Third Person POV
The glass shattered before it hit the wall.
"Find them!" Jonathan Patterson roared, his voice slicing through the sterile silence of the underground facility like a blade.
A young agent flinched as he ducked, glass shards skittering across the floor beside his boots. No one dared move. The room had gone still, holding its breath.
Patterson stood at the head of the operations room, fists clenched, his normally cold composure fractured beneath a storm of fury. His jaw ticked, and the vein in his neck pulsed visibly. His tie hung loose, the top button of his dress shirt undone — a rare disheveled state for a man who prided himself on control.
"Sebastian. Evelyn. And the girl." He spat the last word like poison. "They've vanished. Off the grid."
"Sir," one of his senior agents began cautiously, "we've already contacted all local authorities. Border patrol has been alerted. No movement has been—"
"I don't care about your excuses!" Patterson snarled. He turned, his stare slicing through the man like a whip. "I want every highway, every back road, every crumbling shack in this country searched. I want every security feed combed through — facial recognition on all three of them. No one sleeps until they are found."
He stalked to the large digital board at the front of the room, where a red dot blinked — Sebastian's last known location. A surveillance map stretched out from it like veins on an open wound.
"They think they can run from me. Hide from this program." His lips curled into a twisted smirk. "They have no idea how deep this goes."
He pressed a button on the screen and new files lit up: Olivia's photo, her school records, psychiatric assessments. Evelyn's hospital charts. Sebastian's childhood incident reports — cold, clinical observations of rage, brilliance, and emotional deviation.
Project ECHO wasn't just a program. It was a goddamn institution. Years in the making. Funded in shadows, protected by power.
"They were bred for this," Patterson muttered. "Built for it. And now they want to play rebellion?"
He turned back to his men — elite agents in black uniforms, blank faces trained to obey.
"I want eyes on their families, their friends, their social networks. Plant stories if you have to. Leak false information to bait them out. I don't care if we have to torch every safehouse in the country — I want them back. Now."
The room hummed with tension. No one dared speak.
Finally, a voice crackled through the intercom on the far wall. "Sir, the contact from Internal Intelligence is on the line. They've offered full jurisdictional support."
Patterson grinned. It was the kind of smile that could make a grown man sweat.
"Patch them through. Tell them I want facial tracking across every city surveillance system by midnight. And let them know…" He paused, voice low and sharp. "This isn't just a retrieval. This is a hunt."
He stepped into his private office, the heavy door hissing shut behind him.
Inside, dim lights cast shadows across the walls. Monitors blinked with live feeds, encrypted communications, data streams from around the world. On his desk sat a single photo — one of his family. Or what used to be.
His wife, smiling — long before she turned against him. Sebastian, a boy of five, clinging to her side. Evelyn, barely a toddler.
He picked up the photo and stared at it.
"She warned me," he murmured, voice rough. "She said love would ruin them."
He slammed the frame down, glass cracking across their faces.
"Let's see how far love gets them now."
Olivia's POV
Vince stood in front of the board like a man unveiling a battlefield. Not a map of geography, but of power—threads pulled tight between faces and names that reached all the way up to the top of the government. Photographs, classified documents, torn pieces of reports and coded memos, all pinned in a chaotic but deliberate design.
I stared at it, my eyes wide, my heart cold.
He tapped a photo of a senator. "This man signed off on the funding. Publicly, he champions youth mental health. Privately, he approved live experimentation on minors under the guise of emotional resilience studies."
I swallowed hard.
He moved down to another—an aging woman with sharp eyes. "Dr. Anika Grey. Government psychologist. She writes the behavioral response protocols. The way they design your school environments, your triggers, your 'test' situations? Her hand is behind it. She trained most of the operatives."
He didn't pause. Just kept going.
"This one—Deputy Director Morgan—he controls field deployment. That includes extraction units, surveillance vans, sedative supply chains."
My stomach turned.
"And this guy—" he jabbed a photo of a clean-shaven man in a police uniform, "—he's the reason no one ever comes when we report abuse. Police Chief Halden. ECHO bought his silence a decade ago. His entire department filters incoming reports, classifies anything tied to ECHO families as 'sensitive.' It disappears."
I glanced at Sebastian. His jaw was clenched, arms crossed, a storm behind his eyes—but not shock. He already knew. He was just reliving it.
Vince shifted and pointed to the topmost photo, centered in the mess like a spider at the heart of a web. "General Lawrence. He doesn't need to hide behind a title anymore. He's the executive director of Project ECHO now. Took it from a research project to a covert psychological warfare machine. And he answers to the Department of National Security."
I blinked. "Wait—he's not just part of this. He runs it?"
Vince nodded. "He runs your school board, your medical records, the travel permissions. He signs off on containment. And he's your father's superior."
My lungs stopped working for a second.
I heard Eve suck in a breath behind me, sharp like a blade.
"And last but not least…" Vince's voice darkened as he reached toward the bottom corner of the board, where a photo of Sebastian's father sat—sharp suit, cold stare. "…Jonathan Patterson. Sebastian's father."
He looked directly at me. "He called this his dream project. This—every manipulation, every broken life—it's all his plan. The execution, the brainwashing, the silence. All him. But to pull him down… we have to pull down everyone else first."
I couldn't tear my eyes off the board. All this time, I thought we were fighting a shadow. But now I saw the shape of the monster. And it had many heads.
"They taught us to trust the system," I murmured. "All our lives, they told us to believe in the people in charge."
He was telling us all the things we read in those stolen files… but hearing it aloud made it real. So real. Like everything we were taught from childhood was a lie carefully rehearsed.
"We don't just need evidence," I said quietly. "We need to make it undeniable. Loud. Public. Explosive."
Sebastian looked at me. There was something in his eyes—like pride, and fear, and love all tangled into one.
Vince pulled a flash drive from his pocket and placed it on the table.
"This is a start," he said. "Footage. Communications. Names. But it's not enough. Not yet. We're going to have to go deeper."
I reached for Sebastian's hand. This wasn't about surviving anymore. This was about taking them down.
Together.