PROLOGUE--->
That morning, Caleb Vaughn received a call from his superior.
He had just poured coffee into his old metal mug when his phone buzzed on the counter. The screen lit up with a name he hadn't seen in years:
"D. Sandwell – DIRECTOR"
Caleb stared at the name for a moment, his brow tightening slightly. He wasn't a man easily rattled, but a direct call from the CIA's Special Division Director this early in the morning? That wasn't casual.
He answered.
"This is Vaughn," his voice low and steady, cold as the fog outside his cabin in rural Virginia.
"Vaughn, it's Sandwell. We've got an incident."
Caleb took a pause, lifted his mug, and took a long sip before replying.
"Where?"
"Langley. Headquarters. But it involves people from your old unit. We need you back."
Caleb glanced up at the wooden beams of his ceiling. He hadn't heard those words in years. He wasn't just retired—he'd vanished from the radar by choice.
"I'm out, Dan."
"Not from this."
A beat passed. Sandwell's voice dropped, weighted with something more than urgency—fear.
"An agent shot the Asia-Pacific Division Chief. Right in the briefing room. Then turned the gun on himself. No signs of trauma, no psych red flags. But… right before he pulled the trigger, he said your name."
Caleb froze mid-sip.
"My name?"
"And one more thing. We dug into his psyche logs and memory patterns. There's a signature—"
Another pause. Not hesitation. Dread.
"A signature of what?"
"Of Palimpsest, Caleb. We thought that program was shut down a decade ago. But someone's reactivating it. And you may be the only one left who can tell real memory from the planted ones."
Caleb stared at his reflection in the window. A 38-year-old man with lines too deep for his age, eyes too sharp for someone who'd quit the field. A man built from missions no one dared to record.
"Send me the coordinates," he muttered. "I'm coming."
And just before he hung up, a flicker of something cold brushed the back of his mind—a voice he didn't recognize, soft and childlike, speaking in a language he didn't remember knowing.
"You've already forgotten us."
Elsewhere, Jesse Lorne hadn't slept all night.
He sat hunched over a cluttered workstation inside a private CIA sub-lab, lit only by the pale glow of six monitors. Data streamed in endless columns across the screens—numbers, encryption keys, metadata trails. To most, they were incomprehensible. To Jesse, they spoke.
He was twirling a grape lollipop between his fingers, his trademark when deep in thought.
Suddenly, a ping lit up on the far-left monitor. An old server log flashed once. Jesse froze.
> PROTOCOL PAL.192_RESTORE(07:14:03)
No sender. No data packet. Just a call—like a ghost knocking once on a locked door before vanishing.
He stared at it for a beat too long. Then the lollipop fell from his mouth.
He reached for his coat.
Something from the past had just awakened.
At the same time, Mina Ashford was sitting across from a haunted man.
She was in a deep-level CIA psych-interrogation room, where things weren't screamed—they were whispered, drawn out like poison through calm.
The man in front of her—Agent Cole Rivers—had gone missing three days earlier and reappeared last night on the Serbian border, hands bloodied, eyes blank. There was no official mission assigned. No record. And yet… something was terribly wrong.
Mina kept her voice steady, gentle.
"What's the last thing you remember, Cole?"
"I was... having lunch with my daughter. Georgetown. Then I blinked and… I was in Kabul. Holding a gun. Standing over a body."
Mina's hand hovered over her tablet. She tapped once. A faded emblem appeared on the screen—an old, defunct CIA logo, black-edged, worn.
She turned it to him.
"Do you recognize this?"
His face went pale, then terrified. His voice came in a broken whisper:
"Palimpsest. It's real..."
Meanwhile, at a disguised DARPA lab outside D.C., Ayla Rivera was playing with a mechanical raven.
Its wings were made of flexible carbon fiber, the feathers lined with neural scanning mesh. It wasn't just a drone—it was a flying brain scanner.
Ayla guided the bird gently onto her arm when her workstation lit up with a red-level notification:
Access Request: Caleb Vaughn / Priority Black.
Her brow furrowed.
"He's... not supposed to exist in the system anymore," she murmured.
She checked the metadata.
The access was genuine. The override key used wasn't just high clearance—it was something worse.
A Palimpsest Keyholder.
Her chest tightened. The raven on her wrist tilted its head... then made a low sound—something like laughter.
But Ayla never programmed it to laugh.
Back to Caleb Vaughn…
He stepped out of the black SUV into the abandoned CIA facility known only to a few. The building loomed, silent and forgotten. Moss climbed up old stone walls. Fog crept across the ground like a living thing.
Caleb approached the reinforced steel doors.
Inside, someone was waiting.
A man in a long coat, half his face obscured in shadow.
"Been a while, Vaughn."
Caleb tensed.
"You're supposed to be dead."
The figure smirked.
"So are you. But here we are."
Something in Caleb's head stirred—an old, fragmented memory trying to claw its way back. It felt too sharp, too vivid. Too unnatural.
"We were never meant to leave the project," the man continued.
"You, me... and those you think you can protect. They're already compromised."
Caleb slowly raised his weapon, unsure of his hand.
And then—he heard it.
A woman's voice, clear in his mind, though no one was speaking aloud.
"If you're remembering this… it's already too late."
Meanwhile, Tyler Reeve was having lunch alone.
He sat on the rooftop of a crumbling apartment building in Arlington, shoes off, headphones resting around his neck, and a steaming bowl of instant noodles with a soft-boiled egg perched on top. No fancy restaurant. No field op staging area. Just an old rooftop, the lazy summer wind, and '90s rock trickling from a pocket speaker.
"The best new-generation agent," they called him once. But after three chaotic missions, two deep cover assignments where he nearly forgot his own real name, and one Berlin incident that "no one talks about," the nickname changed.
"Walking Problem."
He chuckled to himself, scooping up noodles, then nodded at the scrappy street cat perched across from him.
"You again, Marlowe. Want some egg?"
The cat flicked its tail, rude as always. Tyler tossed a bit of yolk toward it, and Marlowe pounced.
His phone buzzed. Sharp and no-nonsense.
"F. Hensley – CHIEF OPS" blinked across the screen.
Tyler answered with a lazy drawl.
"Yeah?"
"Tyler Reeve. Tomorrow. 7 a.m. Main operations room. We need to talk."
The voice was cold, clipped. Not up for banter.
"What now?" Tyler sighed.
"You breached three security protocols, accessed level-6 classified files, and tampered with an agent's identity logs in Turkey."
He smirked.
"Those files were boring. I just… edited the timeline. Cleaned it up. Made more sense."
"This isn't a screenplay, Reeve. And you are not the CIA's editor-in-chief."
"You do know I was right about the target, right? If I hadn't stepped in, that whole op would've gone boom—literally."
A long pause.
Then Hensley's voice dropped colder.
"Tomorrow. Seven. Alone. And leave the damn cat at home."
Call ended.
Tyler rolled his eyes. He looked up at the sky, then at Marlowe, now licking the egg yolk off his paw like a king.
"Guess I'm getting fired tomorrow, buddy. Or promoted. Kinda hard to tell."
He leaned back against the warm concrete, took one last bite of his noodles, and muttered to himself with a grin:
"If they're this mad… I must be getting close to something big."