gone.
Jack checked every exit in under two minutes. Basement. Roof. No signs of forced entry. No trace of struggle.
Evelyn stood in the center of the room, staring at the sheets.
She picked up the folded slip of paper from the pillow.
It wasn't handwritten. It was printed — clean font, no ink smudge. The kind of message you prepare in advance.
Izzy read it aloud:
"They didn't come for me.
I called them."
Jack turned slowly, his mouth already tightening.
"No," he said.
But it wasn't protest. It was realization.
Evelyn walked over to the terminal in the corner, booted it. Cross-checked the timecode.
The 93-second sync from the firewall?
It ended at 03:43 a.m.
The same time Leah had left the cot.
She hadn't run.
She'd been waiting.
And when the time came… she went to meet it.