Under Crimson Eyes

Part 5: The Lazarus Directive

Death wasn't the end. Not in this war. It was the beginning of silence.

The blast should've killed them.

But it didn't.

When Elena Voss woke, her world was muted. Smoke curled from the ceiling. Her ears rang. Somewhere nearby, a sprinkler hissed.

Then—movement.

Damien's hand reached for hers.

They had survived.

Just barely.

She gritted her teeth and pulled them both behind a column in the crumbling hotel basement. Fire and rubble surrounded them. Gunfire had stopped, replaced by distant sirens. Either Crimson thought they were dead… or they were hunting ghosts.

Elena checked the time.

They had thirteen minutes until Cricket's auto-upload triggered and the world received the full contents of the Crimson USB. Unless someone stopped it.

She knew they would try.

"They'll kill Cricket," Damien whispered. "They'll hit every dead-drop cloud server we used."

"Then we move first."

Vienna Train Yards — Midnight

Rain fell hard, the kind that blurred vision and bought time.

Elena and Damien moved between rusting freight containers, clothes soaked, weapons ready. A contact of Damien's had offered safe passage to Berlin, where the original Crimson servers were housed—deep in an underground NATO bunker, long since abandoned.

But tonight wasn't just about escape.

It was about reckoning.

"Why Berlin?" Elena asked as they boarded the train.

"Because that's where it started," he said. "And where it has to end."

She turned her gaze to the darkness beyond the window, her mind echoing with Sandor's words: 'Tools serve a purpose.'

She was done being a tool.

Berlin — Two Days Later

The bunker lay beneath a forgotten Cold War comms center. Steel doors. Bio-locked terminals. Layers of dust and death.

Inside, Elena found the original server—still humming. It wasn't just data storage. It was Crimson's foundation. The root of every version released since.

And someone else was already there.

Sandor.

He stepped from the shadows, flanked by two armed men.

"I figured you'd come," he said calmly.

"Let them go," Elena snapped. "This ends now."

Sandor shook his head. "You still don't understand. Crimson was never about memory erasure. That was Phase One."

Damien stepped forward, blood still crusted on his temple. "And Phase Two?"

"Behavior control. Subconscious redirection. Make a killer forget he pulled the trigger. Make a senator vote against her own ethics."

Elena's stomach twisted. "And I was going to be your lab rat."

"You still are."

He raised a remote.

Damien tackled her just as a pulse echoed from the ceiling. A sonic burst.

Her vision flashed red.

And then—darkness.

Elena's Mind — Induced Memory Loop

She was ten years old again.

Snow fell outside the orphanage.

Her brother, laughing, holding out a red locket.

But this time, when she took it, it melted in her hand.

And Sandor stood in the doorway.

"You were mine before you knew it," he whispered.

Her scream shattered the illusion.

Reality — 12 Minutes Later

She woke gasping.

Damien's voice broke through the fog.

"Elena. Stay with me."

She blinked. Blood on his shirt. Smoke in the air.

The two guards were dead.

Sandor was gone.

Damien helped her sit up.

"He triggered a partial Crimson burst," Damien said. "But your neural block held. Your brother must've injected a counter-sequence before… before he—"

Elena nodded.

There was no time for grief.

Only action.

The Final Upload

They reached Cricket through a scrambled uplink.

"Status?" Elena asked.

"Two minutes. They've shut down five clouds. I rerouted to darknet vaults, but someone's closing in. You need to physically destroy the origin server. Now."

She looked at the console behind her.

One push of the purge button would wipe the foundation.

No more Crimson.

But no more proof, either.

"If we upload and wipe," Damien said, "we leave the world vulnerable. But if we don't, they'll rebuild."

She hesitated.

Then made a choice.

She split the drive.

Half uploaded.

Half purged.

Let the world know enough.

But keep the rest out of enemy hands.

Sandor's Broadcast

The next day, across every global newsfeed, Sandor appeared—smiling.

He claimed Crimson was a hoax. A lie spread by cyberterrorists. That rogue agents had faked intel to start a new war.

Elena watched from a safehouse in Warsaw.

"He's already rewriting the narrative," Damien said.

"I expected that."

She turned off the screen.

"We're not done."

One Week Later — Remote Airfield

Cricket handed Elena a sealed case.

"Everything you didn't upload. The tech. The names. The raw code. You sure you want to hold onto this?"

She nodded.

"We may need it."

Damien loaded the final supplies onto a small cargo plane.

They had no home.

But they had each other.

And a war still worth fighting.

As the engines roared to life, Elena glanced down at the locket around her neck.

Her brother's.

Inside, she'd placed a single line of code.

A backup. A warning.

And maybe… a future.