The student council lounge was dim, quiet—almost reverent.
Veronica sat cross-legged in one of the leather armchairs, her expression unreadable. In her hand, a slim white envelope. No stamp. No label. No fingerprints. Slid under her office door sometime during the last class.
Inside it?
A single micro SD card.
No note.
Just a time: 7:07 PM.
And a location: Listen where no one listens.
She didn't like riddles. She preferred knives.
Still, she cracked her knuckles, turned the card over twice, and slid it into the encrypted burner tablet she'd stolen back from a French weapons dealer three weeks ago.
The device whirred softly to life.
A single file appeared.
"Echo.77 – Audio Only – AutoPlay"
Veronica didn't touch anything.
The file launched itself.
Click—static—click.
A soft hiss.
Then…
"…Veronica."
She didn't move, but her stomach coiled.
That voice.
She knew it.
Not intimately. Not lovingly. Not with the pain of grief or the sharpness of guilt.
But she remembered it the way one remembers a nightmare.
A voice from her first life.
One that should not exist anymore.
"…She doesn't know what she is. The Queen thinks she's moving pieces, but she's on the board too. You remember what happened last time, don't you? Don't you?"
The audio distorted again. Crackling interference. Then:
"…The code wakes. Mirror remembers. And the Black Sun is still watching."
Veronica's lips parted slightly.
"Mirror?"
Iris, who'd been lounging upside down on the couch nearby with her sketchpad, froze. Her pencil snapped in two.
"Wait, Mirror? As in—your old tech lead from the Syndicate?"
Veronica nodded slowly. "She died. Years ago. When our Rome headquarters burned."
But she didn't sound certain.
The voice had continued.
"…Seven queens. One throne. Blood for memory. Ash for truth. Veronica Lin, do you remember what you buried?"
A sharp knock echoed at the door.
Lucas stepped in, silent as shadow.
But the moment the audio registered, his entire body stiffened.
His gaze locked on the tablet like it was a viper.
"Stop the playback," he said abruptly.
Veronica's eyes narrowed. "Why?"
Lucas moved before she could stop him.
In a single, precise motion, he crossed the room, plucked the tablet from her lap, and tapped into its root system using a sequence Veronica recognized.
An override code.
The same one used by the Crown Court's cybersecurity division.
"Lucas," she warned. "What are you doing?"
He didn't answer.
Instead, he isolated the file, ran a secondary trace, and scrubbed the system.
Then—
He deleted it.
Irreversibly.
Not just deleted.
Burned.
"Lucas!" Veronica stood, voice sharper now. "What the hell did you just erase?"
"Something you weren't ready to hear."
He met her gaze, expression like iron.
Iris stood too, alarmed. "Wait—wait—what are you not telling her? That was clearly someone from her old life! Someone who knows Black Lotus! That's not a coincidence—"
Lucas cut in, voice cold and too calm. "You think coincidences exist in this game? That was bait. And it wasn't from Mirror."
Veronica's fists clenched. "You recognized the voice."
"I did."
"Then say it."
Lucas hesitated.
Then, almost inaudibly: "It was someone the Queen killed."
The silence that followed was deafening.
Veronica's skin prickled. "You're not making sense."
He turned away. "You're not the only one who came back from the dead with enemies, Veronica."
The use of her full name wasn't lost on her.
Neither was the weight in his tone.
He was hiding something.
Worse—protecting her from something.
Veronica took a step forward, her voice low, controlled. "Tell me the truth. Was it the Court?"
"No." Lucas shook his head once. "Not directly."
"Then what?"
His silence was answer enough.
Lucas wasn't refusing out of duty.
He was scared.
And Lucas Kaelari—Lucien—didn't get scared.
Not unless something monstrous was on the move.
She stared at the now-blank tablet. Her reflection shimmered in the black screen.
The voice had mentioned a name she hadn't heard since her fall from the throne—Mirror.
Her closest ally in her first life. A woman brilliant enough to break into NATO's systems and loyal enough to have died protecting Veronica's escape.
If Mirror had survived…
Or worse—if someone had resurrected her data…
Then they were playing a game larger than just vengeance or family vendettas.
They were digging up gods.
"I need to see the original encryption log," Veronica said coldly.
"You won't find anything," Lucas replied. "The entire string was a phantom. That file was timed to self-destruct."
"I still want to see the shell code."
Lucas didn't answer.
Instead, he turned to leave.
Veronica stepped in front of him, blocking his exit.
"Don't walk away."
"You're not the only one with things to protect, Veronica," he said quietly.
She faltered for half a breath.
That was when she saw it—just for a second—the grief in his eyes.
And something more terrifying.
Recognition.
He'd heard that voice before.
Not just in the file.
In his own past.
And now he was deleting traces, not to deceive her…
But to shield her from whatever hell he thought was coming.
"I can fight my own battles," she said softly.
Lucas's voice was hoarse. "This one might not let you."
---
Later that night, Iris sat alone in the lounge with a glass of soda and her sketchpad, but her eyes weren't on the page.
They were on the door Lucas had left through.
Something about him had shifted.
He was spiraling.
And she didn't like where it was going.
Veronica had vanished into the IT room again, furious and focused. She'd already torn apart the playback system and was now trying to extract fragments from the corrupted memory log, desperate for a single byte of residual data.
But the file was gone.
Not just deleted.
Ghosted.
"I've seen her erase a banking system with a toothpick and a VPN," Iris muttered. "But he beat her to it."
She scribbled something without looking.
A name.
Mirror.
She had a hunch.
And hunches—especially in the Lin family orbit—never meant good things.
---
Elsewhere, in the archives of an underground data vault beneath Geneva, a single access point blinked to life.
A monitor powered on.
A voice command whispered into the void:
"Playback authorization: Ghost Queen Protocol."
The file opened.
The same one Lucas had deleted.
The voice played again:
"…Veronica. Do you remember what you buried?"
This time, the message continued.
"…You thought death ended your story. It didn't. You passed the crown. You forgot what that means."
A shadowed figure leaned forward from the flickering screen.
Face obscured.
Voice distorted.
But the final line was crystal clear.
"I'll see you at the Black Sun Summit, my Queen."
The screen went black