Despite living like a shadow within the Lennox mansion, Dash had carved out his kingdom behind locked doors. His hacking prowess was obsessive and precise, an unmatched talent that allowed him to breach even the most fortified systems, including Lennox Corp's heavily guarded database, all from the safety of his bedroom.
For years, he had waded through layer after layer of encryption and firewalls so complex they seemed designed to vanish into oblivion. But tonight, something shifted, and the silence cracked.
While his fingers danced across the keyboard, dismantling digital defenses like a master thief, Dash uncovered a film unlike any he'd ever seen before. It was buried deep in the system's isolated recesses, deliberately hidden from even the most skilled intruders.
This was no ordinary secret. The data pulsed beneath the surface, a ghostly presence embedded in code, something no one was meant to find.
Staring at the screen, Dash felt a strange unease settle over him. It wasn't an email, no sender, no subject line, just the file itself, timestamped 3:13 a.m., the witching hour.
The glow of the monitor cast a cold, sterile light across his hands and desk, sharp and unforgiving as if something unnatural had slipped past his defenses, slipping into the room alongside him.
His finger hovered over the touchpad, frozen in place. He knew he wasn't supposed to see this, an instinct like a living coil in his gut warned him of a profound wrongness. The file thrummed with an eerie intelligence, cold and calculating, like an artificial mind struggling to communicate beyond its digital cage.
He hadn't told Leo everything. Couldn't. There were gaps in his memory; he didn't know how to explain moments that felt too smooth, too edited.
When he'd tried to bring it up the previous night, Leo looked at him like he was speaking a different language.
Grief, that was what Leo called it. Maybe even guilt. But Dash knew better.
Or at least... he was starting to.
The email pulsed on his screen, no subject, no sender, just a timestamp: 3:13 a.m. It was as if it had slipped through some hidden crack in the system, a ghost message arriving from nowhere and everywhere at once.
It didn't belong there, yet it sat stubbornly in his inbox, blinking quietly like a heartbeat in the dark. There was something off about it, something almost alive, like the file itself was watching, waiting for him to take the bait.
The quiet in the room seemed to press inward, closing in around him like a slow, suffocating fog. This wasn't just a message. It was a trap. Or maybe a warning.
Dash's finger hovered uncertainly above the touchpad, the faint blue light of the laptop casting sharp shadows across his tense face. The room around him felt colder than before, the stale air pressing in from the cracked window beside his desk.
Outside, a distant siren wailed faintly, a reminder that the city never truly slept. He hadn't told Leo everything, not yet. The weight of the implied realities sat heavy in his chest, like a storm gathering just beyond the horizon.
Every creak of the old bedroom made him jump, every flicker of the screen threatening to shatter the fragile calm.
Dash wasn't sure if he was ready to face what lay hidden in that email, but something simple inside guided him forward.
He could almost feel the secrets stirring beneath the surface, waiting to claw their way free, and maybe, finally, to set him free too.
He clicked.
The attachment didn't open; it reacted. For a heartbeat, the screen stalled, casting a pale glow across Dash's face in the quiet wash of morning light.
The shadows in his room had begun to thin, stretching long and blue across the floorboards as dawn crept reluctantly past the curtains.
No loading bar. No welcome screen. Just a strange, dragging pause, like the machine was thinking.
Then the display blinked. The cursor vanished. The wallpaper dimmed until it was almost black, as if the screen itself balked.
Dash leaned in, breath shallow, eyes flicking as ghost-text began to form, thread-thin lines of code spiraling outward like cracks in ice. They crept across the display in branching arcs, webbing through each other, silent and sharp.
MNEMONIC_LOCK_MARA
The name pulsed, white against gray. Callous. Clinical. Lingering. Dash's spine stiffened. The sun hadn't even cleared the horizon, but it felt like something had already risen, and it had nothing to do with light.
His hand hovered, then clicked again.
The file opened like it had been waiting. Not impatiently, but deliberately, like something aware of its gravity.
A burst of static snapped through the speakers, loud enough to make Dash flinch. His fingers twitched against the trackpad, and his breath caught somewhere between his chest and throat.
The screen jittered, pixels crawling like insects across the display, and then, with a reluctant lurch, the video resolved into clarity.
Mara. His mom.
It was her. But not the version sealed inside his memories.
This Mara looked worn down, half-shadowed. Her eyes were sunken, ringed with sleepless purple.
Her hair, usually so meticulously styled, ringlets and curls bouncing, clung to her temples in damp strands, as though whatever air surrounded her carried more weight than oxygen should.
She wore no make-up, and her lips were cracked. Behind her stretched a grim, lightless room, chrome walls, a drain in the center of the floor, a flickering panel overhead that stuttered with the rhythm of faulty fluorescence.
Not a prison, exactly. Something colder. Designed not for punishment, but observation.
Dash quivered slightly, as though her image might spill from the screen and seep into the room with him. His pulse thundered against the silence, and for a second, it felt like his body didn't know whether to run or shut down completely.
A timestamp glowed faintly in the lower right corner. Dated over a month ago.
A month.
All that time, he'd been eating dinner with Harry. Laughing politely when prompted. Pretending to be normal. And she'd been here. Buried behind steel and silence.
His throat closed. He tried to swallow and failed.
She was alive.
She had been alive.
And they'd all been tricked into forgetting.
He gripped the edges of the laptop like it might float away, as if the screen itself was a portal into some place too real to bear, and yet, impossible to look away from.
This wasn't some system glitch. It was a message.
No... worse.
A confession.
Dash couldn't move. His body felt locked, arms rigid, back stiff, lungs tight like they'd forgotten how to breathe. On the screen, Mara's face remained frozen in time.
His mother. The sight of her was unbearable, too sharp, too bright, like staring into a sun made of sorrow. A sick heart bloomed behind his eyes. He blinked, and his vision swam.
It was like every version of her he'd carried in his mind, laughing on the back patio, slicing fruit while humming off-key, her voice chasing off nightmares when he was too young to know better, was being overwritten in real-time.
Not erased. Rewritten. Reprogrammed. Like the memory chip his father had installed in Igor.
Like all the files locked behind firewalls and biometric scanners in the basement levels of the Lennox estate.
And he had let it happen. No, he hadn't even known.
That was the part that twisted the knife.
A scream built in his chest but had nowhere to go. It echoed off his ribs, stifled and stunted. He wanted to tear the screen off its hinges. He wanted to ask a thousand questions and shove the answers down someone's throat.
Mostly, he just wanted to vanish.
Folded in on himself as the file had unfolded. Disappear the way Mara had.
The silence in his room pressed in from all sides. Outside, the sky was starting to soften, navy smearing toward pale blue. The world, irritatingly, was moving on.
He felt the opposite.
Everything inside him was arresting, calcifying under the weight of what he now knew, what he could never unknow. His skin prickled like it didn't belong to him anymore. His fingers felt too long, like they'd been stretched around too much truth.
The laptop buzzed faintly under his palms. Her face is still there. Frozen in a single frame of exhausted defiance.
Dash dropped his head into his hands.
Harry had lied.
He'd lied, smiled, and carved out pieces of their lives like he was editing footage.
Dash suddenly wasn't sure if he could trust a single memory he had. Not of Leo. Not of Mara. Not even of himself.
Who was he, if someone else could choose what he remembered?
Worse, how much of him was left?
The screen trembled, then hissed.
A burst of static bloomed, and then, her voice.
"If you're seeing this," Mara said, quiet and frayed at the edges, "then Harry's system failed."
No introductions. No pleasantries. Just the blade of truth, spread bare without mercy.
Dash went rigid. Her voice sounded wrong, thinner like it had been filtered through too many layers of interference. Or maybe it was just what fear did to memory.
"I don't know how much he erased," she said, and her breath caught. "I don't know what version of me you even remember."
Dash swallowed hard.
"But know this, he isn't the man he says he is. He hasn't been for years."
There it was. The confirmation he hadn't dared to name aloud. The truth, straight from her mouth.
"I tried to stop him. The memory chip, the trials, the serum… they were meant to protect us. To keep Alucards like Igor from turning feral. But Harry...he twisted it. Sold the research. Gave it to someone."
She hesitated. Her voice dropped as if she could still feel eyes on her.
"I think they're called the White..."
The screen fractured into static.
Audio warbled, disintegrated into a sickening hiss.
Then silence.
No pause. No goodbye. No second chance to replay.
Just black.
Dash stared at the screen as if it had betrayed him.
Mara had been speaking from inside the machine; inside the system Harry swore was secure. She was alive. Had been alive.
And Harry had buried it.
Not just her… but everything she knew.
The video titled Mara: Final Transmission rested silently in Harry's inbox, a file heavier than any he had received before. The screen glowed with an eerie stillness, a fragile portal to a voice long thought lost. Mara's image flickered, tired eyes, a haunted expression, a final message carved from desperation and resolve.
No one else knew of this recording, its existence buried beneath layers of secrecy and fear. It was a testament to what was sacrificed, a whispered confession meant only for Harry. The transmission carried the weight of unspeakable truths, a haunting echo of life stolen but not forgotten.
In the silence that followed, the room seemed to hold its breath, as if the very walls understood the gravity of Mara's words, words that might shatter everything Harry believed, unraveling the fragile threads that bound hope and despair.
Harry stared at the files, the titles almost mocking him, Mara: Final Transmission and another, unmarked message buried deep within the system. Two voices from the same source, yet their tones and content clashed like distant echoes in a vast, empty chamber.
One was a deliberate farewell, a curated last testament meant to be found; the other felt raw, immediate, like a ghost trapped inside the machine, sending fragmented signals no one fully understood.
The lines between hope and despair blurred, and Harry couldn't shake the unsettling question: why were there two messages? What truth lay hidden between them, waiting to unravel everything he thought he knew?
Harry's heart sank as the message came through, a terse, cryptic alert that someone had accessed the unmarked file. His fingers trembled over the console, unease winding deep within his chest.
Who was watching the message meant to stay buried? The carefully controlled narrative was already fracturing, slipping beyond his reach. Every carefully laid plan, every secret he'd guarded fiercely, now threatened exposure.
With that, the fragile illusion of control began to crumble.