BLOODCAPE
Chapter 97 – White Flag, Red Code

Chapter 97: Chapter 97 – White Flag, Red Code

Tessa jolted upright in bed, heart pounding like she’d been yanked out of the ocean.

Her dorm room was dark. Still. Cold.

She was still wearing her hoodie — the same one from the rooftop, still damp around the collar from sweat and wind. Her fingers were tangled in the blanket like she’d tried to strangle it in her sleep.

Something had woken her.

But not a nightmare.

A sound.

Faint. Sharp. Artificial.

She turned her head just in time to see the light flicker beneath her door — the slimmest pulse of digital blue, and then it was gone.

She slid out of bed in practiced silence. Bare feet kissed the floor. She crossed the room in five steps and crouched low.

A sliver of black plastic stuck halfway under the door.

A data shard.

She picked it up, holding it under the moonlight slicing through the slats of her blackout window. No markings. No serial. Just a sleek, thumb-sized rectangle — smooth on every side, like it was made to disappear.

Five seconds passed. Her pulse didn’t slow.

Then she stood, moved to her desk, flipped open the hidden panel on her private terminal — the one she technically wasn’t allowed to have — and slotted the shard into the port.

It clicked once.

No prompt. No warning.

Just one file.

And when it opened—

Her stomach dropped.

A screenshot.

Just one.

But she knew it instantly.

Her own screen. From the archive terminal. The Solar Paragon crest glowing faintly in the corner. Solaris, mid-pivot, captured in a freeze-frame of deadly precision. Like a ghost caught breathing.

She stared at the timestamp.

Three hours ago. Right before the breach was flagged. Right before she bolted.

But the angle—

The angle was wrong.

This wasn’t a log file from her terminal. Wasn’t a camera behind her. It was overhead. A mirrored feed, looking down on the station from elevation. Clean. Precise. Unauthorized.

Her throat closed.

Someone else had watched her.

Not just after the fact — as it happened.

She backed away from the screen, every motion slow. Controlled. Like she was stepping away from a landmine.

Her thoughts began to splinter — spinning too fast to grip.

Not Hernan. He wouldn’t send a warning. He’d confront her. Or stay silent. Or disappear.

Not the instructors. They would’ve pulled her in already.

Not Zodiac. They wouldn’t send a threat.

They’d erase her.

So who?

Who was watching her watch him?

Her breath came faster. Shallow. The air felt thinner. Her shoulders brushed the desk — knocked over a cup of pens. She didn’t notice.

Her hand found her mouth.

Two voices warred in her head.

One said: Run. Wipe the terminal. Burn the printout. Claim a system glitch. Claim identity theft.

The other said: You’re already flagged. Run, and you prove them right.

She paced. Once. Twice. Her steps silent, but her heartbeat screamed.

She stared at the screen. The shard. The single frame still glowing.

Her hand drifted to her hoodie pocket.

Still there. The printout.

Smudged. Folded.

Truth and warning, pressed into paper.

She didn’t remember grabbing it before bed.

But she had.

Her jaw clenched. Her breathing slowed.

There was only one person who might understand what this meant.

One person who lived in shadows darker than even the Zodiac could trace.

The person she swore she’d never go to unless she had no choice.

She opened the door. The hall was empty. The air stale.

She whispered to herself:

"If I’m already flagged..."

A pause.

Then quieter:

"...I might as well get answers from the source."

—

Far below her — seven sublevels beneath the dormitories, past sealed lifts and retinal-locked thresholds — Dr. Camilla Varn didn’t blink when the alert hit.

She hadn’t moved in hours. Hadn’t slept in longer.

Her office was off-record. Behind a maintenance door labeled STORAGE. No one came here. No one was supposed to.

She sat amid flickering terminals and half-drained IV bags feeding nutrient fluids into dormant interface shells. Diagnostics spilled across every surface — test failures, gene drift reports, unreleased profiles.

Her coffee was cold. She drank it anyway.

Then the screen pulsed.

[ALERT: PRIVATE PROTOCOL – PROJECT INHERITOR – STATUS: ACTIVE]SUBJECT TRACE: RED (MATCHED)SECONDARY TRACE: WHITE (UNVERIFIED)ORIGIN: STUDENT-ACCESS ARCHIVE NODE – WEST DORM – INDEX SYNCED

Camilla straightened like a static charge had wired into her spine.

No panic. No noise.

Only motion.

She keyed in the override manually: voiceprint, retina, subdermal tag.

"Open Solaris batch records. Internal access only."

The screen changed.

Old footage bloomed open. Grainy. Unstable. Sacred.

Solaris, in his prime — body a storm of precision, every strike a theory made flesh.

And beside him—

A second figure.

Masked. Smaller. Fluid.

They didn’t fight together.

They fought as a formula. One impossible equation.

Camilla opened the comparative feed. Reran the movement scans. Two weeks ago. Power-suppressed sparring footage.

Rook Vale.

She activated motion-match tracking.

MATCH CONFIRMED: 94.3% — GENETIC RESONANCE: PROBABLE DESCENDANTCLASS: BLACK-TIER POTENTIAL / CODE: RED

She nodded once.

"Still chasing ghosts," she murmured.

But then—

She keyed in the second trace.

White.

That shouldn’t exist. The Inheritor Protocol was a single-subject tracker. A tool built to measure the viability of one offspring. Not two.

She widened the parameters.

A name surfaced.

TESSA LYNECLEARANCE: LEVEL TWO / MEDICAL TRACKBREACH: ARCHIVE – SOLAR PARAGON FILEMATCH: 92.7% — FACIAL OVERLAY – UNNAMED CADET: SOLARIS UNIT [REDACTED FILE 7.4.Δ]

Camilla blinked.

On the screen, Tessa’s face ghosted into view. Matched to an old redacted file — Solaris’s original combat partner.

Younger. Hidden behind a mask. But the body language was unmistakable.

Camilla leaned forward.

"He wasn’t supposed to remember her," she whispered.

The breach hadn’t been random. Tessa had searched. She hadn’t stumbled into the file — she’d chased it.

And Hernan?

He hadn’t purged the flag.

He’d watched the breach.

And done nothing.

She opened a containment request.

CONTAINMENT LEVEL FIVE — ZODIAC LIBRAASSETS FLAGGED:– VALE, HERNAN– LYNE, TESSAOPTIONS:– OBSERVATION EXTENSION– BLACKOUT ISOLATION– TERMINATION (SOFT / HARD)– MEMORY DAMPENING (UNTESTED)

Her finger hovered over SUBMIT.

Just one press.

She could end the variable now. Before it grew teeth. Before Leo protected him. Before Gemini politicized it. Before Scorpio escalated it into war.

But she didn’t press.

She closed the request window.

Left it in draft.

Camilla leaned back into the dark.

The servers hummed around her like something alive.

She lifted the cup of cold coffee. Stared into it like it might tell her the future.

Then whispered:

"Let’s see if the ghost still learns."

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