Chapter 17
Ember
The screen flickers, text lines crawling across like a machine translating a heartbeat. Then Lost Echoes resolves into place—darker than The Ward, sharper. No threads here. No idle chatter. Just encrypted chat rooms tucked behind walls of code.
Luke’s already guiding us in, fingers flying. “Referral phrase: white spool. Hold on.”
The text box opens. He types:
Looking for Phoenix.
The reply comes instantly, stark white against black:
You found him.
My chest tightens.
Phoenix’s words spill out in clipped bursts, no wasted syllables:
I’m twenty-eight now. Radley took me at eleven. I got out at sixteen. Performance went bad, wiring cracked, and I slipped through the hole they made. Been running ever since.
I glance at Luke. His face is stone, eyes scanning fast.
Phoenix keeps going:
I’ve been tracking the network for a decade. Laurel’s arrest rattled their machine. Security protocols kicked in. They’re scrubbing evidence. Silencing survivors. If you’re here, you’re already marked.
Luke mutters under his breath.
Phoenix again:
I’m in touch with fifteen others. Confirmed survivors.
But I know there are dozens more. Maybe hundreds.
Most don’t even know who they are yet. You’ve seen it, haven’t you?
Friends who act wrong sometimes. Memories that don’t line up.
Voices that don’t belong to them. Sleeper agents.
Someone programmed them like they did us.
My throat goes dry. Kenzi’s face flashes in my mind.
I type:
Why now? Why open up to us?
A long pause. Then:
Because you came asking the right way. Because you remembered the script. That means you’re close enough to tear the whole thing down. I’ve been waiting for that. Waiting for someone willing to risk more than theories and gossip.
Luke types for us:
What do you want from us?
Then Phoenix:
Not want. Offer. Evidence. Files, testimonies, blueprints. Years of collecting. Too much for one person to carry. I’ll share if you’ll work with me. We coordinate. Watch each other’s backs. Because right now, every one of us is a target. And they’re already hunting.
The cursor blinks.
Luke looks at me, brows furrowed. “If this is real, it’s bigger than anything we imagined.”
I don’t take my eyes off the screen. “If it’s real, we just stepped into their crosshairs.”
Phoenix’s next message appears:
Decide fast. You have little time.
Luke hesitates at the keyboard, glancing at me. “If we say the wrong thing…”
“They’ll shut us out,” I finish for him. “Or worse.”
The cursor blinks once, twice, before another message from Phoenix arrives:
Before we go further, I need to know you’re not plants. I’ve seen too many sleeper agents. They don’t even know what they are until someone says the right word. Then they activate. Prove you’re not one of them.
Luke types:
What do you need?
Phoenix again:
Tell me something you couldn’t fake. Not dates, not names. Sensations, images, things that only someone who’s been there—or been close to it—would know.
My palms sweat. I think of Kenzi, of her cracked memories, of the things we found in the theater. Luke rests a steadying hand over mine, nodding. Echoes, not truths.
I type:
The lights burned too brightly. The curtain smelled of mold. They made us smile even when our teeth ached. The bear’s eye never stayed in.
Another pause.
Then Phoenix replies:
That’s good enough. You’re either real, or you’ve spoken to someone who is. Both mean you’re valuable.
My heart skips. He believes us.
Phoenix continues:
I’ll give you one file to start. A fragment of what I’ve kept hidden. It’s a copy of part of Radley’s original script. Coded instructions for “performances.” Conditioning cycles. They tried to destroy it after the trial, but they missed this piece. Read it. Then tell me if you still want in.
A file icon appears. Luke hovers over it, eyes widening.
“Encrypted zip,” he mutters. “If it’s legit, this is gold. If it’s a trap…”
I swallow. My reflection shivers in the black glass of the laptop, caught between fear and determination. I see myself as both a child and barely an adult at the same time. “Open it. We have no other choice.”
Luke clicks. The file begins to download.
I don’t even notice my hands shaking until the zip finishes and the folder unfurls on the screen like a trapdoor.
Luke clicks the first file.
A PDF opens—stark, stamped with words that make my throat go tight.
Radley Research: Archival Fragment for Authorized Personnel Only.
The header looks official enough to make my stomach drop.
We read.
There are lists. Names and serial numbers that mean nothing on their own until the next file—a scanned memo from a government lab, dated years earlier.
It’s clinical, bureaucratic, and poisonous all at once.
It contains references to conditioning vectors and longitudinal subject cohorts as well as innocuous phrases like “behavioral reinforcement through staged performance.” In the margins, someone has handwritten script adherence and washout window.
Luke exhales. “They weren’t just experimenting. They were running programs.” He scrolls faster. “Lots of them.”
Medical records appear next. Psychiatric evaluations, intake forms, progress notes with sterile dates and even more sterile diagnoses.
Children cataloged with bullet points—dissociation, atypical response to stress, learned compliance.
One entry makes me stop cold. A clinician’s note that reads like an instruction manual for breaking a child down and building a performer back up.
The language is clinical, but the implications are monstrous.
There are references to “Observation 2” and “sub-level B” that make the back of my neck prickle.
Those were the same phrases Phoenix used.
Financial spreadsheets are buried in the folder.
Line items show transfers labeled as innocuous grants and research stipends that trace back to a list of government contractors and a few shadowy agency acronyms. My hands go numb.
Someone was writing checks, meaning someone higher up was funding this.
A video log file is next. It’s low-resolution with shaky footage from what looks like a monitoring feed.
Hallways, doors, and glimpses of children moving under the watch of clinicians who look a lot like the photos I’ve seen of Radley staff.
The timestamp flickers, and my pulse thuds.
I’m suddenly hyperaware these are not just documents. They’re proof.
While Luke parses, I set up the first of the things Phoenix told us we’d need.
The live monitoring. So we create keyword alerts across a dozen sites for Radley, Dr. Radley, white spool, Observation 2, and Project Elysium.
We spin up email filters and burner addresses, route them through a tangle of proxies, and set a push notification to my phone.
If anything mentions the right terms, we’ll know straight away.
As if on command, a script pings at the bottom of the window. It’s an automated crawler that Phoenix embedded in the package, and it compares the files in the folder with copies cached on a handful of public archives and mirrors. The crawler flags matches then—live—shows them being removed.
“Watch this,” Luke says. He clicks a cached link to an old press release that once mentioned Dr. Radley.
The page appears then vanishes. An entire indexed directory I’d bookmarked a week ago shows an HTTP 410.
In other words, it’s gone. Another site that hosted a scanned court filing flickers, then the directory returns a sterile 404 Not Found.
It’s like watching someone sweep fingerprints with a giant hand.
Luke tenses. “It’s a cover-up in real-time.”
Adrenaline sharpens my senses. We go into counter-measure mode by instinct, using the part of our brains that learned how to hide things for the internet age.
Luke runs a mirrored download across three different machines, while I spin up encrypted backups to two cloud storage accounts under throwaway identities.
We shard the data, encrypted slices across multiple hosts with passcodes only Phoenix and we will know.
Copies are written to a hard drive that goes into Luke’s messenger bag like a talisman.
Phoenix’s message in the chat pings while we work:
They move faster now. You saved a copy. Good. Keep it off obvious paths. We’ll coordinate a dump if it’s safe. Don’t post raw files anywhere public.
I type back with barely steady fingers:
They’re deleting things. At least three sites went dark while opening the file.
Phoenix answers:
Yeah, they scrub when heat rises. That’s the protocol. You did right—mirror, shard, airgap. Next, anonymize every trace of this session. And don’t use the same machines for normal stuff. Compromise is contagious.
We comply. Luke pulls a USB with fresh Linux boot images, and we run through a checklist Phoenix rattles off—new VPN instance, fresh burner accounts, rotate passcodes, no personal email contact.
I create two offline PDFs containing the most damning pages and burn them to optical media.
It feels anachronistic but safe. Discs are harder to nudge remotely than drives with network permissions.
Luke does his magic. I can barely keep up with it all.
Between file transfers and encryptions, the hour we agreed to meet narrows into minutes. My phone buzzes with the keyword alerts we set—two minor mentions of “Radley” in forum chatter that was pulled and taken down within seconds. The pattern is obvious. Someone is hunting the breadcrumbs.
“Is Phoenix right?” I ask. “Are they hunting survivors now?”
Luke’s face is hard in the screen light. “Looks like it. Arrests spike, security protocols activate. Someone’s running damage control.”
We finish the backups and set up a redundant watch system.
If anything about the archive’s original URLs disappears again, a secondary alarm pings an alternate inbox Phoenix gave us.
Then Luke does something that makes my stomach flip and my chest go cold with the weight of a choice.
He leaves a small, plausible breadcrumb on a throwaway forum account as bait to see whether anyone’s watching the mirrors we created.
The forum pings. A bot? A human? I can’t tell. The window shutters, and for a split second the cursor hangs over a response:
Who put this here?
The reply trails off.
My phone vibrates with an incoming message from Phoenix:
Good. You’re moving in the right direction. Don’t sleep. Project Elysium is real. It’s why they buried Radley and why Laurel is a convenient sacrifice. Be careful who answers you next.
A knot forms in my stomach as a chilling thought strikes me. If Dr. Elias Radley allowed his granddaughter to take the fall for this scheme, what would he be willing to do to us?
Before I can process my thought, the screen fills with lines of code and file names.
I’m filled with a cold certainty that we’ve just opened something too big to close.
I feel both terrified and uncannily alive—like someone who finally pulled a curtain and found a whole stage of actors frozen in place.
Why did I have to think of that analogy?
“We did it.” Luke doesn’t sound triumphant. It’s more like a warning held as a fact.
Outside, the city hums, oblivious. Inside, a handful of encrypted files sit protected on three different drives and a disc in Luke’s bag. For a change, the question isn’t whether there’s a conspiracy, but how deep it goes.
I push a last button and set our live monitor to send every mention, however small, to an isolated report that both Phoenix and we can see. If any thread tries to call survivors “family” or push anyone to accept a spool, an alert will scream across our phones.
A minute passes. Then another. The waiting is part of the risk.
Then my phone pings again. It’s not an alert from the script, but a private message on Lost Echoes from an account I don’t recognize. The username is clean and ordinary, like a neighbor’s—WatcherAisle.
The message reads:
Nice try. You should have left well enough alone.
The screen goes white around the edges. My stomach drops into a place that feels like it belongs to someone else.
Luke’s hand finds mine and squeezes, fingers tight enough to hurt. “We need to move. Now.”