The coordinates led them to a dead radio tower in the Alaskan wilderness, its steel bones jutting from the permafrost like a fossilized circuit board. Rabbit's teeth chattered as he jacked into the frozen terminal.
*"Thermals show a *hundred* pods down there,"* he said, breath fogging the screen. *"And one just went *active*."*
Lisa's upgraded eyes caught what the others couldn't—a faint blue pulse beneath the ice. A heartbeat. *Her* heartbeat.
Lora cocked her rifle. *"We should've burned this place years ago."*
The elevator shaft screamed as it descended.
---
### **PHOENIX ZERO**
The cryo-chamber was older than they expected. Cold War-era concrete stained with something darker than rust. The pod at the center bore no barcode—just a hand-painted designation:
**SUBJECT: ███████**
*"That's not possible,"* Lora whispered. *"This facility predates Phoenix by *decades*."*
The pod hissed open.
Inside lay a woman in her sixties, her face a roadmap of scars Lisa recognized intimately. The same cheekbone fracture. The same knife-slash through the left eyebrow.
The woman's eyes snapped open—*Lisa's eyes*—and she spoke in a voice like static and bones:
*"You're late, 404."*
---
### **THE FIRST GHOST**
She called herself **Wraith**.
The files showed a black-ops wetworker from the 80s, presumed dead after a Moscow extraction went wrong. The truth was worse.
*"They caught me,"* Wraith said, tracing Lisa's face with frostbitten fingers. *"Turned me into their *proof of concept*. Every scar you have? I earned it first."*
Rabbit nearly short-circuited his laptop pulling up the records. *"Holy *shit*—Project Phoenix wasn't about cloning. It was about *time travel*."*
Not literally. But close enough.
Wraith's DNA had been engineered to *carry memories* across generations. Every Phoenix subject—from Lora's batch to Lisa's—was a living archive. A backup drive.
And Wraith?
She was the original upload.
---
### **THE CHOICE**
Wraith pressed a rusted key into Lisa's palm. *"They're coming. The *real* architects."*
The monitors flared to life, showing satellite feeds of black vans converging on their position. No plates. No insignia.
Just the word **CLEANERS** stenciled on the doors.
*"We can run,"* Lora said.
*"Or,"* Wraith grinned, pulling a detonator from her jumpsuit, *"we can remind them why ghosts *haunt*."*
Rabbit looked at Lisa. Lisa looked at the key.
Somewhere beneath them, the facility's ancient reactor groaned awake.
---