The safehouse had changed. The air inside was no longer still with fear, it now vibrated with a grim resolve. Tricia stood before a dismantled terminal from Reed’s extraction pack, her eyes scanning the lines of encrypted data they had salvaged from his time inside the shadow of Project HARROW.
They had worked in shifts for two days, decoding what they could. But one file kept resisting, its layers woven deep into obsolete military encryption no one had seen in over a decade. Gabriel called it the ghost code.
Then, on the third night, it blinked open.
A single phrase appeared on the cracked monitor in a white serif font against black:
> PHASE OMEGA: ENGAGE PHANTOM DIRECTIVE
Tricia stared at the phrase, her pulse slowing. “What is that?” she asked, turning to Reed.
Reed’s expression darkened. “It’s the final protocol. I saw mention of it once, when I was pretending to be one of them. I thought it was a bluff, until now.”