Aches and Sparks

They returned to the underground safehouse just before dawn.

The city above was waking up,unaware that beneath its surface, four stolen ghosts now breathed again. Ethan watched them carefully as they huddled on cots, wrapped in blankets. None of them spoke. Their eyes held the same haunted glaze the girl had worn when they first found her.

Trauma didn't need words to be understood.

Liam ran basic scans on each of them. Neural activity off the charts. Implants detected. But one thing was clear,they weren't inert anymore. They were waking up.

Maxwell stood near the vault door, arms folded. "We can't keep them here. Too many signals, too much exposure. Astra will trace the energy spikes if they haven't already."

"We just got them back," Ethan said. "We're not dumping them into another hole."

"I didn't say dump," Maxwell replied. "I said relocate. Spread them out. We make them harder to track if they're not all in one place."

Harper, seated near the girl, nodded. "He's right. But we need to stabilize them first. They've been in induced loops for years. Their minds aren't synced to real time."

The girl touched the wrist of the burned girl—Nina. "She thinks she's still inside. I can help her, but it'll take time."

"We'll give you what we can," Ethan said. "But Liam, start scouting alternate locations."

Liam nodded and got to work.

Later, Ethan stepped into the side chamber where the girl sat cross-legged on the floor, facing the boy with metal plates—Jace.

"You okay?" he asked.

She nodded. "He remembers fire. Being tested. He doesn't understand what his body is now."

Ethan glanced at the boy, who stared blankly at his own hands like they didn't belong to him. "They weaponized them."

"Worse," she said. "Astra wasn't just building weapons. They were trying to build obedience."

Ethan sat beside her. "But they failed with you."

"I don't know why." She looked down at her hands. "I should've broken. Like the others."

"You didn't," Ethan said. "That's what matters."

She looked at him, eyes wide. "There are more. I can feel them,like shadows. Still buried."

"How many?"

"Dozens. Maybe more. But they're farther now. Outside the city."

Ethan exhaled. "Astra didn't just experiment here. This is one node."

"They're a network," she said. "And we've only scratched the surface."

Harper gathered everyone that night. Survivors. Fighters. Even the broken ones.

Liam projected a map of Brinlake and its outer zones on the wall. "Based on the girl's readings, and triangulating old transport lines, I found three other likely sites. All decommissioned. All off-grid."

Maxwell pointed at one of them. "That's in Marrow Creek. Dead zone. We'll need gas masks just to breathe near the river."

Harper nodded. "Good. If it's hostile to us, it's hostile to them too."

Ethan looked around the room. "We don't hit it right away. We train. We rebuild. We heal. But we don't stop."

The survivors looked up—Nina, Jace, and the silent boy they'd only known as Red. Their expressions had changed. No longer just fear. Something sharper. A spark.

"They wanted us erased," Ethan said.

Liam zoomed in on the third site,near the outskirts of Brinlake. "This one has movement. Unmarked vans, thermal shifts. Might be their hub."

The girl stood slowly. "Then that's where we'll find the truth."

That night, while the others slept, Ethan couldn't.

He sat in the dark, flipping through an old notebook Liam had salvaged from an Astra van. Most of it was gibberish,test logs, blood data, half-scrubbed field reports.

But one note, scribbled hastily in the margin, caught his eye:

"Signal spike during REM. Subject 01-A still resists. Initiate Memory Burn Protocol if resistance persists."

Ethan read it twice.

01-A.

The girl.

She was never a mistake. She was a risk they failed to break.

He looked up. She stood in the doorway, barefoot, eyes wide.

"You saw it," she said.

He nodded.

"They tried to erase me again. Every time I dreamed of something real, they rewrote it."

"But you kept something," Ethan said.

She stepped closer. "Yes."

He closed the notebook. "What?"

She looked at him, voice like a whisper. "The sound of my mother's voice. I don't remember her face. But I remember how she sang."

Ethan swallowed. "That's what saved you?"

"That's what made me."

She sat beside him, shoulder brushing his. "They'll come again."

"I know."

"They'll bring more."

"I know."

She looked at him. "Are you afraid?"

He paused.

"Yes. But I'm not alone."

She nodded.

"Neither am I."

At dawn, a strange sound echoed through the underground.

A static pulse. Low, rhythmic. Like a heart beating over broken radio waves.

Liam ran to the monitors, eyes narrowing. "We've got an incoming signal."

"From Astra?" Harper asked.

"No. It's not encrypted. It's... raw."

He patched the audio through the speaker.

A child's voice.

Distorted. Warped.

But clear.

"Help... please... they're burning... burning the light…"

Then silence.

The girl stepped forward.

"That wasn't random," she said. "That was a mirror.

Ethan's blood ran cold. "They're wiping another site."

Maxwell was already grabbing his gear. "Then we move. Fast."

Ethan turned to the girl. "Can you track it?"

She closed her eyes.

"I already am."