The flames still crackled in their memories.
Even as the smoke lifted from Broad Street and Lagos blinked awake to a new era, the Core felt no triumph, only the tremble of aftershocks. Truth had erupted like a grenade, but the shrapnel still flew. The vault was gone, but so were answers. And not all ghosts burn quietly.
Inside a safehouse tucked between abandoned colonial buildings in Ikoyi, Misan sat cross-legged on the floor, eyes closed, listening, not to music or words, but to the hum of the city beyond the cracked window. Her fingers tapped a rhythm on her knees, soft, syncopated, and hypnotic.
"She's doing it again," Reni whispered to Adesuwa from the far end of the room.
"She's listening," Adesuwa replied, arms folded. "Not just hearing. Processing."
Misan opened her eyes and turned toward them.
"Their minds were divided," she said softly. "Spliced. Rewritten. Some will never come back."
Reni's brow furrowed. "You're not talking about us, are you?"
Misan shook her head. "There are more."
Yusuf entered then, a stack of physical files under his arm, sweat darkening his collar. "The National Intelligence Directorate sent a courier. They're officially declassifying Project E.R.I.N."
Adesuwa's stomach tightened.
Project E.R.I.N.
The Circle's psychological warfare experiment. Emotional Recalibration through Induced Neuropathy.
Zuri had been one of its early test subjects.
Yusuf dropped the files on the table. "Reni, you need to hear this."
She flipped the first folder open. Diagrams. Brainwave maps. Transcripts from sessions designed to rewrite fear into obedience, erase grief into clarity, and sharpen loyalty through synthetic empathy.
"These aren't just mind games," Reni muttered. "They're programming protocols."
Misan tapped a symbol drawn on her sketchpad.
The same symbol Zuri had carved on the wall before Broad Street.
"I think Zuri knew more," Adesuwa whispered. "She didn't just escape the Circle. She was planted."
At the same time, across Lagos, the city seethed in a different way.
The leaks had ignited a firestorm. Military tribunals convened daily. Political dynasties crumbled. Entire ministries suspended operations pending investigation. Protesters camped in front of foreign embassies, chanting for transparency.
But for every visible collapse, a shadow moved deeper.
In Victoria Island, inside a sleek high-rise untouched by the flames of Broad Street, a council convened in holographic silence. Ten silhouettes. One table. No names.
The remnants of the Circle.
Their leader is a woman known only as Madam Grey, who sat motionless, draped in pearl-white robes. Her voice, when it emerged, was as cold as the glass beneath their feet.
"We underestimated them."
No one responded.
She flicked her fingers. A screen unfolded mid-air, revealing Adesuwa, Yusuf, Tunde, Reni, and Misan, faces now recognized globally.
"They've destabilized our Nigerian operations. But the infrastructure remains. And Misan is the key."
One silhouette spoke. "Extract her?"
"No. Watch her. The Core thinks they've won. Let them gather. Let them speak. The louder they get, the easier they are to trace."
She leaned forward.
"And when they think they've unshackled every voice, we silence them again."
Two days later, in a hidden compound near the edge of Badagry, the Core broadcast their first pirate transmission.
It wasn't on a mainstream network. Not yet.
They hijacked a decommissioned weather satellite, relayed signals through broken towers, and wrapped it in encryption layers so dense even NairaSentinel couldn't trace them, if it were still alive.
Adesuwa stood in front of the camera, hands steady, voice measured.
"My name is Adesuwa Morenike," she began. "And I've seen the truth behind your silence."
She told Lagos everything.
Project E.R.I.N.
The memory prisons.
The economic manipulation.
The stolen elections, rewritten in code.
Tunde followed with visual evidence, snippets from the vault's archives.
Reni decrypted the Circle's funding tunnels in real-time.
Yusuf named names.
And then, Misan stepped forward.
She didn't read a script. She didn't blink.
"They called me collateral. A failed experiment. But my mind is whole now. And I remember."
She spoke for six minutes.
Six minutes that shattered the country.
Viewership skyrocketed.
Hashtags trended globally.
Within hours, public petitions reached ten million signatures.
The people weren't just watching.
They were rising.
But victory had its cost.
Three nights later, someone broke into Reni's flat.
Nothing was stolen, except her encryption keycard and a single photograph: her and her younger brother in Kano, pre-uprising.
A message had been scratched into her wall:
"We are not gone. We are waiting."
She moved into the safehouse immediately.
Trust narrowed.
Paranoia spread like fungus.
Yusuf stopped answering unknown numbers. Adesuwa started carrying two guns. Tunde set proximity mines at every hideout. Even Misan began locking her sketches in coded folders.
The Core had voices now, but the enemy had ears.
Elsewhere, in a medical wing buried beneath the old UNILAG biomedical labs, a figure stirred in a cryochamber.
Zuri.
The real Zuri.
Not the one they had seen on Broad Street.
Zuri had been a clone implanted with selective memories and loyalty failsafes, a fallback designed to fracture Adesuwa's resolve.
But this Zuri, the original, was awakening.
Inside her mind, a flood of memories surged.
Childhood laughter. Fire on the lagoon. White walls. The needle. Screams.
She gasped.
And somewhere, far above her, a sensor beeped.
Adesuwa would feel it in her spine an hour later.
She would fall silent mid-sentence during a Core debrief, eyes wide.
"She's alive," she whispered.
And they all knew who she meant.
Later that night, as the Core debated their next move, Misan walked alone into the chapel of echoes, a small, ruined building once used by freedom fighters during the military regime.
The air was thick with incense and old grief.
She lit a single candle.
Then began to sing.
A song from her mother.
A lullaby written in resistance.
Each word was a declaration. Each note is a drumbeat. Each breath is a blade.
She sang until Adesuwa entered, standing at the back, barely breathing.
Misan turned. "They tried to erase us."
"But they didn't," Adesuwa said.
Misan smiled. "They tried to silence us."
"But now we speak."
The candle flickered.
The city pulsed.
And in that fragile, fiery moment, they weren't just rebels.
They were echoes.
Voices unshackled.