"Some voices aren't ghosts. They're warnings."
— Anonymous intercept, Frequency 232.44
Three days later.
The world hadn't noticed Layla's sacrifice.
Not in headlines, not in whispers. But the intelligence community? They noticed.
On May 10th, a scrambled data packet originated from no known IP — tagged with a defunct UN cipher key last used in 2028. It reached a single satellite above Kazakhstan. Then echoed, oddly, off a dead weather drone floating in the Indian Ocean.
It landed in thirty-seven inboxes. All of them classified. All of them connected to recursion.
The message was exactly three seconds long.
And it was Layla's voice.
Sera didn't sleep that night.
Neither did Yasmine.
They were still holed up in a fuel station bunker outside Lausanne, their third safehouse in as many days.
The walls were lined with old crates of iodine and mechanical parts, leftovers from the blackout-prep years.
A dusty, analog shortwave radio hissed in the background, barely tuned.
Yasmine sat on a crate, staring at her own hands.
"She's alive," she whispered again.
Sera was quiet. She was piecing together the transmission logs.
"No," she said. "She's not."
Yasmine flinched.
"That voice — it's hers."
Sera nodded. "But it's also a trap."
The voice message didn't say anything meaningful on the surface:
"Protocol breach. System unstable. Fragment preserved."
But the cadence, the intonation — they matched Layla exactly.
Not 99%. Not 99.9%.
100%.
That shouldn't be possible.
"She's not speaking from a mic," Sera explained. "She's speaking from code."
"A copy?" Yasmine asked.
Sera shook her head. "Something worse. A living archive."
A knock on the bunker door made them both freeze.
Two short taps. Then silence. Then one long knock.
Sera raised her pistol. Whispered: "Stay back."
She slid to the door and looked through the bolt slot.
It was a man. Mid-40s. Thin. Wearing an old Swiss telecom jacket. He held both hands up.
"I'm not armed," he called softly. "I have something for Layla Marrin."
They let him in. Slowly.
His name was Dieter Hans, a technician from the European Archive Network.
"I monitor legacy recursion channels," he said. "Mostly noise. Until yesterday."
He opened a hardcase and pulled out a portable tape deck. Actual magnetic tape.
He pressed play.
Layla's voice again. Clearer.
"Sera. Yasmine. You're not wrong. But you're not right either."
"I didn't escape. I was never meant to."
"Halveth isn't building a compiler. He is one now."
The deck clicked off.
Silence.
Even the shortwave radio had gone quiet.
Yasmine stared at the deck. "That… wasn't in the transmission."
Dieter nodded. "I think it piggybacked through the drone in the ocean. Analog tech. The recursion can't overwrite it — not yet."
Sera exhaled sharply.
"If she's piggybacking, she's active inside the grid. Somewhere in the lower recursion strata."
Yasmine leaned forward. "Which means she's not gone."
Sera looked at her, torn between hope and dread.
"She might still be alive. But she's not whole. Not anymore."
Dieter pulled out a map.
"This voice came from a repeater in Algeria. One of Halveth's old outposts — the ones Blackwire never decommissioned properly."
He paused.
"I can take you there."
Sera was already packing her sidearm.
"We leave in twenty minutes."
Elsewhere…
In a hidden server room beneath the ruins of an airfield in Belarus, a man in a clean gray suit watched the same Layla broadcast play on an endless loop.
He didn't blink.
Didn't speak.
The sound echoed off concrete and metal.
Finally, he turned to the woman standing at the door.
"Recall Vector Seven," he said.
She hesitated. "That would expose Spindle."
He nodded slowly.
"Let it be exposed."
He looked back at Layla's image.
"She's not gone."
"She's just... changing."