Chapter 25 — Ghosts in the Code
I didn't sleep much that night. The hum of the ship was a constant reminder that we were moving, always moving, always running from something. The stars blurred past the viewport like smudged memories, and I sat there for hours, trying to pull meaning from their silence.
Mira had fallen asleep in the co-pilot's chair, her head tilted toward her shoulder, strands of hair catching soft blue light from the navigation screen. There was peace in her posture, a calm I hadn't known in years. I envied her.
But peace, for someone like me, never lasted long.
The console flickered. Just once. Barely noticeable. But I noticed. I always did.
I tapped into the diagnostics manually. It wasn't a fault in the system. It was a message. A whisper hidden in the code—a buried signal like the ones I'd seen before when the Empire tried to track defectors.
This one wasn't from them.
It was something older. Something I had felt once in my bones, in the metal of my memories. Whatever it was, it had been waiting. For me.
I didn't wake Mira. I didn't want her to worry. Instead, I walked the narrow hall toward the engine bay, where the signal seemed to be pulsing from. Every step I took felt heavier. I could feel a cold tension settling in my chest like someone had pulled a thread that ran straight through my heart.
When I reached the main terminal, the monitor blinked once, then filled with lines of unfamiliar code. Except—it wasn't unfamiliar. I had seen it before. Back when I was still under the Empire's command. It was from a prototype I had helped test—one they never let us talk about. One they claimed was "shut down."
But nothing stays dead in deep space.
A voice crackled softly through the intercom, no louder than a breath.
"Kael Riven."
My name. Not my code, not my rank—my name. Spoken like a memory that had waited too long in the dark.
I stiffened. My hands hovered over the console. "Who are you?"
No answer.
Just the quiet, pulsing rhythm of the ship's power cycle.
I leaned in closer. "What do you want from me?"
The screen shifted. Images this time. Flashes of places I'd been—training camps, battlefields, interrogation rooms. Faces I hadn't thought of in years. Then a final image: me. Not as I was now, but as I had been. Cold. Expressionless. A soldier.
"You are incomplete," the voice said, distant and strange. "You were meant for more."
"Meant for what?"
"Control."
I stepped back. The word hit something deep inside me. I'd always known there was more to my defection than guilt or trauma. I had left because something inside me felt broken—like my thoughts weren't always mine.
Now I knew why.
The experiments. The implants. The buried programs. I had been made into a weapon. Not trained. Engineered. But somewhere along the way, I had broken free. Maybe Mira had helped me see myself. Or maybe I had just gotten tired of being a machine in a human shell.
"I'm not yours," I whispered to the screen. "Not anymore."
The voice didn't argue. It didn't threaten. It only said one thing:
"Then prove it."
And the screen went black.
A low alarm buzzed softly through the hallway. Just once. A new destination had been set. Coordinates I didn't recognize.
"Kael?" Mira's voice cut through the tension. She stood in the doorway, rubbing sleep from her eyes. "What's going on?"
I looked at her, then back at the screen. "We're being pulled toward something. Something old."
She walked closer, her eyes narrowing as she scanned the data. "This isn't just random. Someone—or something—knows who you are."
I nodded. "And they're calling me back."
"To what?"
I hesitated. "To finish what they started."
She didn't ask me to turn back. She didn't panic. She just placed a hand gently on my arm and said, "Then I'm coming with you."