BLOODCAPE
Chapter 126: Echo Reflex

Chapter 126: Chapter 126: Echo Reflex

The stairwell spiraled tighter the farther down they went. Every turn felt like a narrowing throat. Frost clung to the railings and steps, hairline cracks spreading in the ice like veins under glass. The air here wasn’t just cold. It was sterile, abandoned, sharp in the lungs like something that had been filtered too many times for too long. Not dead — preserved.

Each level felt more forgotten than the last.

Nico exhaled, fogging his visor, and tugged his collar higher. "This feels like the beginning of every horror film I’ve ever avoided."

"Cryo ops were shut down twelve years ago," Hernan said. His voice didn’t register the joke. "Officially."

Gemini didn’t speak. She walked slower now, her boots almost silent on the metal. She kept glancing upward — not for threats, but as if something might come uncoiled behind them. Not fear. Anticipation.

The final landing opened into a long, frost-laced corridor with blank walls and flickering emergency strips buried under grime. Hernan moved ahead with quiet certainty, passing a set of sealed doors without hesitation.

He stopped beside a rusted panel.

"Access used to be here," he murmured, running gloved fingers over a strip of wall where no markings remained.

Nico gave a sideways glance. "Used to be? What, were you cryogenically cleaning this place in your off hours?"

Before Hernan could respond, Gemini brushed past him and found the latch under a false panel. She pried it open, exposing a faded manual override. The light blinked orange — low power. Sleep mode.

"You two rehearsing this?" Nico muttered. But no one laughed.

The override accepted a generic field passcode — an outdated string Zodiac hadn’t used in years. The door groaned open with a long exhale of cold air. The sound echoed far too long in the silence. It wasn’t dramatic. It was intimate. Like the exhale of something waking from a bad dream.

Inside: a cryo wing. Eight sealed pod bays along each wall, all coated in brittle frost. Most were open, stripped, drained long ago. But one, at the far end of the room, remained locked. Upright. Intact.

The pod’s status light pulsed dull green.

Gemini’s HUD flickered. SCC-07X-BETA. Last access: Redacted.

She stepped forward, clearing grime from the control housing. Beneath the dust, Zodiac insignia was etched deep into the casing. And below that, barely visible, the old Solari ops code.

"He said this place was a vault," she whispered. "Not just for bodies. For history."

Hernan responded immediately, quietly — the words pulling from somewhere without permission: "It kept secrets. Ones the air would scream if it got too warm."

Gemini froze.

Her head turned slowly toward him.

"That’s exactly what he said," she murmured. Not surprise. Just verification. Just fact-checking a ghost.

The pod hissed. No one had touched the panel, but the seal began to unlock, triggered by Gemini’s proximity tag. A breath of ancient pressure escaped into the air — cold and wet and chemical.

Hernan stepped back.

Violently.

Not fear. Not retreat. It was instinct. Deep-muscle reflex. His body jolted as though struck, fingers tightening into fists at his sides. His chest rose — a breath too fast, too sharp. His stance collapsed into something tighter, older. Something not his.

Nico turned, watching him. Noticing the glitch in posture, the war in the jawline.

Gemini stayed where she was. Hand hovering inches from the pod.

She didn’t look away.

Nico crouched low, brushing aside frost at the base of the pod. He found a metal tag still clipped to the mounting rail — old, dented, corroded. He flipped it over. S. S.

He didn’t ask.

He pocketed it.

Inside, Hernan’s boots shifted again — a small pivot toward the west wall. Not random. Like he remembered something important being there. But there was nothing. No record. No map that had ever included this cryo site. No reason he should know.

"There was someone else here," Hernan said. His voice was low, distant. "Three rows down. Neural instability. They used cryo to stabilize the bleed until evac could reroute."

Gemini said nothing.

Because it was true.

Her hand lowered to the pod, fingers spread flat. Her expression softened — not sadness, not longing. Something like confirmation.

"You were here," she said. "You’ve always been here."

Hernan didn’t reply. His mouth was slightly open, like he was trying to say something in a language he’d forgotten how to speak. Or hadn’t yet learned. His breathing stayed shallow. His eyes flicked once to the far end of the room.

To nothing.

To something.

Nico turned toward him, silent, and understood exactly what he was seeing.

Hernan wasn’t walking through the past.

He was overlapping it.

Far away, in a silent room lit only by cold-blue data projections, Aya let the AI behavior lab unfold like a dissection table. Every system booted in low-power diagnostic mode, no alerts triggered. She was fast, practiced, dangerous.

No dialogue. No conjecture. Just data.

She wasn’t hunting a ghost. She was charting one.

Her filters were already preloaded: retinal focus tracking, neural response delay, visual anticipation variance. A month’s worth of sim logs unraveled into pulse-thin overlays. Six sessions. Hernan in all of them. Elite-ranked. Efficient. Perfect.

She didn’t want perfection.

She wanted the flaw.

Session C4 loaded first. She slowed it to 0.25x. Let the camera crawl.

Hernan stood relaxed as the environment randomized.

And then his eyes locked on a wall that hadn’t opened yet.

Not predicted. Not guessed. Tracked.

Two seconds later, the first drone dropped — exactly where he’d been looking.

"Okay..." she murmured.

She ran the sequence again.

Again.

Each time, his eyes moved faster than the simulation.

Too early. Too smooth.

On the fourth run, she noticed the blink.

A single, reflexive flicker of his right eye — synchronized with a target he hadn’t seen.

A learned blink.

Aya’s fingers trembled only slightly as she pulled up a separate log. A restricted one. Solaris. Final sim run before Volant.

She synced the eye maps.

Laid them side by side.

Then overlaid them.

Identical.

Frame by frame.

The same blink.

The same anticipatory dilation when multiple threats converged.

The same moment of restraint before firing — a twitch so small no one else had ever marked it.

Aya stared at the fusion of heatmaps. Hernan wasn’t following Solaris’s tactics.

He was wearing them.

She pulled up the final frame.

Hernan smiling.

Then Solaris, from ten years ago, smiling just the same.

It wasn’t an expression.

It was a residue.

A phantom reflex.

She exported the frame, encrypted it, marked it with one line:

ECHO TRACE_01 – This isn’t training. This is bleed-through.

She didn’t send it to Tessa. Or Leo. Or anyone.

Not yet.

The lights dimmed. The console shut itself off.

As she turned back toward the hallway, Aya whispered, just loud enough to hear herself think,

"Who are you pretending to be... or who’s pretending to be you?"

The door sealed behind her.

And the corridor felt suddenly, impossibly... occupied.