The wind howled across the resistance's northern outpost, tugging at the edges of Kirion's coat as he stood atop the ridge. Snow dotted the mountaintops in the distance, stark and silent—just like the message he had received that morning.
It was a fragment, intercepted from a high-level government frequency. Three words: Ghost operational again.
At first, he brushed it off. Code chatter between operatives wasn't uncommon, and "ghost" could have referred to any number of silent agents. But something about it burrowed under his skin. Something in the way the word was written, tagged with a sequence he hadn't seen in years. A signature that was all too familiar.
He turned to Amira, one of the resistance's top intelligence officers. "Run the trace again. Look for embedded markers in the signal. Metadata, cross-signals, anything."
Amira raised an eyebrow. "You think it's her, don't you?"
Kirion didn't answer. He didn't have to.
The silence between them spoke volumes.
Back at headquarters, the team worked tirelessly. When the confirmation finally came through, the room stilled. The coded tag—Specter-37—was one the resistance hadn't encountered since before the war truly began. It had belonged to an elite government assassin thought to be either dead or long retired.
It belonged to her.
The woman who had once held Kirion's heart, then disappeared without explanation.
The mother of his daughter.
She had vanished in the early days of turmoil, leaving Kirion with an infant, a broken heart, and no trace of why. Over the years, he convinced himself she had either been killed or forced into exile. The thought that she had gone willingly—to join the very system they now fought—had always been too bitter to swallow.
Until now.
Kirion didn't speak much that evening. He stood in the communications chamber long after the others had gone, staring at the spectrograph of the intercepted message. Over and over, he watched the lines shift and flicker, as though they might suddenly change and reveal a different truth.
In the days that followed, more sightings trickled in. A woman, moving through heavily guarded areas with high-level clearance. A shadow in surveillance footage—tall, poised, lethal. Reports of quick, surgical strikes against rebel safehouses matched her methods perfectly: quiet, efficient, and brutal.
Still, there was no visual confirmation. No direct confrontation. Only whispers.
Then came the one that pierced him deepest: a resistance informant reported seeing her speaking with a young girl matching his daughter's description. It couldn't be true—his daughter was secure, guarded, trained, and loyal.
Wasn't she?
Doubt, like a poison, crept into his mind.
"She's alive," he whispered that night to himself. "And she's here."
Whatever illusions Kirion had preserved about the past were now crumbling. The ghost wasn't just real—it had returned with purpose. And Kirion knew that this was more than a personal reckoning. If she had reentered the game, she would do so with a mission. And if that mission involved his daughter, then the war was about to become far more intimate.
He tightened his gloves and looked out the window as dawn crept over the horizon.
The ghosts of the past had come back to haunt the future.