CHAPTER 1: Unseen Chains

After the tattoo incident, the atmosphere in Bravo unit curdled. No one spoke to me differently. There was no salute, no “ma’am,” no open questions. But the silence was louder. They looked longer. They blinked more often. Instructors hesitated just a beat before barking commands at me. That hesitation was more telling than any words.

Foster didn’t approach me in public. That wasn’t his way. He was a man who moved in the whitespace of regulations.

Two nights later, I was sitting in the mess hall late, nursing a cup of instant coffee that tasted like burnt plastic. The hall was empty, the fluorescent lights humming.

He slid a small, nondescript flash drive across my tray.

“Training footage,” he said quietly, not even sitting down. “Unofficial. No trace. You have one hour.”

He left before I could respond.

Back in the barracks, I locked the door to the small lavatory, the only place with a moment of privacy. I plugged the drive into the offline terminal I’d hidden in my duffel—a sanitized, untraceable piece of tech I’d brought with me.

The screen flickered to life. Grainy footage. No sound, just timestamp overlays and wide-angle views of rooms designated as ‘Tier 4 Drills.’

Except they weren’t drills.

My blood went cold.

This was ‘Signal Black Echo Successor.’

It was conditioning.

I watched recruits, blindfolded, being held in metal shipping containers for hours, subjected to disorienting sound. I watched simulated betrayal scenarios, where one recruit was forced to ‘compromise’ another to secure their own ‘safety.’ I watched forced isolation until the point of emotional breakdown.

And then I saw it. On the wall of the simulation chamber, printed in stark white paint, was the program’s mantra.

“IF YOU’RE NOT READY TO BE FORGOTTEN, YOU’RE NOT READY TO BE USED.”

I stared at that line for a long, cold minute. Falco, my old commander, the man who died, used to have a different saying. “We train soldiers,” he’d roar, “not tools.”

This… this was something else. This was my father’s creation. This was manipulation turned into doctrine. I’d seen the beginnings of it, back when Black Echo was quietly transitioning into something darker. Before the explosion. Before my name disappeared.

This wasn’t just about control anymore. It was about obedience at the cost of the self.

I shut the terminal down, wiped the system clean, and physically shattered the flash drive. The images were burned into my mind.

CHAPTER 2: Inside the Blueprint

The next morning, I filed a request. I used the official channels, citing Policy Code 44-B, ‘Inter-Unit Transfer Behavior Metrics,’ citing “morale disparities” in Bravo platoon. It looked harmless. Boring, even. That was the point.

The request, as I knew it would, granted me temporary, low-level access to the internal rosters and performance logs for all training platoons.

I started making notes. Names of instructors present during the ‘drills’ on Foster’s drive. Timestamps of repeat ‘isolation’ drills. Discrepancies between the reported outcomes—”Recruit passed, high resilience”—and the footage I had seen of a man weeping on a concrete floor.

And then came the note. Sometime before dawn, slid under my barracks door. No signature. Just one line, printed neatly by a laser printer.

“Policy won’t save them. And it won’t save you either.”

I stared at it for nearly a minute. Not out of fear. Out of clarity.

They knew I was watching. And that meant I was finally close.

They had tried to erase me once, quietly and cleanly. Now I was standing in the center of their new blueprint, peeling back the layers. They weren’t just trying to shape a new generation of soldiers.

They were trying to build ghosts.

But this time, the ghost was awake. And she was writing everything down.

CHAPTER 3: The Reckoning

I saw him again three days later, walking the perimeter near the advanced drills course. Clipboard in hand, barking orders like the cadence came from his very bones. Colonel Warren Maddox. My father. My former commanding officer. And the man who had written my first erasure in black ink.

He didn’t flinch when he saw me. Didn’t pause. He just glanced once, the way someone might look at a broken radio. Silent. Unbothered. Irrelevant.

“Paper-pushers don’t last out here, Maddox,” he said, not even looking at me as he passed. “Don’t slow us down.”

Then he turned and walked away.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t need to. That was his signature move. Pretend you never existed. Pretend it never mattered.

Twelve years ago, I was pulled from Project Obsidian—the precursor to Ghost Echo—without warning. I had passed every psychological screening. I had outscored three senior officers in tactical simulations. Falco himself had said I was the best operative he’d trained since the Gulf War.

But then the memo arrived.

‘Psychologically unfit for final clearance.’

No hearing. No appeal. Just one signature. His.

He told people later, in hushed tones at the Officer’s Club, that it was a precaution. That I wasn’t ‘stable’ enough to lead. That I lacked judgment, that I “cracked under pressure.”

But the truth was simpler. Falco chose me, not him, to lead the new unit. And Colonel Warren Maddox couldn’t live with that.

He had spent decades building his image—the decorated veteran, the expert tactician, feared and respected by his peers. But when the program chose someone else—his daughter—he rewrote the rules. He buried me with a single, damning report.

And now, here we were again. Only this time, I wasn’t fighting for his approval.

I was here to dismantle the lie.