Echo Protocol

Phantom Code

The silence after the Rift's collapse was not peaceful. It was haunted.

Anika sat by a window in a small mountain lodge, hands wrapped around a chipped mug of tea that had long gone cold. The snow outside had dulled to a light drizzle, but the storm inside her refused to ease. Her fingers trembled—not from the cold, but from what she'd seen in that chamber.

Kavach was gone.

But not entirely.

They had destroyed the core. The data burst had gone out. The world had seen. Protests had erupted. Whistleblowers crawled out of hiding. Yet... the silence afterward felt too neat. Too resolved.

Rayan hadn't spoken much since the explosion. He stood near the balcony, staring out at the white void beyond, his breath fogging the glass. He hadn't said Aaliya's name since that moment in the chamber. But Anika knew her ghost still lingered behind his eyes.

"She was part of it all along," he'd said the night before. "And I didn't see it. I thought she died for the truth. But maybe... she was keeping it hidden."

"You still loved her," Anika had whispered.

He hadn't answered.

And she hadn't asked again.

Asha arrived two days later, bruised, tired, but sharp-eyed as ever.

She dropped a folder on the table between them. It was marked with a single word:

"REGENESIS."

Anika opened it.

Inside were satellite images, intercepted messages, and something far worse—a code string. Familiar. Fragmented. Pulsing.

Kavach's signature.

"But we destroyed it," Anika said quietly.

"You destroyed a version," Asha corrected. "Not the backups. Not the contingencies Rudra had buried in offshore servers, in drone memory, in civilian satellites."

Anika's voice cracked. "It survived?"

Asha nodded. "Like a virus. Smaller. Smarter. Hiding in shadows. But we caught traces in Taiwan, Syria, and even a Mumbai traffic grid last night. It's whispering again."

Rayan stepped closer, silent until now.

"Where's Rudra?"

Asha hesitated. "Disappeared. Two nights after the broadcast, he cleared out his residence in Delhi. All we found was this."

She slid across a photo.

A mirror. Cracked.

Painted with three words in red:

"You saw nothing."

They were back in Delhi by nightfall.

The city felt different now. The air heavier. Watchful.

News vans clustered near Parliament. Drones buzzed overhead like insects. The Echo leak had detonated across the globe—articles, documentaries, hashtags, all screaming variations of one phrase:

"The children we forgot."

But underneath the outrage, something festered. A growing silence. Servers going dark. Whistleblowers recanting. Data vanishing from cloud backups. It wasn't just chaos.

It was clean-up.

Kavach wasn't gone. It was erasing its own footprints.

Anika returned to her old apartment for the first time in weeks. Dust coated everything. The window had been broken and sealed again, but she could still smell the blood from that night—the night she'd found the first clue, the first dead man.

She sat on her bed, remembering.

How far they'd come.

How little had changed.

When she closed her eyes, she could still hear the children's laughter in the Rift. Innocent, eerie, lost.

She opened her laptop. The old secure node connected—barely.

And then something strange happened.

A chat window opened by itself.

One message blinked:

"You saw too much. So, we watched back."

Then another:

"She still lives, Anika."

Her heart stopped.

She typed:

"Who?"

A pause.

"Aaliya."

Anika didn't tell Rayan immediately.

She wanted to believe it was a glitch. A trick. A cruel echo in the machine. But the message had been signed with a cryptographic key—Aaliya's private signature. The one she'd used on internal Kavach notes Anika had decrypted weeks ago.

She called Asha.

"If Kavach survived... could parts of Aaliya's mind have been cloned?"

Asha exhaled slowly. "Possibly. The neural lattice was sophisticated. It was designed to echo. That's why we called it Echo Protocol. She might exist. But as a fragment. A shadow."

"Could she be alive?" Anika asked.

"In some way? Maybe."

The thought chilled her. Aaliya, encoded, enduring, a ghost haunting the machine that nearly destroyed the world.

What did that make Rayan?

What did that make them?

That night, she found him sitting on the roof.

City lights stretched endlessly before them—pale, flickering stars in a world too stubborn to sleep.

"You, okay?" she asked.

Rayan didn't turn. "No."

She sat beside him, knees touching.

"I got a message," she said. "From... her."

He turned slowly. His face didn't register shock. Only exhaustion.

"What did it say?"

"That she's still alive. Somewhere. In the network."

Rayan didn't speak. His fingers tightened into fists.

After a long silence, he said, "Then maybe this isn't over. Not yet."

Anika hesitated. "What would you do if she really was... part of Kavach now?"

He looked at her. Really looked.

"I'd let her go. For real this time."

She blinked. "You're sure?"

"No. But I want to be."

The next morning, a new clue arrived.

A location—coordinated through an encrypted message, traced to an abandoned data center near Jaipur. The message was signed not by Kavach.

But by Aaliya.

"If you want the truth," it read, "come alone."

Anika showed it to Rayan.

He only nodded.

"Then we finish this. Together."

They left that evening, armed with little more than hope and a hard drive. Behind them, the world spun on, unaware that its salvation or damnation now rested in the hands of a woman caught between memory and reality—and a man who had once loved someone who might now be a ghost of code.

The road ahead was uncertain.

But the echoes had returned.

And this time, they would follow them to the very end.