Time: 6:08 PM – South Border Ghostline Safehouse
The wind outside had teeth.
It howled past the rusted frame of the safehouse like it was searching for something—howling not with sound, but with memory. The structure, buried in the shadow of a craggy ridge and masked beneath a broken-layer stealth tarp, creaked with every gust. Inside, the walls were bare, concrete old and cold, but for the first time in hours… it was quiet.
No more collapsing terminals.
No more holographic threats whispering death sentences.
No more flickering lights that spoke in codes only nightmares understood.
Aiko sat beside Ryoji, both of them wrapped in thermal blankets, though neither felt the chill. The silence between them wasn't empty—it was sacred. A kind of fragile truce between what had happened and what might still come.
Ryoji stirred, slowly. His voice cracked like a radio reawakening after a long blackout.
"You didn't leave me."
Aiko didn't answer at first. Her eyes were on the fireplace—just a low flicker in an old burn-barrel, salvaged from a wrecked supply post. The fire didn't warm much, but it gave her something to look at besides his face.
"I couldn't," she said quietly. "Even if I wanted to."
"I don't remember everything," he murmured. "Only… pieces. There was a place that wasn't real, but felt like it mattered more than anything else."
"You came back from it."
His fingers shifted, clumsy and slow, until they found hers.
"No," he said. "You pulled me back."
Across the room, Miura stood watch with her rifle propped beside her, shoulders tight, eyes sweeping every corner of the low-lit space like she expected the shadows themselves to reach out and grab them. She hadn't said a word since they arrived.
Aiko's Seal was no longer just warm—it hummed. Not urgently, not alarmingly. But insistently. Like something deep in her blood had started counting.
Then the door creaked.
A cold draft swept in, and Marek stepped through—covered in ash and static-suit grime, his face pale and unreadable. He didn't say anything at first. Just looked at Ryoji. Then at Aiko. Then at the makeshift tech array wired across the far wall—cobbled together from scrap gear, old satellites, and whatever Division-grade modules hadn't been traced.
The words came slow.
"You need to hear this," Marek said. "Now."
Aiko stood. So did Miura.
Ryoji tried to sit up, but Marek motioned him down. "Rest. You're going to need strength for what's next."
Aiko crossed the room, her expression already shifting—shielded, sharper. "What did you find?"
Marek tapped a sequence on the old transmitter unit, and a burst of static flared—followed by a low rhythmic pulse. It sounded… wrong. Familiar, but corrupted.
"It's not just the Seal anymore," Marek said. "It's the spine."
"The signal you mentioned?"
"Not a signal," Marek corrected. "A broadcast. Your Seal's spine is acting like a legacy rootline carrier—pulling neural frequency data from every dead Division satellite still in orbit. Every sleeper protocol still in storage. It's… waking them up."
Aiko's blood ran cold. "What do you mean—waking them?"
Marek's voice dropped.
"I mean you're broadcasting on Division Zero's original recruitment lattice. The old war-net. The one they used to scan for psychic candidates during the first Seed experiments. Only now, you're the node. And everything tuned to it? It thinks you're the Prime Seed Host."
Ryoji stared at the ceiling.
"Which means," he said slowly, "anything still running those systems will start moving toward her. Not because they were ordered to…"
"But because she's calling them," Marek finished. "Even if she doesn't mean to."
Miura swore under her breath.
Aiko closed her eyes.
The fire crackled. Somewhere outside, the wind howled again.
But now it didn't sound empty.
It sounded like something answering.
To be continued in Chapter 56…..