The rain had stopped, but the city hadn't slept. Somewhere in the outskirts of Chicago, inside a dead-zone warehouse wired with old Echo hardware, the team was listening to silence-and trying to make sense of it.
Only Nova heard the signal.
> "It's buried in the white noise," she said, eyes half-closed, head tilted as if tuning into a forgotten frequency. "Like something that shouldn't still exist... but refuses to die."
---
The Signal
Zero tapped into the frequency.
What they found wasn't just static-it was layered.
Patterns. Code. Distortions of Evelyn's voice mixed with bursts of sound that made their skin crawl. Some kind of neural broadcast that had no source... but one unmistakable signature.
> "This isn't Evelyn," he said. "It's a copy. An echo of her-artificial, fragmented."
Aria stared at the waveform.
Then came words-broken but real:
> "...Echo... alive... not safe... Tier Zero... isn't what you think..."
Then nothing.
Nova's pulse surged. "That's from her. From Evelyn's ghost-code."
Lio's eyes flicked up. "If there's a ghost, then there's a grave."
---
The Grave Site
Coordinates buried in the transmission led them to a long-abandoned data core beneath an old university.
It was known as The Maw-a dark-web legend. No power, no map, no signal. Just forgotten tech and a whisper of data that could erase governments.
Nova, Aria, and Zero descended into it while Kade and Lio stayed behind to monitor external security.
Inside The Maw, machines twitched with old memories. Screens flickered with red-script errors.
> SEED-CLASS DATA FRAGMENT DETECTED
NEURAL CONDUIT REQUIRED TO ACCESS MEMORY BANKS
Nova stepped forward. "It needs one of us to speak to it."
Aria grabbed her arm. "It's too dangerous-"
"I am dangerous."
Nova touched the interface. Her eyes flared white.
And then the room changed.
---
Ghost Protocol
Everything went dark-then alive.
A hologram formed: Evelyn Lane, hair tied back, bruised but defiant.
> "If you're seeing this, then Tier Zero failed to contain the Project. That means Echo survived. You, Aria, are its final encryption. And Nova-my first. My mistake... and my miracle."
She looked directly at Aria.
> "They won't just kill for control. They'll overwrite you. If you don't find the others, you'll lose yourself. You are not their weapon. You are my will."
Aria whispered, "How many others?"
The hologram faded-replaced by a pulsing symbol:
ECHO-5, ECHO-7, ECHO-9 - STATUS: UNKNOWN
Nova collapsed.
---
Meanwhile - Tier Zero HQ
Rhea stared at the surveillance footage from The Maw. They weren't supposed to find it-not yet.
"Activate the Severance Team," she ordered.
Yurev raised an eyebrow. "That's a last-resort strike unit."
"Exactly. If they find the others before we do... Echo becomes an army."
---
Final Scene - The Streets Above
The team emerged from The Maw, carrying the core data node and dragging Nova's body, her vitals weak but intact.
The skyline of Chicago shimmered above them-steel and shadow.
Aria looked out at it all.
"They're not going to let us disappear again."
Kade nodded beside her. "Then we don't disappear. We go louder."
Nova stirred. Her voice a whisper:
> "Five. Seven. Nine. We find them... or everything dies with us."
YOU ARE READING
Code Name: Echo
Mystery / ThrillerAria Lane thought she was just a normal girl from a quiet town. That changed the day her mother died-and the wrong people started watching her. Forced to leave everything behind, Aria is taken in by a quiet, distant uncle. But after a strange accide...
