Aria Vale
Location: South Wall Access, Vault 07 – 7:12 a.m.
The stink hit first—wet concrete, rusted iron, old blood.
The kind of scent that clings to memory more than clothes.
Kira dropped down behind me, landing soft despite the weight of the pack slung across her shoulder. "You sure this is it?"
I ran my gloved hand along the wall. The imprint was faint—almost gone. But it was there. A Monarch crest burned into the cement. Not the current one. Older. Predecessor era.
"We're standing on the bones of the original vault," I said. "The part they never rebuilt."
Kira pulled a short-range jammer from her bag and flicked it on. "Then let's hope they forgot to erase the ghosts."
We moved slow, every step echoing like a warning. The secondary hatch was half-collapsed, its keypad dark. But it didn't matter. I wasn't here to knock.
I pulled a modified keystrip from my jacket—custom built from the traces Damian's system unknowingly fed me.
When I slid it in, the door didn't open.
It breathed.
Metal hissed, mechanisms grinding in reluctant surrender. A pressure lock disengaged, and the hatch shuddered open, revealing a staircase descending into black.
"Tell me again how you're not a hacker," Kira muttered.
"I'm not," I said. "I'm just his consequence."
We stepped inside.
---
~Vault Interior – 20 minutes later~
It wasn't what I expected.
No flickering lights. No dramatic evidence of Monarch's crimes splayed out in neat folders.
Just sterile corridors. Climate-controlled silence. And biometric security that hadn't blinked in years.
Kira swept ahead, clearing corners with fluid precision. I followed her lead until we reached it.
A door.
Unmarked.
Isolated.
And still warm.
He'd been here. Recently.
The lock read thumbprint and retinal.
"You going to tell me how we get through that?" Kira asked.
"I already did."
I reached into my coat and withdrew the second shard of data from the tracer. The one I embedded in the false intel. The one Damian let activate—like a dare.
When I plugged it into the panel, the light flickered, scanned my face…
…and the door opened.
Kira's eyes narrowed. "You used his biometrics?"
I nodded. "He knew I'd follow. He wanted me to."
Inside, the room wasn't large. Just a vault, cold and precise. One wall held rows of black servers. Another, a case—glass, protected by reinforced steel and surveillance you couldn't buy on the open market.
And in the center…
A chair.
Occupied.
By a man.
Kira's gun was up in a flash. I froze.
But he didn't move.
Didn't breathe.
Because he wasn't alive.
He was dead. Long dead.
Preserved in state like some kind of morbid exhibit. Wires fed into his scalp. Chest opened. Artificial organs where a heart once beat.
I stepped closer. My skin crawled.
"This isn't just a vault," I whispered. "It's a lab."
Kira scanned the setup. "This is Monarch's black R&D. Bio-synthetic enhancement. Memory mapping. Psychological warfare. They were trying to build something here."
My gaze fell on a name engraved into the chair's base.
Jonathan Wolfe.
Damian's father.
"Holy s**t," I breathed. "They didn't bury him. They *plugged him in."
And suddenly it made sense.
Damian's ghosts. His distance. The rot he'd inherited.
Vault 07 wasn't his secret.
It was his curse.
Kira looked at me. "What the hell are you going to do with this?"
I stared at Elias Wolfe's corpse, still wired into the heart of Monarch's forgotten kingdom.
And I said the only thing that felt true:
"Expose him."
---
Damian Wolfe
She found it.
I watched from behind the tempered glass of the observation room, arms crossed, heart quiet. Not still—just quiet, the way it always got before everything went to hell.
Aria moved through the corridor like she'd walked it in another life. Unafraid. Determined. Beautiful in that devastating way that made the danger seem poetic.
Beside her, Kira swept the corners like she was still on mission. Efficient. Deadly. Loyal.
That part still burned.
I could've shut it down. Locked the vault. Sent the Bishop. Wiped the feed and called it a misfire. But I didn't. I let her open the door.
I wanted her to.
Because if she was going to hate me, she deserved to hate me for the truth—not the scraps the world gave her.
I turned my attention to the secondary monitor. Multiple feeds from the vault interior. One angled directly over the chair. Over him.
My father.
Not a man anymore. Just a vessel. Bones and wires and the echo of an empire that refused to die, even when he did.
The first time I saw the body, I was sixteen. They called it legacy. Called it leadership. Said this was the only way to preserve control—the memory transfer project, the neural mapping, the conversion of a man into a system.
They made me watch.
They said it would make me strong.
All it did was make me empty.
Aria stood frozen now, staring at the corpse like it might reach out and touch her. Like the truth finally had weight.
And Kira? She was already calculating how to burn it all down.
Good.
Let them.
Let them see what I'd carried all these years. What I'd inherited and tried—failed—to keep buried. Monarch wasn't mine. It was *his*. I just wore the crown because no one else had the spine to break it.
Until her.
My fingers curled against the table edge.
She was the first one to get this far. Past the lies. Past the red tape and shell companies and lethal silences. She didn't just navigate the empire.
She dissected it.
And she was still standing.
God help me, she was still looking for a way to save it. To save me.
A light blinked on the console—motion in Sector Seven. Auto-triggered defense sweep was still offline, just like I ordered. No one else knew she was here. Not yet.
The Bishop's voice echoed in my head.
"Give him the rope. Watch who he hands it to."
But I wasn't watching Jasper anymore.
I was watching her.
And I finally understood—
Aria wasn't holding the match.
She was the fire.