The journey to their destination was rough.
Mud splashed beneath their boots as Dimitri and Natalia climbed higher, the forest thinning into jagged rock and fog. Dawn had fully broken, but the light was pale and sickly, trapped behind heavy clouds. The air carried the chill of altitude, and the silence of a world that had forgotten mercy.
They had not spoken to each other in nearly an hour.
Dimitri led the way, his coat torn, his movements automatic. Natalia followed closely, clutching her damp bag like it held her heartbeat. Every step echoed the same truth neither wanted to voice, they were running, but from what exactly, they didn't know.
"Dimitri," she finally said, breath clouding in the cold, "where are we going?"
He didn't look back. "There is a village ahead, small and quiet. My father used to hide men there, people who wanted to disappear."
"And one of them can help us?"
"If he is still alive."
"What is his name?"
"Artem."
The name landed heavily. "You trust him?"
"I trust that he hates Specter," Dimitri said. "Sometimes, that is enough."
They crested the ridge just as the sun tore a thin line through the clouds. Below lay a valley, dense trees, a frozen river, and at the far end, a cluster of cottages barely visible through the mist. Smoke rose from one chimney. Life still existed here, faint and flickering.
Dimitri's eyes scanned the valley. "We will rest there, just a few hours."
Natalia didn't argue. Her body ached from exhaustion, but it was not the physical pain that scared her, it was the growing silence in her head. The silence before memory.
She didn't know why, but since the ambush, pieces of something, flashes, kept clawing at the edge of her thoughts. White rooms. Needles. A voice whispering numbers.
Each time, she shoved it away.
They reached the village by midmorning. Smoke curled lazily from chimneys, and the scent of pine and iron filled the air. A dog barked once in the distance, then nothing.
The cottage Dimitri stopped at looked abandoned, wood warped with age, windows covered in frost. He knocked once, sharp and deliberate.
No answer.
He knocked again. "Artem."
A pause. Then, from within, a metallic click, gun cocked.
"Who sent you?" a rough voice demanded.
"Volkov," Dimitri said. "The son."
Another pause and the lock turned.
The door opened just wide enough to reveal a man in his fifties, eyes sharp behind wire-framed glasses, face lined from years of hiding. He looked at Dimitri, and something like disbelief crossed his features.
"Dimitri Volkov," he muttered. "You look like him."
"I am not him."
"Prove it."
Dimitri reached into his coat slowly and tossed something across the threshold, a rusted metal coin engraved with the Volkov insignia, split down the middle.
Artem caught it, studied it, then stepped aside. "Get in. Quickly."
Natalia followed Dimitri into the dim room. Maps covered the walls, old Soviet blueprints, coded symbols, scraps of circuits, and numbers scribbled in red ink. The air smelled of gun oil and dust.
Artem locked the door again, then turned to Natalia. "And who is this?"
"Natalia Ivan," Dimitri said before she could speak. "The one Specter wants."
Artem's brows lifted. "Ah, the ghost file."
Natalia froze. "You know about it?"
"I know Sergei Volkov and his allies created something called Project N.I. and every record of it vanished after his death. When I tried to recover the files, half were corrupted, the other half encrypted with your initials."
She exchanged a glance with Dimitri. "You can decode them?"
Artem smirked faintly. "If they still exist."
Dimitri reached into his bag and pulled out the damaged flash drive, the one he had salvaged from the laptop before it burned out. He placed it on the table. "Then start with this."
Artem's eyes gleamed. "Do you have any idea what this could expose?"
"I don't care," Dimitri said. "Just open it."
The old man sighed but connected the drive to a laptop patched with tape and wires. The screen flickered, humming faintly. Lines of code spilled across it like rain. "Most of it is corrupted," he muttered. "But there is a fragment left intact."
The fragment loaded slowly, a sequence of medical data, followed by a single label:
Subject N.I. Phase 3 Adaptation Complete.
Natalia's pulse quickened. "That is me, isn't it?"
Artem nodded grimly. "Phase 3 implies earlier subjects failed. If you reached completion, then your DNA… adapted to whatever they were testing."
"What were they testing?" Dimitri asked.
Artem hesitated. "Hybrid neural mapping. Your father and Sergei tried merging biological memory with artificial code. A living interface, someone who could retain, transmit, and recall data subconsciously."
Dimitri frowned. "That is impossible."
"Not if you are willing to sacrifice ethics," Artem said. "They used children. Natalia's father was the neurologist who designed the cognitive templates. Sergei provided the genetic donors."
Natalia's stomach turned. "You mean I am..."
"Part of their experiment," Artem finished softly. "You are carrying data that shouldn't exist."
She stepped back, dizzy. The air seemed to tilt around her. "All this time, I thought Specter wanted to kill me."
Artem shook his head. "He doesn't want you dead. He wants what is inside you."
Dimitri's voice was low, dangerous. "Then he will have to tear it from her body."
Artem closed the laptop. "You don't understand. If Specter gets this data, he can rebuild the Volkov system, create soldiers who don't die, because their memories never end."
Natalia pressed her palms to her temples. "I can not be part of this."
"You already are," Artem said. "And the longer you run, the more dangerous you become, to him, to Dimitri, to yourself."
She looked at Dimitri, eyes wide with something between fear and betrayal. "You knew."
"I suspected," he said. "Not this."
"You are still lying."
"I'm trying to protect you."
"By keeping me ignorant?"
His silence was answer enough.
Artem cleared his throat. "If you want to survive, you will need to remove the data from her system before it activates."
"Activates?" Natalia echoed. "You mean it's dormant?"
"For now," Artem said. "But Specter's drone may have already triggered a response. The pulse they emit is not just for tracking, it's for syncing. If that code wakes up inside you…"
"What happens?" she whispered.
"You won't be you anymore."
The words hit harder than gunfire.
Natalia turned away, gripping the edge of the table. Her breath came in uneven gasps. "There has to be a way to stop it."
Artem hesitated. "There is one."
Dimitri stepped forward. "Tell me."
"A neural extraction procedure. Dangerous. Requires a bio-link interface. If it fails, she dies."
Dimitri's voice hardened. "Then we find someone who can make it work."
Artem looked at him grimly. "There's only one person left who can perform it, Specter himself."
The room went silent.
Natalia's heart sank. "You are saying the only way to save me… is to go to him?"
"I am saying you have to outthink him," Artem said. "Specter is not just a man anymore. He is connected, he sees through every machine tied to the Volkov network."
Dimitri's jaw clenched. "Then we cut him off."
"How?"
He stared at the flash drive. "By destroying the root."
Artem frowned. "The root server is buried under Volkov's old estate in Moscow. You can not just walk in."
"I do not plan to."
Dimitri looked up, and for a moment, Natalia saw the soldier again, the strategist born from fire and loss. The look that meant he had already chosen the impossible.
"Pack what you need," he said. "We leave in an hour."
Natalia grabbed his arm. "You can not be serious. Going back there is suicide."
"Maybe," he said. "But Specter has been leading this game too long. Time to make him chase us for real."
Artem exhaled heavily. "If you do this, Volkov… there is no turning back."
"There never was," Dimitri replied.
Natalia stood silent as he gathered his weapons, her mind spiraling. Phase 3. Adaptation complete. She didn't feel like a weapon, but she could feel something inside her shifting, like electricity crawling under her skin. A pulse that was not hers.
When they stepped out of the cottage, the fog had thickened again. The valley looked the same, quiet and harmless but the silence now felt wrong.
Dimitri paused at the treeline. "Artem," he said without turning. "If they find you..."
"They won't," the old man said. "But if you don't stop Specter, none of this will matter."
Dimitri nodded once, then motioned for Natalia to follow. They disappeared into the mist.
Inside, Artem watched their figures fade. He sighed, then reached for the laptop.
He opened a private terminal and typed a message, fingers trembling slightly.
> Subject located. N.I. Confirmed. Volkov is heading to Moscow.
He pressed send.
Outside, the fog swallowed everything.