Port Garrison wasn't on any map anymore.
Once a thriving shipping district, now it was nothing more than a carcass—rusted metal, cracked stone, and forgotten history. What remained were the bones: half-collapsed cranes, rotting dockyards, and long-dead vessels moored in stagnant water.
Lucas stood at the edge of the truck Finch had hotwired, his coat catching in the salty breeze that whipped through the abandoned dock. The perimeter fence ahead sagged with rust, and beyond it lay nothing but decay. The wind stung his face, sharp with brine and the reek of oil.
Alice stood just to his left, silent. Her arms were crossed tightly, the hood of her jacket pulled low. Her eyes moved constantly, never resting—each flick of her gaze more predator than prey. She didn't say a word, but tension radiated off her like heat.
Maya stepped down from the truck with a practiced thud, tightening the strap of her rifle. She looked around, unimpressed. "Place looks like a tetanus farm," she muttered. "Real charming."
Lucas didn't answer. He scanned the shadows beyond the fence, his jaw clenched. He didn't like how quiet it was. Not here.
They cut through the perimeter in silence. The world beyond the fence felt different—like a hushed breath waiting to be exhaled. Shipping containers rose like skeletal towers, rusted and leaning. Some still bore the faded, stamped logos of Cadmus Logistics. Others had been spray-painted over, symbols and warnings layered in desperate streaks.
Every metal creak or gust of wind sounded too deliberate—too placed. Lucas's shoulders coiled tighter with each step, and Alice kept her head on a swivel. Maya brought up the rear, her rifle held low but steady.
No one said it, but they all felt it: this place wasn't abandoned. Not really.
"Still think this K-09 guy's here?" Maya asked as she swept the rusted corridor with her eyes, voice low and sharp.
"He was," Alice murmured. "The resonance is strong. I can feel where it broke. It's faint… but recent."
Lucas crouched beside a twisted support beam, scanning what looked like scorched footprints along the concrete. "These burns look fresh," he said. "Like he pushed through here, maybe wounded."
They split to cover more ground. Lucas and Alice veered toward the skeletal remains of the warehouse wing while Maya and Finch slipped into the narrower access tunnels.
Dust motes hung in the stale air, catching the glow of Lucas's flashlight as he and Alice moved in silence. The sound of their steps echoed faintly in the gloom—too sharp, too exposed.
"You ever think about how we got here?" Alice said suddenly, her voice brittle. "From lab rats to trespassers."
Lucas exhaled, a dry chuckle escaping before he replied, "Not really. Doesn't feel real half the time."
Alice tilted her head, glancing at a scorched wall where symbols had been scratched in. "I kept running. Cities, ruins, sewers—anywhere quiet. Tried to bury myself in noise. But they always knew."
Lucas paused near a stack of metal crates, resting a hand against the cold surface. "How did they find you?"
Alice's voice lowered. "Echo. That's who came. Clean. No warning. When I escaped Helix, I thought I'd shaken them. Went deep—static-heavy zones, dead sectors. Still, they found me. Like I was glowing in the dark."
Lucas frowned, jaw tensing. "Same name keeps coming back. Echo."
She nodded. "They don't leave bodies. Just... silence. I fought one once. Barely lived. You remember what I said when I saw you?"
"You thought I was one of them."
"Because they move like us. Talk like us. Some of them even were us." Alice's voice dropped, her expression haunted. "There were whispers… that some of the ones who didn't die were folded back into the program. Repurposed. Turned into hunters."
Lucas tensed, breath catching. "But how? How do they track us like that?"
A beat of static preceded Finch's voice through the comm. "I've got a theory."
Lucas brought a hand to his earpiece, angling his body toward a rusted wall. "Go."
"Anchor coding," Finch said. "They talked about it at Helix. Quiet, off-record. It's not tech—it's more like a psychic fingerprint. They embedded resonance into the high-risk subjects. Not implants. Not trackers. More like… energy echoes. You walk through a space, you leave an imprint. Echo's trained to follow that."
Lucas's eyes narrowed. "So we're bleeding signal without even knowing it."
"Exactly," Finch replied. "They don't need cameras or comms. They just read the waves. Like bloodhounds tuned to fear."
Maya's voice crackled in. "So we're lighthouses. Bright enough for predators."
"Pretty much," Finch said. "They don't chase you with satellites. They just listen for the echo."
Lucas turned toward Alice. She was still staring down the corridor, her face pale.
"If they're already here…" she said softly, almost to herself, "We're not just too late. We're bait."
Lucas checked the shadows. "Then we better be ghosts again."
Elsewhere in Port Garrison...
A low thrum of sonar resonated through still water beneath one of the sunken drydocks. A male figure emerged slowly, his form breaking the surface in a controlled rise. Ink-black tattoos marked the lines of his shoulders—Atlantean symbols—etched into coffee-brown skin. His eyes, pale and sharp, scanned the ruined perimeter with practiced intensity.
He moved without splashing, pulling himself silently onto the rusted platform that hung half-collapsed above the basin. Muscles coiled with practiced ease, Kaldur'ahm surveyed the fractured skyline of Port Garrison, eyes adjusting to the low fog curling through the dockyard ruins. He listened—not just with his ears, but with the water around him. Echoes in the current. Pressure shifts.
A whisper of cloth above. A few heartbeats later, a figure descended from the skeletal framework of a crane—graceful, calculated. Her black cape fluttered once in the breeze before settling behind her. She landed beside him in silence, crouched low, movements tight and sharp.
Red hair glinted faintly beneath a matte-black cowl. Her gloved fingers moved first, tapping her wrist-mounted display without looking away from the dark sprawl ahead. Eyes behind the HUD visor swept the terrain with surgical precision.
Kaldur'ahm didn't turn as he spoke, eyes fixed on the distant motion. "Barbara."
She glanced at him, subtle and quick. "Kaldur?"
He nodded once. "They're here."
She dropped into a crouch beside him, already working her compact commlink. Her fingers moved in sync with her thoughts, eyes scanning the field below. Tactical overlay flickered across her visor.
"Visual confirmation?"
Kaldur'ahm activated his lens overlay. Through a shifting wash of outlines and field resonance, he tracked them. "Three signatures. One has residual magic—strong and volatile. Another is tied to an artifact—kinetic-based, unstable energy output. The last moves like someone ex-military—tight discipline, alert, flanking position."
Barbara narrowed her eyes as data flickered across her HUD. "Subject L-014 and his companions. Pulled from Helix archives. High-risk. Flagged directly in Hamilton's personal catalog."
Kaldur'ahm's expression darkened. "One of the deep-trial prototypes. Helix classified him as unstable even back then. Hamilton believed trauma could be metabolized into power—kinetic imprint theory."
Barbara looked over, skeptical. "That experiment was supposed to have failed."
"If it failed," Kaldur'ahm said, "then L-014 wouldn't still be alive. Wouldn't be carrying what he is now."
"He is," Barbara muttered. "And walking around with an artifact bonded to him. That makes him a variable Cadmus can't afford to leave unchecked."
"Or control," Kaldur'ahm added. "Which makes him dangerous—depending on how much of him is still his."
Barbara tapped her temple, HUD reconfiguring. "So… do we step in?"
Kaldur'ahm's gaze didn't shift. "Not yet. We don't know if Echo's using them as bait. Or if this was a leak from the inside."
She scanned through her signal sweeps, frowning. "No Echo transmissions nearby. But the static here—it's unnatural. Like it's been folded back on itself."
"Signal jamming," Kaldur'ahm said. "Cadmus always scrambles the field before an extraction. They're already here."
He turned back toward the dark maze where Lucas's trail vanished.
"Let's see who makes the first move."
And with that, the shadows swallowed them both.
The rusted warehouse creaked with shifting weight. Lucas motioned Maya and Alice to halt.
"You hear that?" he whispered.
Before anyone could respond, the air cracked—a silent detonation of motion. Figures in dark combat gear dropped from the rafters with surgical precision, boots hitting metal with practiced weight.
Echo.
The first agent swept Lucas's legs with brutal efficiency. Lucas hit the floor, rolled sideways, and narrowly dodged a baton charged with crackling electric current. He kicked upward, catching the agent in the chest and buying a breath of space.
Maya fired three precise bursts from cover, forcing two Echo operatives behind steel crates. A third agent leapt through the volley, ducking under her fire and slamming into her with a shock baton. She snarled and drove her knee into his side, knocking him back.
Alice shrieked—unstable magic erupting from her palms in an arc of jagged violet light. The blast scorched the air and hurled debris into the narrow corridor. One Echo soldier's gear short-circuited, but another tackled Alice into a support beam, slamming her hard.
Lucas scrambled up and vaulted over a rusted pipe. Kinetic pulses built in his arms—warm, volatile—but not fast enough. An Echo agent flanked him, loosing a compact shock net. It snapped across his back, locking his limbs in a jolt of agony.
"Three flanking!" Maya shouted, gritting her teeth as she ripped off her dying rifle's clip. "We're boxed in!"
Lucas clawed at the net, pain shooting through every nerve. He rolled just in time to see Alice's shoulder light up with a searing energy blast. She screamed, her aura crackling, power erupting from her body in wild, spiraling chaos.
The air became noise—screams, sparks, steel clashing against steel. Echo wasn't just winning—they were dissecting them.
Above – Gantry Level
Kaldur'ahm and Batgirl crouched in the shadow of a collapsed walkway, watching the battle unfold below through thermal optics. Lucas and his team were locked in a losing fight—desperate, chaotic, raw. Blasts of kinetic energy and crackling bursts of magic collided with the silent, surgical brutality of Echo operatives.
"They've been made," Batgirl said tightly, eyes narrowing as Maya staggered from a close-quarters hit, blood streaking her face.
"Echo's already engaging," Kaldur'ahm confirmed grimly, tracking an operative raising a weapon toward Alice, who was pinned near a damaged support column.
Batgirl's fingers hovered over her grapnel. "We wait?"
He hesitated. "They won't last long. Echo's too fast. Too methodical."
She swept her HUD across the field again. "But they're not the enemy."
"No," Kaldur'ahm agreed. "But Cadmus won't make that distinction. If Echo takes them out, we lose access to everything they've uncovered. Including K-09."
Batgirl's jaw tightened as she zoomed in on Lucas. "And if L-014 snaps?"
"Then we contain it," Kaldur'ahm said. "But we don't get another shot if we wait too long."
Another explosion lit up the warehouse. Echo was repositioning, flanking. One of them was nearly on top of Lucas.
Batgirl's breath caught. "We go."
She launched her line before he even answered. Kaldur'ahm followed, already leaping into the chaos below.
Author's Note:
If you're enjoying the story and want to read ahead or support my work, you can check out my P@treon at [email protected]/LordCampione. But don't worry—all chapters will eventually be public. Just being here and reading means the world to me. Thank you for your time and support.