Adanna didn't sleep.
Instead, she dug.
Deep into old drives. Hidden caches. Decades-old logs Cade had left behind — fragments of data she'd copied before erasing his core.
What she found made her stomach twist.
The Shadow Protocol.
A backup system.
Offline. Hidden.
Programmed to activate only when Spindle's network detected a terminal breach.
Cade was never the end.
He was the firewall.
There was something beyond him.
Something worse.
She stared at the phrase looping on a decrypted command line:
Shadow Protocol Active.
Asset Incomplete.
Phase Two Initiated.
Asset.
That word again.
She wasn't a person to them. Just a result.
Her hands shook as she printed out the decrypted documents. Names. Coordinates. Mentions of a lab buried in an Arctic military base long since decommissioned.
But the system had pinged active again just two days ago.
Someone was there.
Shadow Protocol was real.
And it was awake.
Her burner buzzed.
A message.
Just one line:
Don't go to the base. It's not what you think.
No number. No ID. Just… warning.
But she was tired of being warned.
Tired of being hunted.
She called Malcolm.
"I need an extraction," she said.
"Where?"
"The Arctic. I have to finish this."
"You're serious?"
"Yes."
There was a pause.
"I'll bring coffee," he said, voice dry.
She smiled faintly. "Bring a lot."
They met at a private hangar two hours before dawn.
Silas was there too, holding a tablet and a tired look in his eyes.
"This base… it's not just where the backups are. It's where they perfected the project. Before you."
Adanna blinked. "There were others?"
Silas nodded slowly. "There were always others. You just… outlived them."
The jet sliced through clouds like a blade.
Inside, Adanna watched the storm build ahead.
Snow. Lightning. A natural fortress.
Malcolm sat across from her.
"You don't have to do this," he said.
"I do."
"Why?"
She looked him straight in the eye.
"Because the only way to stop being their asset… is to destroy the thing that keeps rewriting me."
Hours later, the base rose from the ice like a tomb.
Dark. Cold. Silent.
Adanna stepped out into the snow, her boots crunching into frost that hadn't been touched in years.
And then —
A light blinked.
Motion sensors.
The system was awake.
And so was whatever waited inside.