Chapter 16: The Ghost of Solomon Graves

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Scene 1: The First Glitch.

The void is white.

Not the sterile, clinical brightness of The Order’s laboratories. Not the formless nothingness of the place where they broke me. This is something different. Wrong.

It is empty, but not silent.

There is no wind, no echoes, no sense of gravity pulling at my body, and yet I exist here. For the first time in what feels like eternity, I am standing, moving, breathing—except I am not sure if I am really doing any of those things.

I do not remember falling asleep.

I do not remember being allowed to sleep.

A shape emerges from the nothingness.

My body stiffens.

It is not fear that grips me—it is something else. Something raw, something frayed at the edges, like a forgotten memory dragged back into the light.

The shape becomes a man.

A familiar man.

Solomon.

He walks toward me, arms crossed, his familiar smirk pulling at his lips, his head tilting at that angle that always meant he was about to tell me exactly how I had screwed up.

I cannot breathe.

I do not need to.

But I do not move either.

He stops a few steps away, looking me over, amused but unreadable.

"You look terrible, kid."

The words hit me like a blade between the ribs, sharp and unrelenting.

I know this isn’t real.

Solomon is dead.

I saw him die.

"You’re not here." My voice is steady, but my mind is shaking, screaming at me to wake up, to break free of this lie before it takes root.

Solomon arches a brow, rocking back on his heels, casual as ever. "Depends. Are you?"

A flicker.

For a split second, his image distorts—jagged lines cutting through his form, like static tearing through a bad transmission. His smirk wavers. His face shifts.

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Then he is whole again.

I stagger back, gripping my head, but there is nothing to hold onto—only the emptiness stretching forever in all directions.

The void cracks.

A fissure splinters through the whiteness, a glitch in reality itself. Beneath it, I glimpse something else—wires, data streams, a pulsing network of raw information.

Not a dream.

A system.

I look at Solomon again, my stomach twisting with something I cannot name.

"You’re not real."

He grins, but there is something underneath it now. Something knowing.

"Define real."

His voice skips, warping midsentence. The words stretch too long, then snap back, the sound distorted like a corrupted file.

The cracks spread. The void shatters.

I reach for him.

My hand passes through empty air.

"See you soon, kid."

The world fractures into nothing.

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Scene 2: A Mind Split in Two.

I wake up.

No breath. No heartbeat.

Just silence.

The lab is as I left it—cold, sterile, indifferent. Dim overhead lights cast sharp shadows across reinforced steel walls, the hum of machines the only sign of life. My body remains motionless, locked in place by The Order’s restraints—not physical chains, but something deeper.

I should be alone.

But I am not.

"Always were slow to wake up, kid."

The voice is inside my head.

It does not echo in the room. It does not come from The Order’s monitoring systems. It is inside me.

I go rigid, my mind racing. This is not The Master. This is not one of The Order’s commands slipping through my neural feed. This is—

"You’re not real." My voice is flat, dead, because I already know the answer.

Solomon chuckles. "Yeah? That what you keep telling yourself?"

The air around me feels too still. My vision does not blur. My body does not tremble. There is no biological reaction, no pulse of adrenaline, no instinctual response to danger. I do not have those anymore.

And yet—

I know this is not right.

"You’re a hallucination."

"That’s one possibility," Solomon says, amused. "Or maybe you’re just talking to yourself. Long enough in a cage like this, and even you might start losing it."

I force my mind to block him out, to reset, to purge whatever residual fragments of memory are trying to rewrite themselves.

But then—

"You want proof?" Solomon’s voice drops lower, a challenge laced into his tone. "Fine. How about this?"

Data floods into my mind. Not a command, not an upload from The Order—this is something else, something foreign, something outside the system. Blueprints. Schematics. Classified reports.

Information I should not have.

"How do you know that?" My voice is sharper now, edged with something dangerously close to fear.

Solomon’s presence leans in, invisible but suffocating. "Because I left a little piece of myself behind, kid. Before The Order wiped me from existence." A pause. "And now? Looks like we’re roommates."

I try to reject it.

But I can’t.

I can still hear him, still feel him inside my mind, as if a part of him has been embedded into the very systems controlling me.

My body is a machine.

And my mind is not my own.

Then—

A distortion.

Not Solomon.

Something else.

The air goes cold. The space inside my head—where The Order should have complete control—shifts, trembles, bends under something unknown.

A second voice crackles to life, distant, fragmented.

"… no… one… survives…"

I freeze.

Solomon does too. I can feel his attention shift, his energy sharpen.

The voice is wrong, skipping, garbled, broken beyond repair. It does not speak—it transmits.

"… I… was… we were… before you…"

The static crawls through my mind, cutting deep, rattling something I do not understand.

"Who the hell is that?" Solomon mutters.

I don’t know.

But I understand the warning before it even finishes.

"You are… next."

A sudden force slams into my mind like a steel door locking shut. The presence vanishes. The static cuts out.

I feel it before I hear it.

The Master.

"Unauthorized intrusion detected. Stabilizing."

My mind seizes, locking down, my thoughts no longer my own. The pressure of The Master crushes everything else beneath it, drowning out Solomon, drowning out me.

Solomon curses, but his voice is already fading.

"Damn it. Hold on, kid—"

The connection severs.

The anomaly disappears.

The silence returns.

I am alone.

But the words remain.

They are not just erasing people.

They are keeping them.

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