Nolan was unmade. The last scene of his mother walking through the smoke of the hospital dissolved beneath him, and the trembling in his limbs refused to stop. The Shadow Walk was supposed to be painful, but this was something else—an existential ache, a deep and tearing dislocation between who he thought he was and what he had just witnessed.

  He curled his fingers into his palms feeling the metal before he felt skin. He understood now why.

  Everything he had seen—his own life, the lies wrapped around it, the surgeries he was told were “enhancements,” the commanders he trusted, the memories he carried like scripture—none of it was what it seemed. His entire childhood had been rewritten, replaced with fabrications so clean, so pleasant, so helpful that he’d never even thought to doubt them.

  His father—Tyson Graves, the man the CSS told him was dead—was alive during Nolan’s training, then repurposed into the commander he’d feared and admired.

  His mother—Noel Stowers, the woman they named a terrorist, a ghost, a monster—was not only innocent of the sins they branded her with, she was his creator. His origin point. The one who had fought for him, who had sacrificed everything, who had become the nightmare of nations to try and get him and Tyler back. And the machine inside him—HIVE—had erased her.

  His throat tightened. His chest felt hollow. He brought a shaking hand to his face, then pressed his palm to his cheek. Cold. Synthetic.

  He was more machine than man. But the machine no longer felt like a prison. Now that he had seen the truth—it felt like a weapon.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  Nolan lifted his head. The world around him rippled, as if someone had thrown a stone into the fabric of existence. The fog swirled, folded into itself, then peeled back like a curtain.

  Light—strange light—poured in.

  Silhouettes emerged from the radiance. Some he recognized instantly: shadows shaped like the men he lost in the hospital bombing; others resembled people he had seen only in fractured glimpses across timelines—Sydney Billings, Noel in her youth, Tyson before the surgeries.

  But there were others. Figures whose bodies bent physics.

  Beings with luminous skin and geometric eyes. A woman with hair the color of nebulae—the woman he saw in the derelict building during the siege of D.C.—the one who spoke in a voice that felt older than time.

  For a moment, Nolan felt the old fear rise—the instinct to reach for a weapon, to brace for another assault, another mission, another explosion waiting beneath the surface. But then the fear slipped away.

  The Shadow Walk had already shown him pain, loss, betrayal.

  This—whatever this was—felt different. He felt himself dematerializing again, but the agony he once associated with it was gone. Instead, he felt warmth spreading through his chest, like being held at the end of a long war.

  He did not cling to the fading ground beneath him. He let go. The boundaries of his body dissolved. Time unspooled. The universe widened into more shapes than a human mind could hold. And yet, for the first time since childhood—since before his memories were rewritten—he felt clarity.

  His journey wasn’t over. But now he had something he had never been given before: Choice. He could choose which side he stood on. He could choose what he fought for. He could choose whose legacy he carried forward. His mother’s. His father’s. Humanity’s. Or something far larger.

  The light engulfed him and Nolan did not resist. He welcomed whatever came next.

  …To be continued…