Chapter 1 – The Knock at 5:02

It was still dark outside when I heard the pounding on my front door. Not just a knock—a hard, urgent pounding that rattled the stained glass in the entryway.

I rolled over and squinted at the clock on my nightstand.

5:02 a.m.

No one knocks at that hour unless something is wrong.

For a few seconds, I lay perfectly still, listening. Maybe I’d imagined it. Maybe it was a dream tangled up with the echo of last night’s anxiety. Then it came again—three sharp, deliberate blows.

I threw off the covers, shivered as my feet hit the cold floor, and grabbed the sweatshirt hanging from the bedpost. My heart was pounding faster than it should have for a thirty-three-year-old who did yoga three times a week.

The hallway was chilly, the house dim and quiet. I flicked on the light over the front door, the kind that made everything inside look slightly yellower and everything outside look blacker.

I opened the door.

My next-door neighbor, Gabriel Stone, stood on my porch.

His face was pale, his dark hair damp with sweat as if he’d run from his house to mine, even though it was only thirty feet away. He was breathing unevenly, like each breath had to be forced into his lungs.

“Don’t go to work today,” he said. His voice was low, urgent, controlled in the way people sound when they’re trying very hard not to panic. “Stay home. Just trust me.”

I stared at him.

Gabriel wasn’t the kind of neighbor who borrowed sugar or waved from the lawn mower. He was quiet, polite, and kept to himself. We’d exchanged a few hellos, a handful of packages misdelivered to the wrong porch, a short conversation about trash pickup schedules. He’d moved in about a year ago, bringing no family, no visible visitors, and the kind of furniture that arrived in plain trucks with no branding.

Seeing him like this, shaken, almost terrified, felt wrong. Like a stone statue suddenly starting to bleed.

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “Did something happen?”

He shook his head almost imperceptibly, but his eyes stayed locked on mine, sharp with warning.

“I can’t explain right now,” he said. “Just promise me you won’t leave the house today. Not for any reason.”

Behind him, the sky was just beginning to lighten in streaks of pale pink and gray over the rooftops. It should have been a normal morning—coffee, shower, commute, spreadsheets—but everything in this moment felt unreal.

“Gabriel, you’re scaring me,” I said.
“Why shouldn’t I go?”

He hesitated. For the first time since I’d opened the door, something like conflict passed over his face. Then his voice dropped into a whisper.

“You’ll understand by noon,” he said.

Before I could ask anything else, he glanced over his shoulder, scanning the quiet neighborhood like someone checking for watchers. Then he turned and walked briskly back to his house without another word. He didn’t look back.

I stood in the doorway with my hand still wrapped around the knob, my mind racing.

Rational Alyssa said: This is ridiculous. He’s being paranoid. People have mental breaks. You should call someone. Go to work like you always do.

Instinctual Alyssa—the part of me that had always trusted gut feelings over tidy narratives—said: Listen. Obey the weirdness. See what happens.

And then there was the third voice, the one that had grown louder in the last few months. The one that formed itself in my father’s voice.

Three months ago, I’d lost him. One minute he was a fifty-eight-year-old man making plans to finally visit my sister overseas, the next he was slumped in his office chair, dead of what the coroner called a “massive stroke.”

Except, in the week before it happened, he’d tried to tell me something.

“Alyssa, there’s… there’s something about our family I need you to know,” he’d said over dinner one night, pushing peas around his plate.

“What do you mean?” I’d asked.

“It’s time you knew,” he’d replied.

But every time I pressed, he’d say, “Not yet. Soon.”

Soon never came.

Then, after the funeral, the weirdness started.

A black sedan parked near my driveway for hours at a time, tinted windows reflecting nothing. My phone ringing from blocked numbers—no one speaking on the other end. My younger sister Sophie, who worked overseas as an aid coordinator, called me more often than usual.

“Have you noticed anything strange?” she’d asked.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” she’d said. “Anyone new hanging around? Government letters? Anything that feels…off?”

“No,” I’d answered, even though things did feel off.

Strange, small things that didn’t add up.

Something was moving around the edges of my life, quietly, intentionally. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it wasn’t random.

My name is Alyssa Rowan. I’m thirty-three years old. I’m a financial analyst at Henning & Cole Investments downtown. I live alone in the little house my grandmother left me when she passed. My days are predictable—bus at 7:30, desk at 8:15, pivot tables and risk assessments until five, groceries, Netflix, bed.

I’m not reckless. I don’t chase drama. I had never missed a day of work unless I was sick.

But standing in my doorway with the cold air licking my bare ankles and my strange neighbor’s warning echoing in my head, logic overruled habit.

If Gabriel was wrong, I’d lose a day of work and gain an embarrassing story.

If he was right, I might be saving my own life by doing nothing at all.

I closed the door, leaned my forehead against the wood for a moment, and made my decision.

I walked to the kitchen, grabbed my phone from the counter, and texted my manager.

I’m really sorry, Jenna. I have a personal emergency this morning. I won’t be able to come in. I’ll log in remotely if I can.

I set the phone down. My hands were trembling.

Then I waited.

The hours crawled.

I made coffee, but it tasted bitter and wrong. I sat at my laptop and tried to clear emails, but every spreadsheet blurred. Every little sound seemed amplified—the ticking kitchen clock, the hum of the fridge, the creak of the house settling. Once, the wind rattled a branch against the window, and I nearly dropped my mug.

By 11:30 a.m., I felt ridiculous.

Nothing had happened.

No strange cars. No ominous phone calls. No Gabriel returning with an explanation.

Maybe he’d had some kind of mental break. Maybe he’d been hacked and thought someone was tracking his phone. Maybe I should bring him a casserole and gently suggest a therapist.

I was on the verge of calling work and offering to come in after lunch when my phone rang.

Unknown number.

I answered.

“Hello?”

“Ma’am, this is Officer Taylor with the county police department,” a calm, authoritative voice said.
“Are you aware of a critical incident that occurred at your workplace this morning?”

My breath caught.

“No,” I said slowly. “What incident?”

He exhaled, and something about the sound told me this was not a conversation he was used to having over the phone.

“There was a violent attack at your building,” he said.
“Several employees were injured. We have reason to believe you were present.”

Cold spread through my body.

“That’s impossible,” I said.
“I wasn’t there. I’ve been home all morning.”

Silence hummed on the line.

“Ms. Rowan,” the officer said.
“We have security footage of your car arriving at the Henning & Cole parking garage at 8:02 a.m. Your work ID was used to enter the building, and you were logged into the third floor at 8:11 a.m. You were reported missing after the attack.”

I had to grip the back of the chair to stay upright.

“My car…” I whispered. “My card…”

Someone had walked into my building wearing my life.

My heart hammered.

“I’m telling you, I wasn’t there,” I said.
“Someone must have cloned my key card or stolen my car. Check the footage. Did you see who got out?”

“The footage is corrupted at the moment your vehicle pulls in,” he said.
“We only see the license plates and the car entering. We do not have a clear image of the driver exiting the vehicle.”

Of course it was.

“Can anyone verify your location this morning?” he asked.

I looked around my empty kitchen.

“No,” I said. “I live alone.”

There was a pause, then his tone shifted into something more formal.

“Ms. Rowan,” he said.
“At approximately 11:47 a.m., an emergency alert was triggered on the third floor of your building following a coordinated attack. Due to the nature of the incident and the evidence recovered at the scene, we are required to locate you for your safety and for questioning.”

“Questioning?” I repeated. “What… what kind of evidence?”

“Items belonging to you were recovered near the scene,” he said.
“Your ID badge, a personal access token, and other materials. We need to confirm your physical condition and whereabouts.”

My mouth went dry.

Items belonging to me. Used in an attack I hadn’t been present for.

Outside my window, a leaf skittered down the street. The world looked the same, and yet one phone call had split it open.

The officer’s voice stayed calm, but beneath it I heard something else now—urgency, maybe even tension.

“Units will be dispatched to your address shortly,” he said.
“Please remain at home. Do not leave the premises.”

Normally, that’s the kind of sentence that makes you feel safe.

This time, it felt like a net being thrown in my direction.

As soon as the call ended, another knock hit my door.

Not frantic. Not gentle. Firm, precise, three beats.

“Alyssa?” a man’s voice called quietly. “It’s Gabriel. Open the door. We need to talk.”

Chapter 2 – The Man Next Door

My chest tightened.

“How did you know the police were going to call me?” I asked. I didn’t move toward the door. I stayed where I was, barefoot on the kitchen tile, phone in my hand like it could somehow protect me.

There was a slight pause. When Gabriel answered, his voice came through low and steady.

“Because they’re not coming to help you,” he said.
“They’re coming to place you under federal custody.”

Ice washed through me.

I moved down the hallway toward the front door but stopped a foot away, my hand hovering over the lock.

“What are you talking about?” I asked through the wood.

“They staged the incident at your building to eliminate everyone there,” Gabriel said.
“You were supposed to be among them. Not as a victim—”

He paused.

“—as the person they would blame.”

I closed my eyes for a moment.

“They told me they found my things at the scene,” I said.

“Of course they did,” he said.
“They needed a story ready to go. A neat, contained narrative. A woman with access, a sudden act of violence, a fragile mental state—”

“I am not—”

“I know you’re not,” he cut in.
“They know it too. That’s not the point. They don’t need you to be guilty. They need you to be useful.”

I swallowed hard.

“If they only wanted to frame me, why call to check if I’m alive?” I asked.

“Because you slipping out of the script changes the plan,” Gabriel said.
“They will want to recover you, interrogate you, and then decide whether to kill you, disappear you, or rework the narrative around your capture.”

There was rustling outside, as if he’d turned his head to scan the street again.

“You have less than ten minutes before they get here,” he said.
“If you open the door to them, this ends poorly. If you open the door to me, you might have a chance.”

“Your word against theirs,” I said.

“My word and your father’s,” he replied.

The world narrowed to that one sentence.

I undid the deadbolt. Opened the door just enough to see him.

He stood on my porch wearing a gray jacket, jeans, and an expression that was both alert and incredibly sad. His eyes scanned my face quickly, like he was checking a picture against reality.

“May I come in?” he asked.

I hesitated for a heartbeat, then opened the door wider.

“Make it quick,” I said.

He stepped inside and closed the door behind him, locking it with a practiced twist. He moved through my entryway as if he’d mapped it in his mind already, going straight to the front window and peeking through the blinds without disturbing them.

“You looked out before you knocked this morning,” I realized. “You were checking for someone.”

“I always check,” he said.

“Always?”

He turned toward me.

“Alyssa,” he said, voice gentler now.
“I didn’t move in next door by accident. I’ve been here to watch over you.”

“I don’t even know you,” I shot back.

“You don’t,” he said.
“But your father did. He asked me to protect you if he died.”

The floor felt like it shifted an inch beneath my feet.

“My father… what?”

Gabriel reached inside his jacket and pulled out a small, black envelope, creased as if it had been folded and unfolded many times.

“He left this with me,” he said. “I was instructed not to hand it over unless certain conditions were met.”

“What conditions?”

He gave me a look that said, this.

I took the envelope from him. The paper was thick, old-fashioned. My fingers shook as I slid a folded page out of it.

My father’s handwriting stared back at me.

Alyssa,

If you are reading this, then what I feared has come to pass. You are not in danger because of anything you did. You are in danger because of who you are. There is more to your identity than you know.

Gabriel will tell you the rest. Trust him as you once trusted me. Do not surrender yourself. If they take you in, you will disappear.

– Dad

My throat closed.

I’d spent weeks replaying our last conversations, wondering what he’d meant to tell me. He’d tried to warn me and I’d chalked it up to grief or age. He’d told me to trust my instincts.

Now, his voice reached across the grave to tell me that the strange man next door was safer than the police at my door.

I looked up at Gabriel.

“Talk,” I said.

He nodded once, a small flicker of relief crossing his features.

“Your father was not the man you thought he was,” Gabriel said.
“He was not just an accountant. The job at the firm, the long hours—that was his cover. He had been working as a covert investigator attached to a federal oversight unit for nearly twenty years.”

I shook my head.

“No. He hated travel. He liked crossword puzzles and Sunday dinners and complaining about the tax code.”

“He also liked encryption algorithms and spotting patterns no one else saw,” Gabriel said.
“That’s how he found Project Origin. That’s why he died.”

The room felt suddenly too small.

“What’s Project Origin?” I asked.

“We don’t have much time,” he said.
“You need to understand the basics quickly. Twenty years ago, your father uncovered a classified biogenetics program—one funded through shell companies and routed through private research labs. It was designed to identify and track individuals with rare genomic markers.”

“Biogenetics,” I repeated.

“Bloodlines, Alyssa,” he said.
“Families. Very specific ones. The goal was not to cure disease. It was to identify immunity—to find people with naturally occurring resistance to viral threats and chemical exposure. People whose blood could be weaponized as much as it could be studied.”

My mouth felt dry.

“What does that have to do with me?”

He stepped closer, his eyes searching mine.

“Because you are not just on their list,” he said.
“You are at the top of it.”

The sound of a car door closing outside snapped our heads toward the window.

“Gabriel,” I whispered. “They’re here.”

Chapter 3 – The Initiative

“We need to move,” Gabriel said. “Now.”

“I thought you said don’t leave,” I said.

“Don’t leave with them,” he replied.
“Come with me.”

Several sets of footsteps crunched on the sidewalk outside. Not the casual stride of the mailman or a neighbor out for a walk. Heavy, measured, in sync.

“Back door,” Gabriel said.

He moved down the hall toward the kitchen, his steps soundless. I followed, adrenaline making the edges of the world sharpen. He unlocked the back door, eased it open a crack, and scanned the yard.

“Stay low,” he said.
“If they’ve placed surveillance, it’ll be on the street side.”

We slipped out into the cold backyard, the wet grass soaking my feet through my socks. My heart pounded in my ears as we cut across the narrow strip between my house and his, crouching behind the arbor vitae hedge.

Through the gaps in the leaves, I saw them.

Three unmarked vehicles—two black SUVs and one gray sedan—rolled to a stop in front of my house. Four men and one woman got out, all wearing plain clothes that screamed “undercover” louder than any badge. One of the men lifted a hand to his ear and spoke into a hidden mic.

I couldn’t hear his words. I didn’t need to.

They fanned out with practiced ease. One took the side gate. One went to the back. Two approached the front door. They moved like people who had done this before, in houses that never made the news.

“Federal custody,” I whispered, remembering the officer’s words.

“They’re not police,” Gabriel said quietly.
“They’re retrieval. There is a difference.”

“Retrieval of what?” I whispered. “Me? Evidence?”

“Assets,” he said.
“And you are one of them.”

My stomach twisted.

“How long have you known?” I asked.

“About you?” he said.
“Seven years. Since your father flagged your file to my unit. About the plan for today? Less than forty-eight hours. Someone in their chain sent a corrupted signal. Your father anticipated they’d accelerate their timeline if he died. He left contingencies. I’m one of them.”

One of the agents at the front door rang the bell. Another knocked.

“Alyssa Rowan,” a male voice called out.
“Federal agents. We need to speak with you.”

My empty living room stared back at them.

“Once they realize you’re not inside, they’ll broaden the perimeter,” Gabriel said.
“We need to be gone before that happens.”

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“To the only place they don’t control yet,” he said.
“The vault your father built to house what he stole from them.”

He guided me around my house, keeping low beneath the windows. At the far end of the block, a dark SUV idled near the corner, facing away from us.

“That one’s not with them,” Gabriel murmured.
“That’s ours.”

We slipped through side yards and across a quiet back street until we reached the vehicle. Gabriel opened the passenger door for me.

“Get in,” he said.

I hesitated only a second, long enough to think about all the ways this could be a trap too. But my father’s note pressed against my palm in my sweatshirt pocket.

Trust him, it said.

I got in.

As Gabriel slid into the driver’s seat and started the engine, I saw one of the men from my front porch turn suddenly, his gaze cutting down the side of the house, brows knitting.

“Go,” I said.

We pulled away from the curb just as the man jogged toward my driveway, one hand lifting to the radio at his ear.

We headed out of the neighborhood and toward the highway. The houses fell away, giving way to service roads and retail signs and then, eventually, open land.

I watched the city blur past in silence, hands wrapped around the note in my pocket, knuckles white.

“Talk,” I said finally.

Gabriel nodded.

“Your father worked under a classified oversight group tasked with investigating misuse of federal research funds,” he said.
“On paper, it was about budget waste. In reality, it was about stopping off-book projects.”

“Projects like this… bio whatever you called it?”

“Biogenetic initiative,” he said.
“Twenty-two years ago, they got wind of a program funneling huge sums into ‘immunology research’ with almost no public output. No published papers. No regulatory approvals. It didn’t match the money. Your father dug.”

“He wasn’t an investigator,” I said. “He was a numbers guy.”

“He was a numbers guy who could smell a lie in a spreadsheet from a mile away,” Gabriel said.
“Follow enough numbers, and they lead you to people.”

He glanced at me before turning his attention back to the road.

“He found blood records,” Gabriel continued.
“Taken from children without proper consent. Cross-referenced with genealogical databases, insurance records, hospital data. He found patterns—certain families flagged repeatedly, certain children classified as ‘outliers’.”

“And I was one of them,” I said.

“The primary one,” he said.
“They called it the Rowan Initiative in their internal files. Subject markers tied to you were considered…unique.”

My mind flashed back to my childhood.

The doctor visits that seemed more frequent than my friends’. The extra vials of blood during routine check-ups. The time I’d been kept overnight for “observation” after a mild fever. The way my father’s jaw had tightened when I told him about a nurse I’d never seen before drawing more blood than usual.

He’d told me not to worry.

He’d told me it was nothing.

He’d lied.

“When you were seven, a blood sample taken during a routine allergy screening flagged markers they’d never seen before in a human subject,” Gabriel said.
“Complete immunity to several viral strains they were studying. Abnormal regenerative factors in your white blood cells. In you, it happened naturally. They’d been trying—and failing—to engineer something similar in lab subjects for years.”

I swallowed hard.

“Are you saying I can’t get sick?”

“You can,” he said.
“But not like other people. Your father kept the worst of it from you, but he told our unit enough. You recover faster. You shrug off exposures other people don’t. You never had the childhood illnesses your classmates did, did you?”

I thought about the perfect attendance certificates I used to get. My sister catching everything and me being the one carrying soup bowls and Kleenex.

I thought about how I’d never had the flu, never been laid flat by anything more than a twenty-four-hour bug.

“So they saw me as…what?” I asked.
“A resource? A lab rat?”

“An asset,” he said.
“That’s the word they use. Something to be exploited, replicated, controlled.”

He changed lanes, the SUV purring smoothly over the asphalt.

“Your father discovered they had requested additional samples from your pediatrician without his consent,” Gabriel continued.
“He dug further. Found the internal designation files. Found proposals for ‘expanded subject engagement’.”

“What does that mean?”

“It meant taking you into federal custody under the pretense of ‘specialized medical care’,” he said.
“Your father refused. He blocked the transfers. He went to the oversight board. He thought exposing the project would end it.”

“But it didn’t,” I said.

“It forced them deeper underground,” he said.
“They didn’t end the initiative. They erased the evidence by erasing anyone who knew too much. Which is why your father died of a ‘stroke’ at fifty-eight.”

I stared straight ahead as the city fell away behind us.

“He tried to tell me,” I said softly.
“After Sophie left. He said, ‘It’s time you knew more about our family.’ I thought… I thought he meant some old affair or a secret cousin.”

Gabriel was quiet for a moment.

“He was trying to protect you,” he said.
“He hoped retirement would come before their timeline caught up. It didn’t.”

We drove in silence for a while, highway signs ticking by like metronome beats.

“So what was today?” I asked finally.
“Why the attack at my building?”

“A convenient stage,” Gabriel said.
“You work with financial data, right? Access to portfolios, corporate accounts, trust funds?”

“Yes,” I said.

“They hit Henning & Cole to do two things at once,” he said.
“Eliminate key witnesses involved in their money laundering operations through that firm. And place you at the center of it.”

“The police said they found my ID,” I said.
“My card logs, my car…”

“They probably did,” he said.
“Because they put them there. Your car plates, your access token, personal items taken from your desk or home. Enough to make a story that the public will swallow, especially if you vanish conveniently soon after.”

“So they were going to kill me,” I said.
“Or haul me off and ‘disappear’ me.”

“Until forty-eight hours ago, yes,” he said.
“Then the parameters changed.”

“What changed?”

“Your last blood test,” he said.
“You donated at a blood drive at work two weeks ago, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I said slowly.
“How do you know that?”

“Because it flagged in a system your father hacked before he died,” he said.
“An old alarm tripped by a new sample. It confirmed that whatever you are, you still are, and their data is incomplete without you.”

“So they decided to… what? Harvest me instead of kill me?”

“They decided to do both,” he said.
“Keep you alive long enough to extract what they need. Then remove you from the board. Dead asset, living narrative. It’s cleaner that way.”

I let out a shaky breath.

“And here I thought I was just a boring analyst,” I said.

“You were never boring,” he said.

Chapter 4 – The Vault

The farther we got from the city, the fewer cars shared the road. Eventually, Gabriel turned off the main highway onto a two-lane road lined with bare trees. Brown fields stretched out in every direction, dusted with frost.

“How much farther?” I asked.

“Ten minutes,” he said.

“To what exactly?”

“To the place your father called ‘insurance’,” he said.
“A secure storage vault where he kept everything he couldn’t trust to digital systems. The people behind Origin think they scrubbed the evidence. They’re wrong.”

We turned again, this time onto a narrower road that soon became a gravel path. A chain-link gate loomed ahead. Gabriel pulled out a remote from the visor and pressed it. The gate slid open on whining wheels.

“You’ve been here before,” I said.

“Three times,” he said.
“All with your father.”

Beyond the gate, the gravel gave way to dirt and then to a cleared patch of overgrown land. It looked like nothing—trees, brush, a gentle hill.

Then I saw it.

Half-buried in the hillside, hidden beneath vines and dead branches, was a steel door with a rusted handle and a faded emblem etched into the metal.

The Rowan crest.

My grandmother had once told me it was a family symbol, something from “the old country.” A tree with deep roots and a circle of stars.

Gabriel parked the SUV and killed the engine. The silence pressed in, broken only by the tick of cooling metal and the faint rustle of wind through the weeds.

“Last chance to turn back,” he said.

“There’s nothing to turn back to,” I replied.

We walked to the door. Up close, the metal was smoother than it first appeared. Newer hardware sat beneath the façade of rust—a biometric panel hidden under a sliding plate.

Gabriel nodded at it.

“He said it would recognize your bloodline,” he said.

“How?”

“DNA profile,” he said.
“It was keyed to his genetic markers. It was designed to accept his children if anything happened to him.”

My palm felt suddenly sweaty.

“Just…touch it?” I asked.

He nodded.

I pressed my hand against the panel. For a second, nothing happened. Then a small red light flickered to green. A chime sounded deep inside the door, and heavy bolts slid back with a deep, mechanical groan.

The door swung inward, revealing a short corridor lit by emergency-style LEDs. The air that washed out was cold and dry and smelled faintly of dust and metal and old paper.

We stepped inside.

The vault room was circular, walls lined with shelves of black storage cases. In the center, on a pedestal under a glass cover, sat a single leather-bound journal.

My chest tightened.

My father loved journals. He’d filled dozens over the years with notes, charts, little sketches. He’d always said he trusted ink more than hard drives.

I moved toward the pedestal. There was a small envelope taped to the cover with my name written in his hand.

“Alyssa.”

I peeled it off and opened it.

Alyssa,

If you are here, it means they moved faster than I hoped. It also means you are as stubborn as I knew you would be.

Listen to Gabriel. Trust your instincts. The files in this room are the last remaining trace of what we uncovered. They will not stop until they control both you and this information. You cannot let them have either.

There is one more thing you must decide. In the back of this vault is a terminal wired to an offline transmission system. You can use it to either surrender the data back into the shadows, or release it into the world where it belongs. Whatever you choose, know this:

You were never their creation. You are their proof that nature won.

I love you. Always.

– Dad

My eyes stung.

I set the note down and lifted the glass off the journal. Inside were cramped pages filled with my father’s neat script. Dates. Names. Lab codes. Diagrams of molecular structures I didn’t understand. Margin notes that read like a man arguing with himself.

“Can we copy this?” I asked.

“We will,” Gabriel said.
“But first, the terminal.”

He pointed toward a section of wall at the back of the room. There, half-hidden behind filing cases, was a narrow doorway leading to a smaller chamber.

Inside, a single console sat on a metal desk, screens dark but humming faintly. A generator somewhere deep in the hill kept this place alive even after my father was not.

I sat down in front of the console. Two options glowed dimly on the display as soon as the system recognized my presence.

ACQUISITION PROTOCOL – RETURN DATA TO PRIMARY SERVER

REVELATION PROTOCOL – DISTRIBUTE DATA TO PUBLIC NODES

“Acquisition,” I said slowly, “gives it back to them.”

“It sends it back into the black-hole system Origin uses to bury its projects,” Gabriel said.
“They’d get their evidence. They’d be able to pretend this never happened, adjust their strategies, and try again.”

“And Revelation?”

“Blasts it out,” he said.
“Media outlets, watchdog groups, independent data nodes your father pre-coded years ago. They’d have to fight for control of the narrative in the open instead of in secret.”

The screen waited patiently. I did not.

“If I hit Revelation, what happens to me?” I asked.

“They will label you a traitor,” he said.
“A terrorist. They will say you leaked sensitive information that puts national security at risk. They’ll say anything except the truth—that you exposed a crime.”

“If I hit Acquisition?”

“They will still come for you,” he said.
“You’re too valuable to them. The difference is, the world will never know why.”

There are decision points in life where you feel time slow down. You see the future branching in front of you like a map. One road is dark but smooth. The other is rough but honest.

I thought about my dad alone in an office somewhere, years ago, discovering that his daughter’s blood had been catalogued in a lab she’d never visited. I thought about him pushing peas around his plate, trying to find the courage to tell me everything and choosing, instead, to protect me with silence.

He hadn’t been able to finish what he started.

But he’d left me the tools.

I reached out and pressed REVELATION PROTOCOL.

The console beeped. Lines of code began to scroll up the screen. A countdown appeared in the corner—three minutes until full dissemination. Progress bars lit up as encrypted packets shot into the dark corners of the internet, headed for recipients who had no idea their inboxes and servers were about to become a battlefield.

Gabriel watched the screen, then me.

“It’s done,” he said quietly.
“You just lit a fuse that can’t be put out.”

Somewhere above us, faintly at first and then more clearly, an alarm began to sound.

“They found the gate,” Gabriel said.
“We’re out of time.”

Chapter 5 – The First Day of the Rest

We moved fast.

Gabriel grabbed three of the black cases from the shelves and shoved them into a duffel bag he pulled from under the desk. I tucked my father’s journal into my jacket, the weight of it both anchor and weapon.

The alarm grew louder, echoing through the metal corridors.

“They’ll come in through the main entrance,” Gabriel said as we ran.
“There’s a maintenance tunnel that exits on the north side of the hill. It’s narrow, but it bypasses the primary blast door.”

“You sound very sure of the architecture of a secret family vault,” I said, breathless.

“I helped design the failsafes,” he said.
“Your dad didn’t trust anyone else.”

We reached a narrow hatch half-hidden behind shelving. He heaved it open. A wave of colder air washed over us. The tunnel beyond was just big enough to crouch in, lit by a string of bare bulbs.

He went first; I followed. The metal under my hands was slick with condensation. I could hear my own heartbeat and, faintly, the heavy thud of boots somewhere above as whoever had tracked us finally breached the outer door.

By the time we emerged at the far end, my legs burned and my palms were raw. We pushed aside a camouflage of branches and stepped out into a stand of trees. The sky was a flat, iron gray. In the distance, I could hear the low chop of helicopter blades.

Gabriel led me down a slope toward another path where a second vehicle waited—a battered pickup that looked like it belonged to any farmer.

We climbed in. Dust billowed as we pulled onto an access road. Behind us, on the ridge where my father’s vault was hidden, three black helicopters appeared over the treeline, searchlights sweeping.

“Will they know what I did?” I asked.

“When the feeds start lighting up and journalists start calling people they haven’t spoken to in years, they’ll guess,” Gabriel said.
“But they won’t have the monopoly on the story anymore.”

My phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out. Notifications flooded the screen faster than I could read. News alerts. Emails. A text from Sophie.

What did you do?

Another from an unknown number.

We know where you are. Surrender now and this can be negotiated.

I turned the phone off.

“So what now?” I asked.

“Now?” Gabriel said.
“Now we stay ahead of them. There are safe houses. People who owe your father. People who have been waiting for someone to push this button. You’re not alone, Alyssa. You were never meant to do this alone.”

“I didn’t exactly plan on doing it at all,” I said.

He gave me a sideways look.

“And yet you did,” he said.
“Given the chance to vanish quietly, you chose to pull the fire alarm.”

“I chose not to be their silent asset,” I said.

“And in doing so, you became something else,” he said.
“A threat. A symbol. Depends who you ask.”

We drove in silence for a while, the world outside rushing past in winter colors—gray road, brown fields, bare trees.

I thought of the people in my office whose names I hadn’t heard yet in relation to “the incident.” I thought of the security guard who always held the door for me in the morning. My manager, Jenna, who teased me about highlighting my spreadsheets too aggressively. How many of them were gone because of a plan I’d never agreed to be part of?

“I wasn’t there,” I said softly.

“But you were meant to be,” Gabriel said.
“And that’s enough for them to try to use you. They will push a version of the truth that serves them. We will push the rest.”

“We?”

“You and anyone else who refuses to let this go back underground,” he said.
“Whistleblowers. Investigative journalists. Rogue analysts. Your father’s old colleagues. The list is longer than you think.”

“What about my old life?” I asked.

He was quiet for a moment.

“You can’t go back to being invisible,” he said.
“Your name is going to be everywhere very soon. Some will call you a traitor. Some will call you a hero. Most won’t know what to think. But you will never be ‘just a financial analyst’ again.”

I looked down at my hands. They were shaking, but less than they had this morning.

“I used to think my life was small,” I said.
“Unremarkable. Comfortable.”

“It was controlled,” he said.
“Engineered to feel safe so you wouldn’t look too hard. In a way, you were living in a cage made of routines.”

“And now?”

“Now you’re living in truth,” he said.
“It’s messier. But it’s real.”

The sun struggled to push through the clouds as we drove. Somewhere, servers were buzzing with the weight of new data. Somewhere, a junior reporter was getting the scoop of their career. Somewhere, the people who ran Project Origin were swearing at screens, shredding papers, planning countermeasures.

And me?

I sat in the passenger seat of a dusty pickup truck driven by a man who had knocked on my door at 5:02 a.m. and told me not to go to work. A man my father had trusted when he knew his own time was running out.

I slid my hand into my pocket and felt the edge of the keycard Gabriel had given me earlier, still warm from where it had rested against my skin. The one that had opened the vault. The one that would now mark me as someone who had seen the inside of a secret.

I thought of my dad’s words.

You were not born to be controlled. You were born to reveal what control really is.

For the first time since he died, I didn’t feel like his missing conversation was an unfinished sentence. It was a baton, passed.

“We’ll stop at the next safe house,” Gabriel said.
“There’ll be people there who can help with aliases, secure channels, all the unglamorous parts of being hunted.”

“And then?” I asked.

“And then we work,” he said.
“We follow the money. We follow the names. We make it impossible for them to pretend this never happened. You’re not just defending yourself anymore. You’re finishing what your father started.”

I leaned my head back against the seat, closing my eyes for a moment.

This morning, I had woken up thinking it would be a normal Thursday. Commute. Coffee. Conference calls. The usual.

Now, I was someone else.

Not because my DNA made me different, not because a file labeled “Subject 7B” existed on a tablet, not because powerful people wanted me erased.

I was different because I chose not to play the role they wrote.

I chose my own.

As the pickup rolled down the lonely road toward whatever came next, I opened my eyes and watched the horizon.

I was supposed to die today.

Instead, I became the one thing Project Origin never designed me to be.

Visible.