The Silence Before the Storm...

Eve stared at the keycard in her hand.
It was smooth, metallic, warm to the touch—somehow alive. As if it recognized her. As if, in some strange way, it had been waiting to return to its rightful owner.

Damian hadn’t said anything more. He didn’t need to. His silence carried weight, confirmation, permission.

Behind her, the fire crackled. Before her, the truth was a blade already pressed to her skin.

She wasn’t Eve Lancaster, the girl who survived nightmares.
She was Subject E-09.
The final prototype.

Born from the ashes of Project Genesis.
And now? She was awake.

The Files That Should Never Have Been Found..

Later that night—after Damian left her in that high-ceilinged room with no walls and yet no exits—Eve read every file he'd given her.

Genesis wasn’t a research facility. It was an obedience farm.

A classified behavioural conditioning program designed to create “invisible weapons”—operatives who couldn’t be tracked, interrogated, or emotionally compromised.

Children were taken. Or created.
Raised in perfect control.

Obedience woven into identity. Empathy used like anaesthesia: dose, withdraw, manipulate.

Each subject had a function. A destiny.
Some were infiltrators. Some were executioners.
One—just one—was designed to remember everything.

"That one was her."

The War Within...

As Eve lay in the compound's soft bed that didn’t feel like hers, images crawled across her closed eyes.
Not dreams.
Memories.

A hallway lined with locked doors.
Her mother—Seraphina—standing in a white coat, not as a parent, but as a scientist.
An old lullaby. A glass wall.
The echo of another child’s scream.

And a boy in a black uniform. Standing still. Staring straight ahead.
Emotionless. Designed. Watching her.
It was him.

Damian.

She gasped, bolting upright. The truth was too cruel.
He hadn’t found her.
He had trained with her.
They had grown up in the same cage, just on opposite sides of the mirror.

The Twist He Couldn’t Predict..

Eve confronted Damian the next day.
No fury. No screaming. Only one question.

“How long have you known I’d wake up?”

He didn’t lie. “Since your thirteenth birthday.”

She laughed. Hollow. “You were there that night, weren’t you? The house fire. The men in the masks.”

“Yes.”

“You were supposed to kill me.”

He looked away for the first time. “I couldn’t.”

And there it was—the fracture in the armour.

Even he hadn’t been immune to her. Not then. Not now.
The handler had disobeyed the program.
And for that, the program had buried them both.

But now she was back.
And this time, she wouldn’t be their prototype.
She’d be their reckoning.

That night, Damian handed her a secured tablet. Encrypted access. One name on the screen.

Director A. Carlisle – GENESIS HEAD
Location: Unknown
Status: Alive
Secondary Objective: Elimination

Eve stared at the blinking cursor.
Below the file, a simple button: Activate.

She didn’t flinch.

She pressed it.

The screen went black.

When it returned, a loading bar appeared. "Neural conditioning override—INITIALIZING."

All over the world, hidden cells, deep agents, and dormant commands began to stir.

She wasn’t a weapon anymore.
She was the command line.

And she had just triggered the Fall.