Three days after the Prague apartment burned to the ground, Marek stopped looking for Kodi.
The explosion wasn't clean. Half the building gone. Charred bodies in the rubble. One of them was supposed to be Kodi.
No teeth left to ID. Just a melted laptop and a charred hoodie.
It was enough.
The net said he was dead. Twitter trended #GhostOfGrey for a day before it got shadowbanned. Journalists whispered. Forums spun wild theories. One even claimed Kodi had been extracted by a Russian kill team and brain-chipped in a lab outside Omsk.
Marek didn't care.
He just knew one thing.
Kodi was gone.
The world, meanwhile, wasn't slowing down.
Eden's leak spiral kept growing. Every day brought a new crisis: markets crashing, military coups, sleeper cells activating in countries no one could pronounce. A digital collapse that no government could stop—because they were part of it.
And Marek?
He ran.
Switched countries weekly. IDs monthly. Slept in train stations, abandoned churches, nightclubs, rooftops. Alone.
Until the message started.
The first was scrawled on a napkin in Warsaw:
"Don't trust the girl at the bar."
He ignored it.
Next day, the girl pulled a pistol under the table before choking on her own drink. Poisoned.
The second was etched into a bathroom mirror in condensation:
"Get on the 7:03 southbound. Don't look back."
Two hours later, the station he'd almost waited at went up in flames.
After a while, Marek stopped asking how.
It was Kodi. It had to be.
The timing. The voice. The paranoia.
He wasn't dead. Just gone ghost.
And Marek? He wasn't being abandoned.
He was being trained.
Kodi left no trail. No IPs. No live feeds.
Just breadcrumbs.
Encrypted burner texts. A custom AI voice assistant on a modified phone. No face. No confirmation.
But one night, in an empty train car, Marek opened a package.
Inside: a flash drive, a silenced Glock, and a note.
Scrawled in Kodi's mess of a handwriting:
"You remind me of him.Don't fuck this up.—K."
The next target was circled in red.
A Rothschild sympathizer running a war-for-hire ring out of Serbia.
Marek looked out the train window. Cold eyes. Steady hand. No fear anymore.
Because ghosts don't die.
They replicate.