Chapter 9: Ghosts in the Wire.

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Chapter 9: Ghosts in the Wire

The night inside the train car was suffocating. Dust floated like ghosts in the beam of Knox's wrist light, swirling between Sierra and the truth he had just dropped on her.

You weren't just in the system. You are the system. Or a part of it.

Sierra couldn't breathe.

She stared at her hands like they might betray her. Skin. Bones. Sweat. Trembling fingers. All real. All human. But somewhere deeper—beneath blood, beneath memory—there was something else. A program. A protocol. An origin.

The Protocol didn't reject you. It recognized you.

Knox sat across from her, elbows on knees, jaw tense. He wasn't trying to comfort her. He knew better. Comfort wouldn't cut through the storm now boiling in her chest.

"I don't feel like a weapon," she said quietly.

Knox looked up. "Weapons never do. Until they're triggered."

Her stomach twisted.

"What does that mean?" she asked.

He hesitated. That was rare.

"The Protocol isn't just code," he said. "It's adaptive. Viral. It wasn't built to just control minds—it was built to merge them. A new form of intelligence. Hive-thought, centralized reasoning. But it needed a host to stabilize it. A keyframe."

Sierra blinked. "And you think that's me?"

Knox nodded. "Or someone they turned you into."

Her mind reeled. The stolen years. The memory gaps. The blackouts she'd written off as stress or trauma. What if they weren't?

What if they were installations?

"What if I never wanted this?" she said.

Knox gave her a long look. "No one wants to be born into war. But here we are."

A sound broke the stillness. Not outside. Not in the tunnel.

Inside her head.

A static pulse—faint but sharp, like a wire snapping in the dark.

She flinched. "Did you hear that?"

Knox was already on his feet, hand reaching for the pulse-reader strapped to his chest. His expression darkened.

"Something's piggybacking on your neural link."

Sierra stood too fast, the world tilting. "What do you mean—piggybacking?"

"Like a tracer. Or a shadow. Something was dormant in your cortex. Talking back through residual synapse patterns. Maybe it's bleeding through now because you're near the signal field again."

Sierra backed against the cold steel wall. Her breath quickened.

"Am I being tracked?"

Knox didn't answer right away. He tapped the reader again. A soft chirp. Then a small, eerie light blinked red on the device.

"You're not just being tracked," he said. "You're broadcasting."

Sierra's eyes widened. "What? How?!"

"Think of your mind like a buried wire. You might not know it's live, but if it's carrying a current, someone on the other end knows where it is—and what it's carrying."

The floor swayed beneath her. Not physically—mentally. She gripped a nearby rail.

"You mean... I've been leading them straight to us?"

Knox's face didn't change. But his voice softened.

"Not on purpose."

A sharp clang echoed from outside.

Both their heads snapped toward the sound.

Knox moved to the window. One glance was enough.

"Too late. They found us."

A faint red light cut through the train yard like a laser sight. One. Then two. Then six.

"They're not foot soldiers," he muttered. "They're Phantoms."

Sierra's blood froze. "What the hell are Phantoms?"

Knox turned to her, loading a round into the handheld pulse gun at his side.

"Silent. Fast. Wired directly into the Protocol. They don't talk. They don't stop. And they don't miss."

Something slammed against the train car.

Hard.

Sierra screamed.

Another slam.

Knox threw open the back hatch. "We run. Now."

"But I'm broadcasting—"

"I've got a neural dampener. It'll block the trace for five minutes. After that? We improvise."

Sierra hesitated just long enough to hear the shriek of metal as the car door was pried open from the outside.

Knox shoved the device into her palm. "Put it on and move!"

They jumped.

Ran.

Metal creaked and screamed behind them as the train car exploded into movement. Drones lifted. Lights roared to life.

But Sierra didn't look back.

Because she wasn't running from a facility anymore.

She was running from herself.

And the ghost inside her mind?

It was finally waking up.

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