Some legacies are inherited. Others are engineered.

Cillian never remembered falling asleep. Only the sound. Metal screaming somewhere overhead. Then heat. The nightmare came the way it always did, already in progress. Smoke filled the corridor thick enough to taste. Emergency lights strobed red against concrete walls as alarms bled into one continuous tone.

Someone shouted over comms, the signal breaking apart in static. “Facility compromised, repeat, Facility compromised.”

Gunfire echoed deeper inside the structure. Cillian moved forward anyway. Boots slipping on wet flooring. Not water. Blood. The air smelled wrong, chemical and sterile beneath the smoke.

Not a battlefield. A laboratory. Somewhere beneath stone. Old stone.

For a split second, his mind tried to place it.

Italy.

Lab equipment lay shattered along the hallway, containment glass blown outward from pressure that hadn’t come from explosives alone. A door ahead hung half open. Inside, cryogenic chambers glowed faint blue through failing power cycles.

Bodies moved behind the frost-coated glass.

Not dead.

Not awake.

Waiting.

“Cillian, we’re out of time,” a voice cut through the chaos.

Grayson. Younger. Controlled. Still believing the mission made sense.

Cillian ignored him. His objective wasn’t neutralization. It was retrieval.

A terminal flickered near the far wall, its screen cycling through encrypted files faster than he could process. Genomic sequences. Neurological mapping overlays. Behavioral projections layered over human profiles like targeting data.

One file locked open. As if waiting.

ECHO VIABILITY — ACTIVE TRIAL

A symbol burned in the corner of the screen. An inverted cross marked by five dots. Something about it felt older than the program. Older than the building. Older than the war.

He felt it then. The certainty. This wasn’t experimental. It was operational.

“Charges set!” someone yelled.

The building shuddered violently. Dust fell from the ceiling. Somewhere above them, stone cracked.

Cillian grabbed the external drive, ripping the data free as alarms shifted pitch.

Containment failure. Not evacuation. Not escape. Failure.

Behind him, glass began to fracture. Inside the chambers, movement accelerated. Not random. Triggered.

“Cillian!” Grayson again. Closer now. Urgent.

The lights died. Complete darkness swallowed the corridor. For one second, there was silence. Then something moved behind him. Not fast. Not loud. Breathing.

Cillian woke violently.