Rain lashed across the cockpit windows like the sky was trying to rip the ship apart. They'd flown through the storm for hours, silent, tense, and half-broken. The stolen fighter groaned with every gust, but it held. Lucas stared out the glass, mind racing with everything he had just learned—about Agent Zero, the trap at Ashpoint, the true scale of Cipher.
He wasn't ready for what came next. But he couldn't stop either.
Ava finally broke the silence. "That flare trick was suicide."
Lucas gave her a tired grin. "You doubted me?"
"I doubted physics. You insulted physics."
Kai grunted from the back, holding a cold pack to his shoulder. "Can you two flirt later? My insides feel like scrambled drones."
Lucas turned back to the nav screen. The pulsing dot from the map had shifted again, this time narrowing down to a region in Northern Kalgara—icy, remote, and officially uninhabited. But there was something Cipher didn't account for.
The First Cipher.
Long before Cipher was a syndicate or a shadow empire, it was a project. Experimental. Secret. And rumor said, one of the original architects—Agent Zeal—was still alive. Off-grid. Hunted by both Cipher and governments. He had vanished thirty years ago.
According to the data Lucas extracted, Zeal had left a contingency hidden in the Kalgara wastelands.
They had to find him. He might be the only person alive who knew how to kill Cipher at the root.
The landing was rough, throwing the ship into a half-spin on the icy slope. They skidded through snowbanks, barely avoiding a jagged rock face. When they finally stopped, Ava sighed.
"Next time, I'm flying."
Lucas grabbed his gear. "Next time, I'm hoping we don't almost die."
The cold hit like knives. Even Kai stopped complaining. They trekked for hours through biting wind and snow blind terrain, following Ava's hacked tracker signal until they reached a steel door hidden behind a rock ledge.
It had no lock. No keypad.
Just a metal plate with a symbol: the original Cipher insignia—an open eye inside a broken triangle.
Lucas reached forward and pressed his palm against the plate.
The door hissed open.
Inside was warmth, dim lights, and the sound of an old record player spinning something ancient and scratchy. The hallway led to a bunker built into the mountain, walls lined with paper files, chalkboards, and books.
A man stood at the far wall, back to them. Tall, hunched, wrapped in a patchwork coat that had seen too many winters. His voice was slow, deep, and dry as the snow.
"I wondered how long it would take Zero's boy to find me."
Lucas froze. "You know who I am?"
The man turned.
His face was a map of scars, half-covered in an old gas mask with a cracked lens. One eye, still sharp and pale blue, stared through Lucas like glass.
"I know what you are," he said. "What you're becoming."
Ava stepped forward. "You're Zeal?"
The man nodded once. "I built Cipher. Then I broke it. The part you know is what came after—the monster my science birthed."
Lucas swallowed. "You knew my father."
"I trained him. I trusted him. Then I watched him die on a mission that was never meant to happen."
Kai narrowed his eyes. "You mean the explosion on Obsidian Bridge? That was Cipher's fault, wasn't it?"
Zeal sat slowly in a chair that creaked with age. "Partly. But not just Cipher's. Zero didn't die by chance. He died because he disobeyed a direct order from me."
Lucas stepped forward. "Why? What was he doing?"
Zeal leaned back, his eyes full of something like regret. "He saved someone. A child who carried an experimental neural strain—something Cipher was trying to extract. That child was you."
The words hit like a punch to the lungs.
Lucas felt the ground shift under him.
All his life, he thought he was just some random orphan Cipher had found by accident. But Zero had known who he was. What he was.
"He risked everything for me," Lucas said.
"He died for it," Zeal answered.
The room fell silent again. Only the record crackled, playing a warbled version of an old song none of them recognized.
Lucas stepped forward, forcing his voice steady. "Then help me finish what he started. I want to burn Cipher to the ground."
Zeal chuckled softly. "Then you'll need more than bullets. You'll need history."
He reached behind a cabinet and pulled out an old metal case. Inside was a device that looked like a cross between a grenade and a hard drive. He set it on the table.
"This is a mindkey. It contains everything—Cipher's origin files, secret tech, command protocols, locations, names. Things even Ava can't crack."
Ava leaned in. "Challenge accepted."
Zeal smiled. "It only unlocks with Zero's bio-signal. Which, lucky for you… might still be alive in your blood."
Lucas reached out, touching the device. It blinked once, scanned his hand… then opened with a hiss of compressed air.
The screen lit up.
Data scrolled across like an unfiltered stream of truth. Mission logs. Blueprints. AI consciousness threads. It was overwhelming—and it was everything.
Zeal stood slowly. "Now you have the fire. Just be careful what you burn."
Lucas looked down at the mindkey.
He had power now.
More than Cipher ever wanted him to have.
And he was just getting started.