CHAPTER 141: THE FIRST TRACE

The mood in the van was serious.

Jonah leaned his head back against the seat. The mental exhaustion from controlling Cipher, from pushing its senses through solid walls and then through a storm of data, made his body ache. He could still feel the painful sensation of phasing through walls, the overwhelming noise of the server data. It had all been for nothing.

"So, they’re gone," Draven said from the front, his voice a low growl of frustration. He punched the dashboard with enough force to make the console rattle. "Scrubbed the whole place clean. We’re back to square one."

"Worse than square one," Seraph corrected, her arms crossed, her eyes narrowed as she stared at the glowing Aethelred tower. "Now they know we’re looking. They’ll be digging themselves in deeper than a tick."

The trail was lost. The mission was a bust. Jonah could feel the last bits of hope dying out in the cramped space. All that was left was to pull his ghost out of their empty machine.

He closed his eyes, ready to give the command to recall Cipher.

"Wait."

The word was soft yet sharp, breaking the heavy mood instantly. Jonah opened his eyes. Vanessa was leaning forward, her face lit by the green glow of her console, her eyes wide with a sudden, brilliant idea.

"Jonah, leave Cipher in there," she said, her voice urgent.

"Why should he leave it there?" Draven grumbled. "There’s nothing left to see."

"We’re not looking," Vanessa said, a slow smile spreading across her face. She looked at Jonah. "We’re listening."

It took him a second to understand. Then, his own eyes widened. "The Resonance Compass."

"The what?" Seraph asked, turning around in her seat to face them, her face showing a mix of confusion and impatience.

"It’s the new tech I designed," Vanessa explained quickly, her fingers already flying across her keyboard, pulling up the runic schematics. "It’s a special kind of sensor. It’s not meant to find a big, obvious power source. It’s calibrated to do just one thing."

She looked at Jonah, her face showing a mix of hope and terror. "It’s designed to hear the ghost of your energy. The faint, corrupted traces. The scars your power would leave behind if someone tried to copy it and got it wrong."

She took a shaky breath, her eyes locked on his. "Try it now."

A sudden rush of adrenaline cleared Jonah’s tiredness. He settled back into his meditative state, his mind reaching out across the miles of city, back to the tiny, patient creature that was waiting silently in the lab.

Cipher. New command.

He focused his mind, drawing on his own unique energy. This time, it wasn’t the raw, powerful force he used for synthesis. It was a finer, more controlled stream of his power, a focused beam of his own life force. He channeled it through his mental link, pouring it directly into his creation.

Inside the empty lab, Cipher began to buzz.

A soft, almost invisible wave of energy pulsed outward from its small body. To a normal person, nothing in the room would have changed. But through Jonah’s special senses, the lab shimmered, the air seeming to vibrate with a new kind frequency. Cipher wasn’t just a scout anymore.

It was an antenna. It was a psychic listening post.

The scan washed over the empty room. It passed through the walls, the floor, the ceiling. At first, it revealed nothing. The walls were clean. The floor was clean. The air was clean. The Bureau had erased every single physical trace of their work.

But they couldn’t erase a ghost.

The scan revealed nothing... except for one spot.

In the exact center of the floor, where the faint bolt-marks suggested a stasis pod once stood, something appeared in Jonah’s vision.

It wasn’t solid or an object. It was more like a dark stain on reality itself. A faint, chaotic shimmer of light that seemed to writhe and twist in place. It was like a glitch in the world, a visual scream that had been permanently burned into the floor.

A psychic scar.

Jonah sent the data from the scan back to the van.

On Vanessa’s console, a jagged line spiked across the screen. It was a mess of red and black energy, a pattern of agonizing chaos. It looked like a heartbeat monitor that was hooked up to a dying man having a nightmare.

Vanessa stared at the readings, her face pale.

"What is it?" Seraph demanded, her voice tight and urgent.

Vanessa whispered, her voice choked. "It’s a trace. It’s Jonah’s signature... but it’s corrupted. It’s been... torn apart and stitched back together wrong." She swallowed hard, her eyes not leaving the jagged line on the screen. "Whatever they made here, it’s in constant, unimaginable pain."

The mission wasn’t a failure. The empty lab wasn’t a dead end. It was the answer. It was the proof.

The Bureau hadn’t just studied his blood. They hadn’t just analyzed his power. They had used it.

They had taken his unique gift, the very essence of what made him Jonah, and they had brutalized it. They had hacked it apart and forced it into a new, horrible shape. They had created a living, breathing, and suffering trace of his soul.

A prototype.

The horrifying truth settled over them all, cold and sharp.

Draven, who had been silent, cursed quietly. Seraph gripped the back of the passenger seat tightly, her hand straining.

Jonah stared out the window at the city lights, but his mind didn’t see them. He saw the ugly shimmer on the lab floor. He could almost feel its endless pain.

It was a piece of him. A stolen, tortured piece, but a piece nonetheless. And it was out there somewhere.

"They made one," he said, his voice quiet, but every person in the van heard the cold anger beneath the words.

"They actually made one."

He finally looked at Seraph, his expression showing grim determination.

"And then they moved it."