The road back to the Olympic Peninsula was a blurred ribbon of silver and slate. Julian drove with a steady, rhythmic hand, the hum of the engine a stark contrast to the digital screams that were still echoing in the hollows of my mind. I stared out the window as the landscape shifted from the industrial scars of the south back into the ancient, indifferent majesty of the north.
The Bio-Sync was gone. I could feel it in the way the air seemed to sit lighter in my lungs. The "Grace Sterling" who had been a ghost in a mirror, a weaponized memory, had dissolved into the mercury-rich veins of the Nightingale’s foundation.
But as we crested the final ridge and the cedar cabin came into view—a small, amber lantern-light glowing against the pre-dawn fog—I felt a new kind of tremor. It wasn't th
