The snow had thickened by morning. Geneva looked like a porcelain city under glass—silent, sterile, and impossibly still. From the window of their new temporary safehouse, Ethan watched a pigeon land on a lamp post and shake the frost from its feathers.
He barely noticed Darius entering the room until the man dropped a stack of surveillance printouts on the table.
"Three relays match the signatures from the estate," Darius said. "One of them's dead. The other two are still active—barely."
Ethan turned from the window. "And Ghost 02?"
"Left no digital trace. But whoever they are, they didn't want us walking away empty-handed."
Ethan sat down and scanned the top sheet. It wasn't just Ghost 02's disappearance that bothered him. It was the method. The message. It had the sharpness of someone who had once been family.
"They want us to follow," he muttered. "But only far enough to see what they want us to see."
Darius poured black coffee into two tin mugs. "What bothers me is the timing. The HELIX folder—it wasn't just buried. It was bait."
Ethan sipped slowly. "Which means we've been drawn into something much bigger than inheritance."
Darius tapped a location circled in red on one of the maps. "I think Marcus anticipated this. The Geneva house wasn't the only vault. According to the files, there's another facility just outside Marseille. Decommissioned under a shell corp ten years ago."
Ethan raised an eyebrow. "Military-grade?"
"Better. Built like one of NATO's black sites. Marcus used it to house things too dangerous to keep inside national borders."
Ethan stood. The air around him bristled with new weight. "Then we go to Marseille."
They took backroads.
Ethan insisted they switch vehicles twice, and Darius agreed without protest. Somewhere between Lyon and Avignon, they abandoned their last burner phones and committed fully to offline mode. No GPS. No signals. Just hard copy maps and quiet roads.
The facility was buried into the side of a limestone ridge. From above, it looked like a weather station or abandoned observatory—three domes, two towers, no signage. But as Darius disabled the perimeter sensors, Ethan felt the presence of something older, deeper.
Inside, the air was cool and dry. The walls were concrete layered with soundproofing foam and copper insulation. Emergency lights flickered as the main systems failed to power up.
"It's been dormant for a while," Darius said. "Marcus probably had it locked down after Ghost 02 disappeared."
Ethan followed him through a narrow corridor lined with vault doors. Some were sealed with biometric panels, others with codepads covered in dust.
One of the doors bore the Alden crest.
He placed his hand on the scanner.
A soft tone. Green light. The door hissed open.
Inside: racks of hard drives, backup servers, and a single chair facing an inactive console. A sealed metal case sat in the center.
Ethan approached and cracked it open.
Inside was a single sheet of paper, folded once.
He unfolded it slowly.
HELIX PROTOCOL: Failsafe 3
Activation requires full biometric signature.
Warning: This protocol overrides all remaining inheritance directives.
Beneath that, a handwritten line in Marcus's unmistakable script:
If you activate this, you become the war.
Ethan stared at it. His fingers tightened.
"What is it?" Darius asked.
"Marcus wasn't trying to protect his legacy," Ethan said slowly. "He was trying to make sure no one else could weaponize it."
Darius crouched beside the console. "Then Ghost 02 must've tried. Or did. And failed."
Ethan knelt, eyes fixed on the console. "Or succeeded—and walked away with part of it."
He reached for the biometric pad.
Darius grabbed his wrist. "You sure about this?"
Ethan looked at him. "No. But we didn't come all this way to turn back."
He pressed his palm to the pad.
The room powered up. Fans kicked in. Lights activated in sequence. The screen lit up.
VERIFICATION COMPLETE.
USER: ALDEN_HEIR
PROTOCOL HELIX – PHASE ONE INITIATED.
A soft beep echoed behind them. Then another.
Darius turned sharply. "We've got motion outside."
Ethan didn't hesitate. "They followed us."
From the upper hatch, faint footsteps. The soft hum of silencers being checked.
Ethan grabbed the sealed drive and pocketed it.
"This isn't a safehouse," he said grimly. "It's a fuse box."
He and Darius moved fast—sweeping the room one last time, copying what they could. Then they pulled back, toward the maintenance shaft.
A single gunshot cracked in the corridor.
Darius swore. "One of them tripped the sensor."
Ethan led them into the dark tunnel. "Then they know where we are."
Behind them, another echo. Then silence.
The war had just begun.