Chapter 162 Chapter 162
Dominic’s POV
It’s past midnight in the old Voss family cemetery, a place that smells of damp stone and old promises. The headstones lean like tired sentinels, watching as I commit another crime for the sake of a ghost.
The grave I came for sits apart from the others, marked by a simple granite plaque: Elia Beloved daughter, cherished friend. A lie carved in stone.
The same grave that, according to every official record, holds her remains. The same grave Stanley once ordered sealed and forgotten. The same grave he swore she wasn’t dead in.
The diggers work fast, mercenaries I’ve hired under fake names, paid in crypto and silence. The soil gives way easily, too easily for something meant to have rested undisturbed for over a decade.
When the spade strikes metal, I feel it in my bones.
“Stop,” I say.
The men step back. I climb down, mud pulling at my boots. My gloves scrape against the surface of a steel coffin, modern, industrial, nothing like the ornate box in the burial photos. Someone changed it.
I run my flashlight along the seal. There’s a digital lock embedded where a latch should be. A small keypad, blinking faintly. This isn’t a tomb. It’s a vault.
I kneel, wipe away dirt, and pull a small decryptor from my coat. It’s an old tool, illegal, military-grade but I’ve used worse. The code cracks in under a minute.
The lid releases with a hiss, air escaping like a held breath. When I open it, there’s no smell of decay. No trace of death. Just the gleam of money.
Bundles of euros and dollars, vacuum-sealed and stacked with surgical precision. Beneath them were hard drives. At least a dozen. Each labeled with a date and a symbol I recognize immediately, the stylized serpent logo of Z-Core Biotechnica. Liana’s company.
Elia’s supposed grave was never a burial site. It was a storage unit. I lift one of the drives, brushing off dirt. The label reads: EDEN-01: Initial Sample Mapping
My chest tightens. Project Eden. The island. The same phrase Stanley mumbled in the hospital before he collapsed.
Another drive beneath it bears a later date EDEN-06: Neural Recombination Logs. Neural. As in brain.
“Jesus Christ,” I whisper.
If these drives contain what I think they do genetic data, neural maps, cloning records then this isn’t just evidence of a cover-up. It’s proof that Elia wasn’t a victim at all. She was the experiment.
The hum I heard earlier grows louder. I glance back at the coffin’s side and notice a small power conduit, still faintly active. Someone wired this coffin to stay alive.
I pop open the panel and find a sealed lithium battery array still blinking faint green. Whatever was inside this vault wasn’t meant to rot. It was meant to run.
I pull another drive free. EDEN-08: Subject Reanimation Protocol. A chill crawls up my spine. “Reanimation.”
Stanley’s words echo in my head, She wasn’t dead when they buried her.
If she woke up, even briefly, they might have recorded everything the brainwaves, the cellular reactivity, the moment between life and death. They could’ve used that data to create copies.
I climb out of the pit, my hands shaking, the drives heavy in my coat. The men look at me expectantly. “What’s in there?” one asks. “Nothing you want to see.”
“Sir, this….”
I cut him off. “Bury it again. Seal it. Forget tonight happened.”
He nods. Money has a way of convincing silence. I watch as they shovel dirt back over the coffin full of secrets, erasing the wound we made but I can’t unsee it.
Elia’s grave was a lie, a mask built over machinery by dawn, I’m back in the safe house. The drives line the table like a row of tombstones. I connect the first one, EDEN-01 to my system.
Encrypted, but not impenetrable. Whoever built the security assumed no one would ever dig them up. The interface blooms across the screen, dark and sterile.
Z-CORE PROJECT EDEN, SUBLEVEL 3 ARCHIVE Accessed by: Dr. S. Voss, Director of Experimental Continuity
Then a list of subjects. E-01 E-02 E-03… Each tagged “Deceased.” Except one. E-07 – Status: Reanimated / Relocated. I open it.
A cascade of data floods the screen, genetic strings, brainwave recordings, timestamps. At the bottom is a photo. It’s Elia or at least her face but the metadata says the image was taken six years after her supposed burial. My throat goes dry.
Stanley didn’t save her. He reprogrammed her. The woman Liana met, the one I followed across continents was E-07. The “Elia” we saw wasn’t even pretending. She was engineered to believe she was real.
That’s why her story kept breaking apart, half-truths colliding with implanted memories and that means the real Elia…
I look at the remaining drives. Somewhere in them is the answer. Maybe even the footage Stanley never wanted anyone to see but beneath the fear, another thought coils in my mind.
If Stanley could rebuild Elia from fragments, then what’s stopping him from rebuilding others? From replacing anyone?
A soft chime interrupts my thoughts. An incoming message, it was encrypted and untraceable. I open it. Unknown sender:
You shouldn’t have dug it up, Dominic.
Some graves are meant to stay empty.
Attached is a single image the same grave, freshly filled and someone standing beside it, captured by night vision someone watching from the trees. Liana. Her face half-hidden, her expression unreadable.
For a long time, I just stare at the photo, my mind a storm of fear and recognition. If she’s there, then she knows. Maybe she always did.
The woman who built Z-Core might not just be cleaning up after Stanley, she might be finishing what he started. I close the laptop and kill the lights. Outside, the city sleeps.
But somewhere beneath that sleep, in hidden servers and false graves, Project Eden is still alive. And if the coffin was never a resting place then maybe neither was Elia.