The rain outside the derelict apartment block was just noise, another layer of static in the world. Inside Safehouse Gamma, the silence was absolute. The air was cool, sterile, the concrete walls bare save for the necessary fixtures – reinforced door, a fold-down cot, a single console humming softly. I moved through the space with the quiet precision born of habit and necessity. The stolen tech was bagged, inert and harmless until analysis. The shard of Kryptonite, was triple-wrapped, locked in a shielded compartment within my kit.
I ran diagnostics on the safehouse's perimeter, confirming its isolation, confirming no tails. Checked the air filters, the power supply. Routine. Necessary.
Finally, the console. Encrypted comms. The lifeline to the outside world, to the network that fed me contracts, intel, and the occasional sardonic byte from Whisper. I expected the usual ping, the standard data dump, maybe a query about the asset's integrity.
The notification was different. Distinct. A private channel, dormant for years, reserved. Only two people knew its frequency, its encryption key rotation algorithm. One was dead. The other…
A voice message. Not data. Not orders.
My fingers paused over the keyboard. The world outside the safehouse, with its meta-humans and global threats, felt momentarily distant. This was a different kind of variable.
The message was routed, scrubbed of metadata, anonymized through layers of proxies I'd built years ago. Secure. Yes. But utterly unexpected.
I initiated playback.
The speaker ID was blank. As it should be. Then, the sound. Breathing. Shallow, ragged. A sharp intake. And then, her voice.
Sarah.
Her voice. And it was breaking.
"Dad?"
The single word hung in the sterile air, alien, out of place.
"If you even get this… I don't know why I'm sending it. Maybe it's stupid." A crack. Anger, sharp and brittle, surfaced. "Probably. Like a lot of things you did."
My grip tightened on the armrest of the console chair. Not a conscious decision. Just a physical response, instantaneous. The message continued, a torrent of words held back for too long.
"Where the hell have you been?" she demanded, the volume rising, straining against the secure channel's buffer. "Seriously? You drop off the face of the planet after the divorce, just… gone. 'The Ghost,' right? You really lived up to the name."
Each word was a precise, targeted strike. She didn't know the specifics of my work, didn't know why I'd vanished after signing the papers, after leaving the house for the last time. She just knew the outcome. Absence.
"You showed up maybe… what, three times a year? For an hour? And it was always on your terms, wasn't it? Always some rushed thing, you checking your watch. Like I was just… a stop on a mission."
She wasn't wrong. I had treated it like a mission. A necessary check-in, a performance of 'fatherhood,' calculating the minimum required interaction to prevent… what? Guilt? Liability? I tried to minimize the damage I inevitably caused by my mere presence. Trying to be human. Trying to be a dad.
"You taught me not to need anyone," her voice dropped, the anger replaced by a chilling, measured hurt. "Remember that? 'Reliance is a weakness, Sarah.' 'Trust is a liability.' You drummed it into me. Made me independent. Made me strong. And then you used your own lesson against me and disappeared."
The irony wasn't lost on me. I preached self-sufficiency, preached detachment, and then abandoned the one person I should have been attached to. A calculated risk assessment. Minimizing the chance of her being a target. Minimizing the chance of me being exposed through her. Brutal logic. It demanded I cut loose.
"And now… now something feels wrong, Dad. I don't know… the news, the rumors, things are just… changing. Getting crazier." Her voice was trembling now, the anger fully gone, replaced by a raw, exposed fear. "And for the first time… maybe ever… I wish you were here. To explain it. To… I don't know. Just be here."
This was the variable I couldn't calculate. A crack in her carefully constructed facade, the one I'd helped build. A need I thought I'd successfully extinguished. Unshakable under pressure? This was pressure of a different kind. Not a bomb ticking, but a heart breaking.
"You always said we were alike," she finished, the words quieter, heavier, laced with a sorrow that twisted something deep inside me. Something I usually kept buried under layers of ice and purpose. "Maybe that's why I don't trust anyone either."
The message ended. Silence fell again, thicker this time, pressing in from the concrete walls.
My training, my discipline, demanded an immediate response. Dismiss it. File it under 'Emotional Intrusion.' Analyze the transmission path for potential compromises (there were none, I'd ensured that). Return to the mission. The tech, the Kryptonite, Whisper's expected intel – these were the priorities.
But I didn't move. My hands remained clenched, the knuckles pale against the dark console. The faintest twitch registered in my jaw, a micro-movement I barely allowed myself.
Unwilling to forgive. Grudges are permanent. Sarah's message was a grievance laid bare. A valid one. Would I forgive her for… what? Reaching out? Expressing the hurt I had caused? The concept was foreign. Forgiveness wasn't a tool in my arsenal. It wasn't logical. It yielded no tactical advantage.
But Sarah wasn't a target. She was… a consequence. A consequence I had chosen to manage through distance and silence.
I hit the replay button.
Sarah's voice filled the sterile air again. The anger, the hurt, the fear, the unexpected vulnerability. I listened, not analyzing the data stream this time, but the shape of the sounds, the pauses, the catch in her breath.
"You dropped off the face of the planet…"
"Always on your terms…"
"You taught me not to need anyone…"
"Something feels wrong…"
"I wish you were here…"
"You always said we were alike… Maybe that's why I don't trust anyone either."
The last sentence repeated in my mind, a loop. We were alike. Yes. I had seen it even when she was young. A core of caution, a tendency towards self-reliance, a watchfulness that mirrored my own. I had nurtured it, thinking I was giving her strength, armor against a dangerous world. Armor against me.
Was that why she didn't trust anyone? Because the one person who should have been the bedrock of her trust had instead taught her its futility? Had abandoned her? This is what I had created. A reflection of myself, burdened with the same inability to connect, the same fundamental isolation.
I replayed the message a third time. This time, I focused on the fear in her voice. "Something feels wrong… the world's changing… getting crazier." She saw it. She felt the shift. That same cold wind of uncertainty I felt, even with all my foresight and preparation. My world of mercenary codes, missions, and collapse triggers had no place for this fundamental human unease she was expressing. Had no place for her.
For the first time since this all began, since I became... this... I started to wonder: What if it did? What if there was a place for family? What if that wasn't a weakness, but… something else?
The thought was disruptive. Dangerous. It threatened the very foundation of my operational philosophy. Emotions clouded judgment. Attachments created vulnerabilities. I had excised them ruthlessly to become lethally efficient, adaptable, unshakable.
But the image of her, trembling with fear, wishing I was there, wishing for the presence of the ghost who taught her not to trust, created a silent, internal tremor I couldn't suppress with logic or discipline.
I stood up from the console. My operational state was a disguise, a posture, a calculated presentation to the world and to myself. A shell built of discipline and detachment. For this moment, this singular intrusion of genuine human connection and pain.
I walked away from the humming console, away from the stolen tech and the Kryptonite shard. My gaze fell on a small, almost hidden recess in the concrete wall near the cot. It was the only non-functional element in the safehouse. A hidden compartment.
I opened it. Inside, protected from dust and light, was a single item. A photograph. Faded around the edges, the colours muted by time.
It was Sarah.
She was maybe seven or eight years old in the picture. Standing in a park, sunlight catching her hair. She was looking directly at the camera, directly at me, back then. And she was smiling. A wide, unrestrained smile, full of pure, uncomplicated joy.
She looked at me like… like I was her hero.
I stood in the dark, the air of the safehouse doing nothing to dispel the sudden, heavy weight in my chest. The message echoed in my mind – we were alike, that's why I don't trust anyone either. The image in my hand spoke a different language. Trust. Adoration. A connection I had systematically dismantled, brick by painful brick, in the name of survival and strategy.
I stared at the faded photo, the smiling child a ghost haunting the man I had become. The safehouse was silent, except for the soft hum of the console, a reminder of the world I inhabited, the world Sarah was now sensing, fearing. And for a long, immeasurable moment, I wondered if there was any way back to the world represented by the faded sunlight and the trusting smile. Back to her.