For a second, I thought he was going to have me arrested. The air crackled, thick with things I wasn’t cleared to know. Harris didn’t move, his eyes boring into me, trying to peel back my skin and read the memories underneath.

“Sector 19,” he said, the words cutting through the silence. “Classified airspace. A graveyard. Nothing gets in, nothing gets out. We lost half a dozen recon drones trying to map it before the ceasefire.”

“Sir?” I whispered, my throat tight.

He turned from me and nodded to the analyst at the back. “Put it on the screen.”

The projector flared to life, replacing the sterile briefing slides with a grainy, black-and-white satellite image. It was a sea of jagged black rock and white snow. The Northern Ridge.

A single pixel blinked, faint and rhythmic.

“Two nights ago,” Harris said, his voice dropping to a low growl that filled the room, “satellite imaging picked up this. A distress beacon. Military issue. Old tech.”

He paused, letting the weight of it land. “It’s broadcasting on the same frequency the Night Vipers used.”

My knees gave out. I grabbed the edge of the table to keep from collapsing. The metal was cold, grounding me. “No. That’s… that’s not possible. That was eight years ago. The batteries would be dead. The… everything would be dead.”

“‘Impossible’ isn’t a word we use lightly here, Miss Cole,” Harris said, his gaze fixed on the blinking dot. “Your brother’s squad was declared MIA, presumed lost. They were never officially KIA. And that patch…”

He finally looked back at me, his expression unreadable, almost pained. “You shouldn’t have that. Not a field-issued patch. Unless…”

“He gave it to me,” I said, the words tumbling out. The memory was so sharp it felt like it was happening right now. The night before his final mission, standing on our parents’ porch. The smell of pine and his cheap cologne.

“He gave it to me,” I repeated, my voice stronger. “He said, ‘If anything happens, Em, you keep this. Don’t let them take it. Someday, it’ll mean something again.’ I thought he was just… I thought he was just trying to say goodbye. I thought he was scared.”

A heavy, suffocating understanding settled over the room. Harris looked at the other officers, then back at me. “Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he knew something we didn’t.”

“Sir,” a tall woman with “RAMIREZ” on her flight suit spoke up, her voice calm and analytical. “If that beacon is authentic, and it’s been active for eight years, it’s not a standard distress call. It’s a message. If Lieutenant Cole is alive, and he knows we’re looking…”

Another officer scoffed. “Alive? After eight years in Sector 19? Nothing survives that. It’s a ghost signal.”

“Then we go hunt a ghost,” Harris snapped.

My heart was a trapped bird, beating against my ribs. “Sir. Captain Harris. If there is even a one-in-a-billion chance that’s him… if he’s out there…”

He cut me off with a raised hand, his face hardening again. “You’re a civilian, Miss Cole. A data clerk. You’re not a soldier. You’re not cleared for this. What you’re asking is insane.”

“I’m not asking,” I shot back, the sudden fire in my voice surprising even me. The trembling stopped. The fear was still there, but it was now welded to a cold, hard certainty. “He’s my brother. You found a signal. You’re going. And I’m on that bird.”

For the first time since I’d walked into that room, a flicker of something new crossed Harris’s face. It might have been respect.

“You’ve got guts, kid. I’ll give you that. But guts don’t fly a high-risk recon mission into jammed airspace.”

“With respect, Captain,” Ramirez interjected, stepping forward. “She’s right. We’re flying blind into unknown territory. That beacon is old Viper tech. But that patch… it’s a personal article. If Lieutenant Cole is out there, he might not trust us. He might be… compromised. But he’ll trust her. Family patterns, callsigns we don’t have on file, behavioral cues. She’s not just a civilian. She’s our best link to understanding what the hell we’re flying into.”

The room buzzed with murmurs. Harris stared at me, then at the blinking dot on the screen. The silence stretched, pulling tighter and tighter until I thought I would scream.

Finally, he sighed, a sound like gravel shifting. “Fine. Get her suited. She doesn’t leave your sight, Ramirez. She’s your responsibility.” He jabbed a finger at me. “But you do exactly what I say, when I say it. You breathe wrong, and you’re zip-tied to a bulkhead. Are we clear?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, my voice shaking.

“Then let’s go get your brother.”

Three hours later, the world had dissolved.

The quiet, boring purgatory of my office life was gone, replaced by the screaming chaos of a high-priority mission. The operation was codenamed “Echo Frost.” It felt sickeningly appropriate.

I was shoved into borrowed cold-weather gear that smelled like mildew and old sweat. It was stiff, heavy, and a size too big. Ramirez walked me through the hangar, the noise overwhelming. The roar of the VTOL engines vibrated in my teeth. The air was thick with the sharp tang of jet fuel and ozone.

Men and women in full combat gear moved with a purpose that terrified me. They were checking weapons. Loading ammo canisters. Their faces were grim, set, and they looked right through me. I was a ghost here, too.

Harris met us at the ramp of the transport, a sleek, shark-gray craft I’d never seen before. He was already in his flight jacket, helmet tucked under his arm.

“You sure about this?” he yelled over the engine whine. “Once these doors close, there’s no turning back. If we find something out there, it might not be what you want.”

I looked him dead in the eye, the rotor wash whipping my hair across my face. “I’ve lived for eight years not knowing. I’ll take anything over that.”

He just nodded once, curtly. “Then get in. And strap down tight.”

The inside of the craft was dark, lit only by the red glow of the instrument panels. I was buckled into a jump seat between Ramirez and another soldier whose name tag just said “DOC.” Across from me sat two more, silent and cloaked in shadows.

The ramp sealed, and the outside world vanished. There was a lurch that threw me against my harness, and then a feeling of impossible speed. We were airborne.

For an hour, the only sound was the deep-frequency hum of the engines. No one spoke. I stared at my feet, my hands clenched so tight my knuckles were white. I traced the empty spot on my sleeve where the patch had been. Harris had taken it. “Evidence,” he’d said. It felt like I’d lost Mark all over again.

“Approaching the ridge,” the co-pilot’s voice crackled over the internal comms. “Five mikes out.”

Ramirez leaned toward me. “How you holding up, Cole?”

“I’m fine,” I lied.

She didn’t smile. “When we land, you stick to me like glue. Don’t touch anything. Don’t talk to anyone unless I say so. Just watch, and listen. Got it?”

I nodded.

Suddenly, the red lights in the cabin flickered. A high-pitched squeal screamed through our headsets, and I ripped mine off, my hands flying to my ears.

“What the hell is that?” Doc yelled.

“Interference!” the co-pilot shouted. “Massive EM spike! All systems are…”

The rest of his sentence was lost in a burst of white noise. The transport shuddered violently, throwing us against our restraints. The cabin lights died, plunging us into absolute darkness, and the steady hum of the engines turned into a strained, gagging whine.

We were falling.

“Mayday! Mayday! We’ve lost all power!” Harris’s voice was strained, fighting the controls.

Panic, cold and sharp, seized my throat. I couldn’t breathe. This was it. I’d survived eight years of grief only to die in a metal coffin, chasing a ghost.

The craft groaned, the sound of metal tearing. Then, just as suddenly as it began, the screaming in my ears stopped. The emergency lights flickered on, casting a sick, greenish glow over the cabin. The engines coughed, caught, and roared back to life.

We slammed into something hard, skidding for what felt like an eternity before coming to a violent, groaning halt.

For a moment, there was only the sound of our own ragged breathing and the howling of the wind outside.

“Everyone sound off!” Harris yelled from the cockpit.

“Ramirez, good!”

“Doc, good!”

The other two soldiers grunted their assent.

“Cole?” Ramirez shouted, shaking my arm.

“I’m… I’m here,” I choked out.

“We’re down,” Harris said, his voice grim. “Co-pilot, what’s our status?”

“Landed hard, sir. But we’re in one piece. That interference… it’s gone. Vanished, just as we crossed the perimeter.”

“That wasn’t a jammer,” Ramirez murmured, unbuckling. “That was a warning shot.”

The rear ramp hissed open, flooding the cabin with blinding white light and a wind so cold it felt like knives in my lungs.

“Gear up!” Harris ordered, emerging from the cockpit, weapon drawn. “We’re on foot from here. Beacon’s a hundred meters east!”

I stumbled down the ramp into a world that shouldn’t exist.

The storm was a living thing. The snow wasn’t falling; it was moving horizontally, a scouring wall of ice particles. The wind screamed, a high-pitched, agonizing sound. It was colder than any cold I had ever known, a physical weight that instantly numbed my face and hands.

“This way!” Harris bellowed over the din. “Beacon’s a hundred meters east!”

We moved in a tight formation, heads down, pushing against the wind. It was like walking through wet concrete. Every step was a battle. My borrowed gear was useless against this. The cold was already in my bones.

Then, through the whiteout, I saw it.

A faint, sickly green light, pulsing weakly from a drift of snow.

Harris and Ramirez raised their weapons, sweeping the area. “Clear!”

Harris knelt, brushing the snow away with a gloved hand. It was the beacon. An old, battered piece of tech, cracked and frozen, but still pulsing.

Ramirez pulled out a scanner. “Power cell is unstable. It’s… it’s been jury-rigged. Hooked up to some kind of geothermal power source. This thing has been broadcasting nonstop for… my God. For years.”

“Someone’s been keeping it alive,” Harris said, his voice tight.

I crouched beside them, my heart hammering. “Mark… he was always good with tech. He could make anything run on nothing.”

Before anyone could answer, a crack echoed through the valley. It wasn’t the wind. It was the sound of ice breaking under a boot.

Every soldier froze. Weapons snapped up, beams from their helmet lamps cutting into the blizzard.

“Movement!” shouted one of the soldiers from the rear. “Thirty meters! Bearing two-niner-zero!”

“Hold your fire!” Harris commanded.

Out of the screaming white, a shadow emerged. A figure, stumbling, wrapped in tattered rags that might have once been a military uniform. It was tall, impossibly thin, its face hidden by a cracked pair of old-model snow goggles.

The figure raised a trembling, gloved hand.

“Don’t… shoot…”

The voice was a dry rattle, barely human. A sound broken by ice and time and loneliness.

But I knew it.

I knew it like I knew my own name. It was the voice from my nightmares, the voice I screamed for in my sleep.

The world stopped. The wind, the cold, the soldiers—it all vanished.

“Mark?” I whispered.

The word was torn from my lips by the wind, but he heard it. The figure froze. He turned, his movements slow, agonizing, as if his joints were frozen solid. He reached up and, with trembling fingers, pulled the goggles from his face.

It wasn’t him. It couldn’t be.

The man I remembered was broad-shouldered, laughing, his eyes full of sunlight. This… this thing was a skeleton. His skin was pale, almost blue, stretched tight over a skull. His beard was matted with ice. His lips were cracked and bleeding.

But his eyes.

They were the same. The same color, the same shape, and they were staring at me with a look of raw, terrified disbelief.

“Emma?” he rasped.

I don’t remember deciding to move. My legs just went. I ran, slipping and falling on the ice, scrambling back up.

“Emma, no! Wait!” Harris shouted behind me.

I ignored him. I crashed into my brother, throwing my arms around his frozen body. He was solid ice. I could feel his ribs through the tattered layers. He smelled like ozone and frozen meat.

He made a sound, a choked sob, and his arms came up to hold me, his grip surprisingly strong. “You’re… you’re real,” he stammered, his body shaking uncontrollably. “You’re real. You’re warm.”

“I’m here, Mark. I’m here. I got you,” I sobbed into his chest.

Harris and the team were on us in a second, weapons still raised, but their faces were masks of stunned disbelief.

“How the hell…” Harris whispered.

Mark looked past me, his eyes wide with a sudden, primal terror. He coughed, a dry, hacking sound, and his words came out in fragmented bursts. “They… they left us. The experiment… it… it failed. They tried to… to contain it.”

His eyes rolled back into his head, and his full weight, all ninety pounds of him, collapsed into my arms.

The flight back was a blur of noise and fear.

Doc worked on Mark in a frantic, desperate silence, hooking him up to IVs, thermal blankets, and a heart monitor. The readout was a weak, thready scrawl.

I sat holding his frozen, skeletal hand, refusing to let go. Harris and Ramirez stood over us, their faces grim in the red emergency light.

“He shouldn’t be alive,” Doc muttered, shaking his head. “Massive malnourishment, severe hypothermia, frostbite… but his core temp is… stable. Dangerously low, but stable. It’s like his body just… stopped.”

We landed back at the base, which was already on high alert. Mark was rushed to the advanced medical bay, a place I didn’t even know existed. I tried to follow, but Harris put a hand on my chest.

“We need to debrief you. Now.”

“I’m not leaving him!”

“You are,” his voice was kind, but absolute. “He’s with the doctors. They’re the only ones who can help him. But we need to know what we’re facing. You’re the only one who heard his last words clearly.”

An hour later, I was sitting in the same briefing room, wrapped in a shock blanket, sipping hot coffee that tasted like ash. Harris, Ramirez, and a handful of stone-faced officials I didn’t recognize were watching me.

I told them everything. The patch. The beacon. Mark’s words. “The experiment.” “They left us.”

When I finished, the room was silent.

“Project Mirage,” one of the officials finally said, his voice flat.

Harris looked at him. “Sir?”

“Top-secret energy project. Theoretical physics. They were trying to bend spacetime. Create localized time-distortion fields.” The official looked sick. “We thought it was just a theory. A money pit. We shut it down eight years ago… right after the Night Viper squadron vanished.”

“My God,” Ramirez whispered. “They weren’t on a recon mission. They were the guinea pigs.”

A medic suddenly burst into the room, his face pale. “Sir. You need to see this. Now.”

We ran to the med bay. Mark was on the table, still unconscious, but the monitors were stable.

“His vitals are normalizing,” the chief medic said, pointing to the screen. “But that’s not the strange part.”

He held up a scanner. “His cellular structure… it’s saturated with synthetic cryo-agents. Tech that’s at least twenty years ahead of anything we have. But that’s not all. Based on his cellular degradation… or lack thereof…”

He took a deep breath. “This man hasn’t aged eight years. He’s aged, maybe… eight weeks.”

The blood drained from my face. “What are you saying? Time displacement?”

“Something like that,” the medic said, his voice trembling. “He wasn’t just stuck out there. He was… paused. Kept in stasis. Someone, or something, kept him alive.”

I reached out and touched my brother’s hand. “He’s here. He’s alive. That’s all that matters.”

But deep down, a new, colder fear was settling in. This wasn’t an ending. This was a beginning.

As if on cue, Mark’s eyes snapped open.

They weren’t the soft, laughing eyes I remembered. They were wild, haunted, and filled with a terror so profound it stole my breath.

“Emma,” he rasped, his hand shooting out to grab my wrist. His grip was like a steel trap.

“Mark, you’re safe. You’re at the base. You’re home.”

“No,” he choked, trying to sit up. “No. Not safe. You have to listen. It’s not over. You brought me back. You led them here.”

“Who, Mark? Who’s coming?”

He gripped my wrist so hard I cried out. “The ones who built the storm. The ones who changed.”

“Changed how?” Harris demanded, stepping forward.

Mark stared past him, toward the reinforced window of the med bay, where the blizzard still raged outside.

“We weren’t the only ones who survived the experiment,” he whispered, tears streaming down his face. “The others… half the squad… they didn’t just get paused. They got… unstitched. They’re not men anymore. They’re… echoes. And they’re hungry.”

At that exact moment, every alarm on the base blared to life. The lights died, replaced by the pulsing, terrifying red of a full-site breach.

“Report!” Harris roared into his comms.

“Sir! Unknown contacts breaching the perimeter! They’re… sir, they’re not showing up on thermal! They’re just… here! They’re moving too fast!”

Outside the window, through the storm, shadows flickered. They weren’t men. They were tall, impossibly thin, and they moved with a jagged, unnatural, glitching motion. Like a corrupted video file trying to play.

“They followed the beacon,” Mark was sobbing now, trying to pull himself out of the bed. “They followed it.”

“Get back!” I screamed, trying to push him down as soldiers burst into the med bay, taking up defensive positions.

Harris drew his sidearm. “Evacuate the medical wing! Get him to the bunker! Now!”

The main doors to the med bay buckled inward with a scream of tortured metal.

“Emma,” Mark gasped, clutching his chest. “My patch. The patch you had. Where is it?”

“Harris has it. In the briefing room. Why?”

“No, no, no,” he moaned. “It’s not just a patch. It’s the key. The anchor. It’s how they track me. It’s how they… find their way back.”

My blood turned to ice. “That’s… that’s why you told me to keep it. Not for memory. As a… a tracker.”

“It has to be destroyed!” he screamed. “Now, Em! Or they’ll tear this whole place apart to find it!”

Just then, the observation window shattered inward in an explosion of glass and ice. One of the figures—all sharp angles and flickering static—lunged into the room. It was silent, but I could feel a sound, a low-frequency hum that vibrated in my bones.

The soldiers opened fire. The bullets passed right through it, hitting the wall behind. The creature didn’t slow.

It was looking right at Mark.

“Run!” Harris yelled, shoving me toward the door.

But I was frozen, watching the creature. And then I saw it. On my sleeve. The empty spot where the patch had been.

It was glowing.

A faint, sickly blue light, pulsing from the threads.

“It’s not the patch,” I whispered, the horrifying realization dawning. “It was never the patch.”

I ripped my sleeve open. There, on my skin, where the patch had rested for eight years, was a faint, glowing blue outline. Like a brand.

“It marked me,” I gasped.

The creature turned its “head.” It saw the glow. It saw me.

It changed direction, lunging not for Mark, but for me.

“Emma!” Mark screamed.

I didn’t think. I just reacted. I grabbed the heaviest thing I could find—a medical defibrillator—and swung it with all my strength.

It connected. But it didn’t hit flesh. It hit static.

There was a deafening CRACK. A blast of blue light and ozone filled the room, throwing me backward. The creature screamed—a sound of ripping data and tearing time—and then it just… disintegrated. It didn’t die. It was deleted.

The alarms fell silent. The red lights stopped flashing. The heavy thrum that had filled the air was gone.

I lay on the floor, gasping, my arm searing with pain. The blue glow on my skin was gone.

Ramirez helped me up, her face ashen. “Perimeter’s clear, sir. Whatever they were… they’re gone.”

Harris slowly lowered his weapon, staring at the scorch mark on the floor where the creature had been.

Later, as a false dawn broke over the frozen ridge, the base was quiet. Wounded. Harris stood by the shattered window, watching the snow.

I sat by my brother’s bed. He was sleeping, truly sleeping, for the first time. The terror had faded from his face. He just looked… old.

“It’s over,” I whispered, mostly to myself. “I brought him home.”

But as I looked at his arm, resting on the blanket, I saw something. A faint, glowing blue outline, just under his skin.

Identical to the one that had been on my arm.

My stomach turned to ice. He was an anchor. But so was I.

His eyes opened slowly, locking onto mine. He didn’t look scared anymore. He looked resigned.

“I told you, Em,” he murmured, his voice distant. “It’s not over.”

A second later, Harris’s comms crackled to life. It was Ramirez, from the command center.

“Sir… you need to hear this.” Her voice was shaking. “Sector 19 just went dark. The beacon… it’s gone.”

Harris let out a breath. “Good. Finally.”

“No, sir,” she said, her voice cracking. “It’s not gone. It just… moved. A new signal just lit up. Same frequency. Same energy signature.”

Harris gripped the comm. “Where, Ramirez? Where is it?”

“It’s not on the ridge, sir. It’s… it’s in downtown Anchorage. In the middle of the city. And sir… it’s not one beacon. It’s a dozen.”