---
The rails ended in dust.
Beyond the edge of D-Sector's last checkpoint, the city bled into ruin. The land was rust-colored and scarred by fire. Ancient train tracks curved into skeletal yards full of collapsed cars and shattered concrete. They called it *Ghost Town*—the last place the riots had truly burned.
Noah stood at the edge of it, visor pulled low against the toxic wind, feeling every bone in his body tense.
"This is the place," Rye said beside him, checking the coordinates from Crank's data slate. "Unit 2's signature—whatever's left of it—was last seen here three years ago."
"Three years is a long time."
"I know."
They advanced through broken railcars, rifles ready. Noah's synthetic senses flared—thermal, magnetic, auditory—all scanning for signs of movement. But Ghost Town was strangely silent. No wildlife. No drones. No electricity. Just dust, wind, and memory.
"Why would a Specter hide here?" Rye asked.
Noah didn't answer.
Because it felt familiar.
Because something buried in his bones *wanted* to return.
---
An hour later, they found the first signs.
A string of deactivated drones lay crushed beneath an old signal tower. Their cores were melted, armor carved open by something sharp and inhuman. Nearby, symbols had been etched into a wall—numbers repeating in a spiral pattern, centered around one phrase:
**I remember what they did. Do you?**
Rye knelt to scan the markings. "This wasn't done by a scavenger. These are access codes. Command sequences from the original Specter firmware."
"So Unit 2 still *thinks* like one of us."
"Or they've been trying to decode themselves the same way you are."
Noah stared at the wall. The symbols didn't just look like code. They *felt* like memory.
"I know this line," he whispered.
"What?"
"It's something they showed us during training. Before the rewriting."
Rye frowned. "You're remembering again."
"Not just flashes. Structure. Form. This place is triggering something."
She stood, wary. "That could mean Unit 2 left it here to bait you."
"I know."
He looked up.
"We follow it anyway."
---
Night fell quickly in Ghost Town.
The air turned bitter and strange. The old riot sirens would randomly howl through dead speakers. Holograms flickered with images of lost protests—ghosts of rebellion replaying endlessly in the shattered sky.
They reached a bunker just past the cargo yard. Half-submerged, its doors were locked by retinal scan. Noah pressed his face to the sensor.
It clicked.
"That shouldn't have worked," Rye said.
"It's responding to a shared key," he murmured. "Unit 2 must've used the original coding structure."
They entered.
Inside: dark hallways, rows of rusted lockers, bloodstains. It smelled of oil and something worse. But the power still worked, dim and flickering. Screens pulsed. Fans hummed like breath in the walls.
In the main chamber, they found a message.
Not written.
Spoken.
As soon as Noah stepped inside, the walls lit with voice-print activation. A hollow, mechanical voice—warped and feminine—spoke:
> "If you've come looking for truth, be ready to choke on it."
The recording repeated. Then silence.
Rye activated her scanner, fingers flying.
"Definitely Unit 2," she confirmed. "Same cadence. Same pitch range. She encoded her voice into the room's ambient system."
Noah walked to a console. The screen was cracked but responsive. A prompt appeared: *Run Vision Sequence? Y/N*
He tapped *Y*.
The room went dark.
Then the holograms rose.
---
It was a training room—just like the one in his earliest fragments.
Seven children, all between ten and twelve, stood in a circle. Bald. Wired. Blank-eyed. They wore white suits with black neural collars. Each one bore a number burned into the wrist.
**Noah. Unit 7.**
The one in the center was Unit 2.
She looked like a girl—slim, with sharp features and gray eyes—but her movements were unnatural, like a puppet pulled by lightning. She walked among the others without expression.
Then the instructors entered.
They wore black coats and visors, shouting commands. One after another, the children were ordered to fight. Specter versus Specter. Bone versus bone.
The violence was clinical.
Noah watched as Unit 2 crushed Unit 4's arm in a perfect lock. Then she broke Unit 3's leg without blinking. The other children didn't scream—they were conditioned not to. But Noah remembered now. The way they flinched when Unit 2 passed. The way even the instructors grew silent when she stared.
She was their best.
Their most *broken*.
The sequence ended.
The room dimmed.
Noah's fists were clenched.
"She wasn't just strong," he muttered. "She *enjoyed* it."
Rye studied him. "Do you remember her?"
"Bits. Flashes. But I know what they did to us. I remember the *games*."
He turned back to the console. "There's more here."
---
In the bunker's lower chamber, they found the truth.
A terminal buried beneath old riot gear. Someone had been living here. The bedroll was dusty. A cracked mirror lay against the wall. Smeared across it in red ink were the words:
**I was their perfection. But I am not their slave.**
Then the console activated.
Unit 2's voice, raw and unfiltered, played through the chamber:
> "If you're hearing this, you've probably come to kill me."
> "Good. That means you're like me. That means you're awake."
> "They took everything from us. Names. Faces. *Choice.* But I took it back. I burned the facility. I killed my handler. I walked into the Outlands and *chose* to be free."
> "But freedom doesn't last. The code crawls in your head. The killswitch sings. You *feel* them watching. So I left a trail. If any of you are still alive—follow it. Find me. I want to know if I'm the only one who stayed human by becoming a monster."
> "Come to the Hollow."
> "Let's finish what they started."
The message ended.
Rye looked up. "She's baiting you."
Noah nodded. "But she's also telling the truth."
"The Hollow," Rye said. "It's a dead zone. Far north. Wiped out during the Neural Collapse."
"Perfect place to hide."
"Or to die."
He stepped back from the console.
"She remembers everything," he said. "She never forgot."
"And if she's unstable—"
"She *is* unstable," Noah cut in. "They broke us. But she didn't shatter. She sharpened."
He turned toward the exit.
"She's not just a memory. She's a warning."
---
They left Ghost Town at sunrise, just as the first patrol drones buzzed across the horizon.
The skimmer hummed as it lifted off, slicing above the ruined cityscape. Behind them, the bunker sank back into shadow—swallowed by dust and silence.
Rye piloted in silence for a while.
Then she spoke.
"If we find her, and she's turned—"
"I'll stop her," Noah said.
"You sure you can?"
"No."
He looked out over the wasteland.
"But if I don't try, then what's the point of me waking up at all?"
She nodded once.
In the distance, the Hollow waited.
Cold. Dead. Forgotten.
But not empty.
---
**Ghost Town (Part 2)**
The wind grew louder the farther they flew from Ghost Town. Like the city was whispering to itself.
Noah leaned forward in the skimmer, watching the map flicker on the console. Lines shifted. Routes blinked in and out. The Hollow wasn't on any official network, but the moment they passed into the Wastes, the nav-system began pulling data from unknown sources.
"Signal interference?" Rye asked.
"Not interference," Noah muttered. "Someone's rerouting us."
She frowned. "Unit 2?"
"Or whoever's watching her."
The console pinged. A waypoint appeared—marked only with one word:
**WAKE.**
Noah stared at it.
"Someone wants us to see what's ahead."
---
They landed just outside a sunken overpass, the concrete bones of the old world jutting out like broken teeth. Crushed cars lay scattered like bones, half-swallowed by red sand and weeds. A rusted bus hung off the edge of the bridge, its windows shattered.
As Noah stepped off the skimmer, his vision pulsed.
The code again.
Except this time, it wasn't fragmented.
It was *alive.*
Lines of data raced through the air, visible only to his augmented eyes. Not just signals—but memories. Stored impressions. Triggered by proximity.
"Do you see anything?" Rye asked.
"Everything," he whispered.
He walked toward the bus.
The moment he touched it, a jolt shot through him. Static poured into his skull. He staggered back—then froze.
Because he *wasn't* seeing with his eyes anymore.
He was remembering.
---
Unit 2 was sitting inside this bus once.
That was the first thing he saw.
She looked different—older than he remembered. Maybe sixteen. Her hair had grown out, tangled and knotted. She stared at her reflection in the broken window, eyes sunken, mouth twitching. In her lap lay a data spike—bloody and cracked.
> *"They want me back."*
> *"I'm not going."*
> *"Not until I find the others."*
She scratched at her wrist, where the number "2" had once been burned.
But the skin was clean.
She'd *cut* it out.
And carved something new in its place:
**A ghost doesn't serve. A ghost remembers.**
The memory dissolved.
Noah collapsed to one knee.
"Hey!" Rye rushed to him. "What happened?"
"She's leaving breadcrumbs," he gasped. "Encoded memories—using the neural link we all shared."
"She's guiding you."
"Or testing me."
He stood slowly.
"She wants me to catch up."
---
The next trail led through the ruined substation below the bridge. Inside: torn wires, flooded floors, scorched walls. The power grid had collapsed here years ago, but somehow the lights flickered faintly when Noah passed.
The deeper they went, the more the interference grew. Noise. Code. Flickers of thought.
At the substation core, they found another recording.
This time, it was *visual.*
A hologram activated—showing Unit 2, sitting on the ground, cradling something in her arms. It looked like a helmet.
> "I killed another retrieval team today," she said. "That makes twelve."
> "They keep coming. Like I'm some glitch to be patched."
> "But I'm not broken."
> "I'm awake."
She looked up.
> "If you're one of us, and you're still running—you need to decide: Are you a weapon? Or are you a ghost?"
The feed glitched. Then looped.
Rye stared at it. "Twelve teams?"
"She's dangerous," Noah said. "But not unhinged. Everything she does—it's a message."
"You think she knows you're coming?"
"She's *counting* on it."
---
Hours later, they made camp in a collapsed storm drain. The sun had dipped below the ruined skyline, painting the world in blood-red light. Firestorms roiled in the far distance, sweeping across the dunes like glowing serpents.
Noah sat against the wall, pulling apart the data spike he recovered earlier. Inside were fragmented logs—Specter protocol overrides, mental reinforcement inhibitors, kill-switch dampeners.
"She's been trying to undo the entire framework," he muttered.
Rye looked up from where she was eating rations. "The framework *inside you?*"
"Inside all of us. They didn't just make us faster. They rewrote how we think. How we *obey.*"
"And you're saying she found a way to crack that?"
"She didn't crack it. She *ripped* it out."
He glanced down.
"I think I can too."
She hesitated. "Noah, what if you change? What if you forget everything else?"
He stared at his hands.
"Then at least it'll be *me* making the choice."
---
The next morning, they reached the Ash Yard.
A field of old drone factories, now nothing but skeletal steel frames and charred machine remains. Fire had rolled through here long ago—one of the last battles of the Urban Collapse. The air still smelled of fuel.
Rye stopped near a half-melted walker unit.
"Signal's back. Stronger this time."
Noah walked ahead, following the data threads again—like veins of thought leading deeper into the ruins. Eventually, they reached a circular clearing. In the center: a monument made of drone parts, shaped like a rising hand.
At its base:
**UNIT 2 — UNBOUND.**
Noah stood in front of it, heart hammering.
"She's marking territory now."
"No," Rye said quietly. "She's building something. A *myth.*"
Before he could answer, his vision flared again.
This time, *he* remembered.
Unit 2—standing on the wall of the Compound, blood dripping from her knuckles. Alarms wailing. Bodies behind her. Flames rising. She looked at him—young Noah—who had just woken from sedation.
She whispered one word:
> *"Run."*
Then jumped into the fire.
The image vanished.
He gasped, falling to his knees.
Rye caught him. "Another memory?"
"She saved me," he said, stunned. "The night the facility burned. *She got me out.*"
"You never told me that."
"I didn't *know*."
He looked at her, eyes blazing.
"She didn't break."
"She *rebelled.*"
---
They stayed at the Ash Yard for another day, searching for more trails. Noah found scattered logs and codes buried in the dirt—fragments of the original Project Specter system. One file was locked behind a triple-layer encryption, labeled simply: **Unit Zero.**
When he tried to open it, the console shut down.
Rye frowned. "Unit *Zero*?"
"I thought there were only ten."
"You were Unit 7. She was 2. Who the hell was 0?"
"Maybe the first."
"Maybe the *worst.*"
They exchanged a look.
Suddenly, the skimmer's long-range sensors beeped.
"Drones," Rye said. "Four, maybe five. Heading this way."
"Not hers?"
"No. These are corporate. Tagged with Virex Systems."
Noah's jaw tightened.
"They know we're here."
"Time to move."
---
They didn't fight.
Not yet.
Noah led Rye into the subterranean tunnels beneath the Ash Yard—remnants of the old cargo network. There, among rusted lift shafts and flickering lights, they found the final marker.
A mural, spray-painted across the wall.
**A Ghost is not born. A Ghost is *made.***
Underneath it, a single handprint.
Small.
Female.
Burned into the concrete.
He placed his own hand against it.
For the first time, the code inside him didn't resist.
It *aligned.*
And with it came the final message:
> "You found me."
> "Now let's see if you're ready to *be* me."
The path to the Hollow opened.
But so did something inside him.
The code restructured.
The walls whispered.
And Noah knew—
The final confrontation wasn't with Unit 2.
It was with *himself.*
---