Neo stared at the broken mask.
His Echo Step faded into a low hum, like static behind thought.
**It was him.**
Not a hallucination.
Not a projection.
**Jai.**
From before Virelia. From before the transfer. From the life Neo had sealed in fragments and code.
---
**"You're supposed to be dead."**
Neo's voice was cold steel — not shaken, not cracked, but edged.
Jai wiped blood from his mouth with a crooked smile. "You sound disappointed."
Neo didn't answer.
He couldn't.
The truth was harder to calculate than deception.
---
**Five Years Earlier. Sector 14-A.**
Neo and Jai were ghost-tier cadets in a rogue intelligence unit—kids raised on codes, missions, and silence. They survived by reading signals, not emotions. By crafting plans within plans. By trusting no one—
Except each other.
Until a mission in Ivala City went wrong.
Neo was told Jai didn't survive the extraction.
Told. Ordered to forget. Reassigned. Mind sealed under Echo inhibition protocols.
---
**Now, Jai was standing here. Bleeding. Alive. Laughing.**
"Did they erase me, Neo?" he said, voice barely above a whisper. "Did they teach you to forget the revolution we started?"
Neo's mind raced.
But the Echo Step didn't flare.
No danger.
Not yet.
---
"Why come back now?" Neo asked, stepping forward. "Why sneak in through Virelia's weakest link?"
Jai's eyes gleamed. "Because someone here is building what we feared."
He dropped a data chip onto the ground.
"I was supposed to stop it. But then I saw your name on the monitor. *You.* The one they called 'The Silent Storm.'"
A pause.
"I had to know if you remembered."
Neo picked up the chip but didn't respond.
> Echo Step pulsed.
> Something on that chip would change everything.
---
Outside, the bell rang.
Students poured into the halls like noise incarnate.
But Neo stood still, chip in hand, the past in front of him, and the future tilting on its axis.
---
**From the shadows above, another figure watched.**
Lucid.
The Council's newest pawn.
She saw through illusions.
She read minds like books.
But Neo?
Neo was the one page she couldn't read.
Her eyes narrowed.
> "So... he's not just a storm. He's the eye of it."