She saw a room she recognized: the Situation Room of the defunct Combined Intelligence Directorate. But the chairs were empty except for one. In it sat an old man with a scarred cheek and calm, tired eyes.

And somewhere in the deep dark of the net, a ghost began to move.

"Danlwd," she whispered. Welcome. "You’re supposed to be dead."

He leaned forward. "The link is stable. But there’s a problem. Someone inside the remnants of CID is feeding false coordinates to our extraction teams. We have twelve hours before a nuclear package goes missing from a Turkish depot. The only way to stop it is to route a command directly through a compromised node—a node that exists only inside a live VPN session that you are now holding open."

"You’re the link, Agent Zero. No name, no face, no past. Just this connection. If you close it, the package vanishes. If you keep it open, they can trace it back to you in twenty-three minutes. Your choice."

The old man smiled—a rare, sad smile. "Direct access confirmed. Welcome back, Zero."