Rain lashed against the windows of the remote safehouse in Old Bauchi Sector, where the silence was thick enough to choke on. The small, concrete bunker was buried beneath the hills, originally built as a military listening post during the conflict era. Now, it served as the hideaway for the only man who might still hold the key to the Red Vein virus.
Sanda watched Leo closely.
The boy—no, the man—sat at the edge of a long metal table, eyes sunken, lips pale. He hadn't spoken since they left the port. He had barely moved. The files that exposed his past still sat unopened in front of him. But Sanda knew Leo had seen them. The way his fingers trembled slightly told enough.
"I was a subject," Leo said at last, his voice flat. "R.V.-017. That's why my brain processes faster than normal. Why I never sleep more than two hours. Why I sometimes hear… echoes."
Sanda nodded slowly. "They built you into something they couldn't control. That's why they tried to bury it. And why they're back to finish the job."
Leo's eyes glinted with pain—and fury. "And you… you didn't know?"
"If I had," Sanda said, "I would have burned the project to the ground before I ever found you."
Leo turned toward the table and reached into his jacket. He pulled out a thin drive—barely the size of a matchstick—and set it on the metal surface.
"This contains part of the code that controls Red Vein's latent routines," he said. "I extracted it six years ago. Hid it in a ghost server. Never knew what it was… until now."
Sanda leaned forward. "Can it be stopped?"
Leo hesitated. "Maybe. But not with just this. Red Vein is decentralized. It learns. It adapts. And it has access to over seven hundred digital networks—some tied to military grids, others to financial systems. It's not just a virus. It's a parasite… designed to awaken sleeper protocols in people like me."
Sanda froze. "There are more?"
Leo nodded grimly. "At least eleven. Scattered around the world. The files at the port named a few. Some of them might already be active."
Sanda stood and walked to the corner of the room, his mind racing. "That means this isn't about you anymore. This is global."
"Correct," Leo said. "And Lucas is just one head of the hydra."
Sanda's thoughts spiraled. If Leo had been a child subject of Red Vein, and eleven others existed—then someone had seeded this project years ago, waiting for the right time to detonate it like a sleeper warhead in human form.
He turned back to Leo. "We need the names. And locations."
Leo hesitated. "There's one problem. The last piece of the decryption key—was stored in an off-grid AI server located in the N'Djamena Strip. But two weeks ago, that server was hijacked."
"By who?"
Leo looked up. "A woman named Nia Tagore."
Sanda blinked.
He knew that name.
A ghost from the old days. One of the first AI architects of Zone 3. Brilliant. Ruthless. And missing for the past nine years.
"She went dark after her lab was bombed," Sanda muttered.
"She didn't die," Leo said. "She vanished into the shadows. And now she's back, running a faction called The Hollow Tree. They specialize in mind-code augmentation. Black psychology. Dream hacking."
Sanda's face hardened. "She has the last key."
Leo nodded. "And she's selling it to the highest bidder."
A long silence filled the room.
Then Sanda straightened. "Then we move. Tonight."
Leo looked at him, surprised. "It's a warzone. That region is crawling with mercs, drones, and sandstorms that fry tech signals."
Sanda reached for his coat. "I'm not asking if it's safe. I'm asking if you're coming."
Leo stared for a moment. Then stood and grabbed his weapon.
"I'm in," he said.
As they stepped out into the storm and disappeared into the darkness, neither of them noticed the silent drone hovering high above the hills, its red eye blinking once—then vanishing.
Far away, in a glass tower on the coast of Darra Province, a woman watched them on a screen.
Her face was pale, her eyes sharp.
Nia Tagore.
She smiled faintly.
"They're coming," she said softly. "Let's see if the ghosts still remember how to bleed."