The Red File Book Two : Code Obsidian

Into Azure

They moved under the snow.

The tunnel was barely wide enough to crawl. Ice cracked under every breath. Jace led with a heat scanner, Rey behind him with the map. Emma came third, followed by Noah and two more survivors.

No one spoke.

It took four hours to reach the hatch. Steel. Frozen. Half-buried in permafrost. Rey cut through the lock. The hatch opened with a hiss that felt louder than a scream.

Inside: nothing.

No alarms. No lights.

Only a long hallway, lined with white walls and numbered doors.

Azure.

Forty Minutes Later
They'd taken three guards already. Crimson mercs, faces hidden, blood pooling under silent bodies. Emma's team moved like shadows, every step measured, every kill clean.

But something was wrong.

Jace whispered into her ear. "No one's patrolling below Level 3. Either they're overconfident—or they saw what's down there and noped out."

Noah stopped at one of the doors. It had no number. Just a keycard lock with a blinking red light.

He pressed his palm to it.

It turned green.

They all stared.

"Why did that work?" Emma asked.

Noah's face had gone pale. "I don't know."

The door opened.

Inside the Room

The walls were glass.

Behind each panel: a child. Or what used to be a child.

Some were floating in tanks. Others strapped to cold metal tables, limbs half-formed, eyes moving independently. One was breathing but had no mouth. Another blinked constantly but didn't seem to see.

Emma took a step back. "Oh my god."

A monitor on the wall buzzed to life. Footage. Logs. Medical experiments. Failures. Test numbers. Not names.

Every kid here had been copied again and again. Sometimes twenty, thirty times.

Trying to get it right.

Trying to make them perfect.

Noah stared at the screen, jaw clenched. A number next to a video feed caught his eye:

0037-N

He whispered, "That's me."

Back in the Hall

They moved faster now. Fury sharpened them. Crimson guards fell harder. This wasn't just infiltration anymore—it was personal. Emma wasn't just shutting this place down. She was burning it out of existence.

In the main chamber, they found the control center.

And the truth.

There were backups of every kid—neural scans, DNA, memory blueprints. Stored on drives the size of their fists. Thousands of them. And not all were dead. Some were pre-programmed—meant to replace existing children in the outside world.

Emma turned to Jace. "They weren't just copying the dead. They were swapping the living."

He nodded grimly. "Crimson's trying to finish what the Society started. Total control. Replace the unpredictable with obedient copies."

Emma didn't hesitate.

She handed Noah a charge. "Light it."

Noah took one last look at the files, the faces, the tubes.

Then he lit the fuse.