Time: 6:26 PM – South Border Ghostline Safehouse
It wasn't the fire that woke him this time.
It was the sound of static—not on the radio, not through any speaker, but inside his head. A low thread of distortion woven into his thoughts like background noise from a dream he hadn't left yet. Takeshi Ryoji blinked hard, sat up slower.
Every breath felt more real now.
The pain was real. The cold was real. And so was the weight in the room.
Across from him, Marek was already motioning over the table—an old topographic overlay of the region flickering on a battered field-projector. Mountains glitched into view, then signal paths. At least five converging nodes blinked red.
"These aren't ghostlines," Marek muttered. "They're reclaim routes. Dead lines activating because they've picked up a living Prime ID. That's you, Aiko."
Aiko didn't flinch. She leaned in, expression locked. "How long before they reach us?"
"Depends." Marek zoomed in. "If they're just probes? Hours. If they're manned units or old synthetics that still follow root-priority code?" He looked at Ryoji. "You know how fast Division cleanup squads used to move."
Ryoji nodded. "Fast enough to erase entire districts before the public caught on."
Miura paced to the edge of the map. "So they'll think she's commanding them?"
"They won't think," Marek said flatly. "They'll respond. Obedience to the Prime Seed Host is hardcoded into Tier-One war-nets. And now those signals are spreading."
Aiko stepped back.
Ryoji stood.
Still weak, still shaking, but there was a different kind of strength in his eyes now. Not adrenaline. Not just instinct.
Resolve.
"We shut it down," he said.
"You can't shut it down," Marek replied. "Not without cutting out the spine entirely. That means cutting into her."
"No," Aiko said. "We reprogram it. Change the signal from a broadcast to a firewall."
Miura frowned. "Can that even be done?"
Ryoji stepped forward. "It can. But we need to find whoever designed the legacy spine interface. The one the Director copied into her."
Marek's silence said enough.
"You know where to start," Ryoji said.
Marek nodded slowly. "There's only one facility that predates the original Division lattice. Buried even deeper than this place. It was used before the war-net had a name. Before the Seeds even had numbers."
"Where?"
Marek looked up.
"The South Vault. Ghostline Depth Zero."
A beat passed. No one spoke.
Not even the wind.
Just the sound of the map flickering… and the silent shift in the room as every soul there realized this wasn't just survival anymore.
This was legacy.
And they were walking straight into it.
Miura broke the silence. "You're saying that place still exists?"
"It was never decommissioned," Marek replied.
"Just buried. Layered over by other safehouses, sealed off after the early psychotronic prototypes failed. Division called it a neural dead zone. But it's not dead—it's dormant."
Aiko narrowed her eyes. "And if it wakes up?"
Marek looked at her, then at Ryoji. "Then we find out what was buried with it."
Ryoji turned toward the far gear locker. His movements were stiff—like someone wearing pain like old armor—but he didn't hesitate. "We move before sundown. We take only what can't be traced."
"You're in no shape to lead a strike," Marek said, half-warning.
"I'm not leading a strike," Ryoji answered. "I'm taking her home."
That made Aiko stop.
He looked at her, not like a soldier, not even like a protector—but like something else entirely.
"Not where you were born," he added. "Where they made you."
Aiko didn't argue.
She just nodded.
Across the table, the red signals on the topographic map began to pulse—faster now. Like heartbeats that didn't belong to anything human. Marek stared at them, then keyed in a code that dropped a hidden route beneath the Ghostline's known tunnels.
A new path lit up.
Southward. Downward.
Beneath every recorded floor plan.
Toward something the world had sealed and forgotten.
And it was listening again.
To be continued in Chapter 57...