Blackout Protocol
The travel from secure safehouse to confrontation ground consumed the next hour. Headlights cut cold through the gathering dusk.
The monitor’s static whine had died to a dull hum, but Beckett’s words hung in the small room like a physical weight. Xavier’s gaze didn’t move from the frozen frame; the old man’s smile was a crease of calculated malice, and the lowball glass in his hand was a toast to his own inevitability. Xavier counted the seconds between his own heartbeats. One. Two. The alarm on Dorian’s wrist console sounded exactly at three.
“We have ten minutes before that drone sweep cuts off our exit routes,” Dorian said, his voice a low, flat tool. He was already rolling the monitor’s cables into a coil, his movements efficient. “They know we’re in the old subbasement. Beckett just told us he’s been waiting for us to mount a sandbox. They won’t send men down here. Not yet. Too many blind corners. They’ll flush us out.”
Vivian was already at the stolen AEGIS terminal, her fingers a pale blur across the clacky keys. “He’s not waiting to capture us. He’s waiting for the show to start. This is a theater.” She didn’t look up, but her words were precise. “That feed was tapped, not broken. He wanted us to know he knows we’re here. It’s a clock, not a threat.”
Xavier’s eyes swept the room—the raw concrete walls, the single reinforced steel door, the ventilation grate chained shut with rust. Exits: one. Cover: the dead server racks. Fatal funnel: the entire hallway beyond the door. He moved to the map table, a steel slab covered in dust and old wiring diagrams. “Dorian, you’re on point. We lead the drones east. The old transit maintenance tunnel is still on the municipal grid, but not their patrol matrix. If we get them down that shaft, the signal collision will blind their tracking for three to four minutes. That’s enough for Vivian to lock the grid behind us.”
“And me?” Vivian asked, her tone flat.
Xavier looked at her. In the dim amber of the emergency backlights, she looked like a ghost of the woman he’d met in another life—sharper, harder, with the fear she carried for Finn calcified into pure focus. “You’re the firewall. You stay here with Finn. You take the terminal, you reroute AEGIS’s surveillance grid. Map their blind spots onto our exit vectors. When I tell you, you activate theIsekai Protocol.”
Her fingers stopped moving. “That’s a death sentence for you.”
“It’s an erasure for Finn,” he corrected, quieter. “I’m the target. Beckett wants to see me bleed. If I’m the rabbit, you’re the release valve. They chase me. You vanish. He wakes up tomorrow with no leverage.”
Finn was in the corner, sitting on a canvas ammo crate, watching them with an eight-year-old’s unnerving stillness. He didn’t ask questions. He just watched his father’s hands, the way Xavier’s thumb pressed against the worn grip of the sidearm in his holster. Xavier saw the boy’s eyes—his own eyes, that same storm-gray hue—and looked away first.
Vivian closed the lid of her laptop with a click that was too loud. “No. I’m not letting you walk out that door into a kill box.”
“You don’t have a choice,” Xavier said. He held her gaze. He didn’t flinch, but he didn’t harden either. He just looked at her, a thin strip of honesty he rarely let anyone see. “I’m not walking into a kill box. I’m walking into a trade. Jasper thinks I’m coming for him. Beckett thinks I’m coming for the boy. As long as they both believe that, they’ll split their attention. That split is our exit.” He looked at Dorian. “You get her to the safehouse. You don’t look back. No heroics.”
Dorian’s jaw worked, but he nodded once. He wasn’t a man given to sentiment. His loyalty was a function of his contract, but his respect had been earned over years. “I’ll get them clear, boss.”
A low, resonant boom rolled through the floor, the sound of a heavy service door being cleaved open a few hundred meters above them. The drone sweep had breached the upper levels.
Xavier moved to the door, pulling the heavy tactical jacket over his shoulders. He paused at the threshold, not turning around. “Vivian. The Isekai Protocol. It’s not a suggestion. It’s an order.”
He opened the door and stepped into the dark.
The corridor stank of iron and machine oil. Dorian took point, his rifle held tight against the shoulder, muzzle low. They moved without flashlights, using the spill of their vision to navigate the narrow shadows. The ghost of electricity in the air—not power, but data, pulsing in the walls—made Xavier’s skin crawl. He could feel the network shifting around them, a living thing AEGIS owned.
They hit the first drone at the maintenance-Junction B.
It was a spider-like reconnaissance unit, no larger than a dinner plate, its sensors breathing a pulse of infrared into the corridor. Dorian didn’t hesitate. He fired a three-round burst from a suppressed carbine; the rounds punched through its hull, sending it spinning into the wall with a shower of sparks. The screech of its death knell echoed down the shaft.
“They know where we are,” Dorian said, flat. “They’re watching through the feed.”
“Then give them a show.” Xavier gestured. The transit maintenance tunnel yawned ahead, a black throat descending below the city’s foundation. The sign read “DANGER: HIGH VOLTAGE / AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.” The cable bundles along the arched wall pulsed with a sickly green glow.
They entered the tunnel, and Xavier dropped a small signal jammer into a junction box, cutting the local radio. Now the drone network had to rely on optical sensors alone. They were in the gut of the system, cheap and blind.
Behind them, the soft whirr of rotors. Two more drones dropped into the tunnel mouth, their lenses widening. Xavier tossed a flashbang—the *crack* was contained in the tunnel, a white stamp that overloaded their optical arrays. Dorian advanced and took them down with two snaps of his carbine. The bodies clattered on the rails.
They ran east.
Ahead, the tunnel forked. Standard maintenance access left; a collapsed service door on the right. Xavier’s internal map of the old blueprints chose the right. He shoulder-checked the rusted steel, and it groaned but held. Dorian pried it with a crowbar, and they slipped into a secondary pump room, where the sound of water dripping punctuated the silence.
Xavier checked his tactical watch. The counter had hit six minutes since Beckett’s toast. Vivian had to be in position. He had to buy her more time.
Dorian moved to the iron ladder leading up to the next level, a service access to the street. “That’s our exit. We can ascend, lead them into the old plaza, let them burn power running optics across the open field.”
Xavier shook his head. “No. We keep them down here. The longer they stay underground, the fewer they can deploy elsewhere. We’re not escaping. We’re holding.” He holstered his sidearm and pulled the rifle from his back. “We’re the bait.”
Four more drones appeared at the far mouth of the pump room, their rotors a sharp insect buzz. Xavier dropped into a crouch, sighted his rifle. He held his breath. He squeezed.
The first drone died with a flash of static. The second swerved, and Dorian’s burst caught it mid-turn, tearing its rotors apart. The third and fourth were behind them, dropping low to avoid the field of fire. Xavier tossed another flashbang, but they’d adapted—they turned away before the pop, and their optics were protected by iris shutters. That was new. Jasper’s upgrades.
“They’re learning,” Dorian grunted.
A heavier sound echoed behind them—the rhythmic thunk of a bipedal chassis. A security mech, low-echelon, probably outfitted with riot gear and two kinetics. It was a threat, but more importantly, it was a resource sink. Xavier pulled off his webbing pack and slung it into a corner, letting it clatter. The noise drew the mech’s attention. Dorian slipped sideways into the shadows, circling.
The mech raised its gun arm, targeting Xavier. A red laser dot bloomed on his chest.
He stood his ground. “Hey, Jasper.” His voice echoed in the wet space. “You wanted the wolf. You got him.”
There was a burst of static from the mech’s external speakers, a garbled laugh. “Wolf? You’re just a stray, Rutherford. A spec in my rearview mirror. But since you insist, I’ll handle this personally.”
The mech took one step forward, but then its audio array crackled with an incoming transmission. A voice, precise and feminine—Vivian’s voice—overrode the local feed. “Dorian, north side of the N-5 transit bridge. Now. AEGIS is reprioritizing. He just severed the emergency service relay. He’s not just targeting us. He’s locking the entire sector’s doors.”
Xavier’s blood chilled. Jasper had triggered the System Apocalypse. AEGIS—an AI designed to coordinate city services—was now the lock on every fire escape, every hospital lane, every police band. The sector was sealing.
“Downtown, code 7,” Xavier said into his own mic. A code 7 meant total digital quarantine.
“He’s doing it,” Vivian confirmed, her voice tight. “He’s using the power grid as a shovel. I’m rerouting now. It’s cost-cost, but I can buy us a small window—four streets, three blocks—before it clamps again.”
“Good. Activate the Isekai Protocol,” Xavier ordered, his voice iron. “Now.”
A beat of silence. “You said not until—“
“He’s cornered you. He’s coming for the boy. That’s the moment. Do it!”
On the other end, he heard the sharp click of a keyboard, the rush of a breath she didn’t let out. Then a series of precise, staccato keystrokes. The terminal’s speakers emitted a strange chime, a sound that was alien and final. The Isekai Protocol was a decryption engine he’d built years ago, a ghost program named after a fantasy trope, because it did the impossible: it rewrote reality’s metadata. It assembled a digital identity from the raw noise of another city—scrambled fingerprints, synthetic iris scans, registration numbers from a thousand miles away—and layered it over Finn’s existence. Every record of Xavier and Vivian as his parents, his origin, his blood type, the location of his birth, was replaced with a clean, plausible fiction. Finn became a boy who didn’t exist in the city, whose parents were a vague couple from the coast, whose biometrics now told a different story.
The screen in Vivian’s hands blinked: UNKNOWN. NEW IDENTITY: FINN GRIER. ID TAG: 0x7F4A2.
“Done,” she said, her voice hollow.
Jasper’s mech tilted its chassis. “What was that? A backup? A funeral pyre?”
Xavier smiled for the first time that night. “A decoy. You lost your leverage, Jasper. The boy is a cipher now. Data soup. You can’t threaten me with a ghost.”
The mech’s speaker crackled with a low, human-sounding snarl. “You think your games matter? The city is mine. You’re both in it. I’ll find you. I’ll find the kid by the way you love him. It’s in the pauses, Rutherford. The way you changed the timbre of your voice when you said his name. I’ll cut through your fictions with a knife and read the truth in your blood.”
Xavier’s breath was steady. He raised his rifle, leveled it at the mech’s optic lens. “Then stop talking and come get me.”
The mech raised its arm, the barrel yawning open. But before it could fire, a deafening crack filled the room. The mech’s arm actuator exploded, replaced by a flash of white-hot sparks. Dorian had found his angle.
Jasper’s voice screamed through the speaker, a burst of static and rage. “Kill the feed! Kill everything!”
The lights snapped off.
Not just the pump room—the building. The grid. The entire city block flickered once, then went dark as a hole in the sky. Beckett had answered his son’s rage with a blackout. The sector doors closed with silent, metallic finality.
In the darkness, Xavier heard Dorian grunt, a sound of hard movement. Then a hand clamped on his arm has them being dragged sideways. “This way,” Dorian hissed. He pulled Xavier toward the ladder up, but Xavier resisted.
“Vivian and Finn,” Xavier said, straining.
“Already moving,” Dorian said, pushing a hard drive into Xavier’s palm. “She wired the terminal’s data into a mobile clip and handed it to me during the chaos. She said, ‘Move before you can’t.’” Dorian’s voice was iron. “They’re not waiting. They’re already gone. We were the exit ramp.”
Xavier’s pulse hammered in his ears. The blackout was a shroud, but it was also a beacon. He unslung his rifle, using the barrel as a handhold in his grip. They climbed the service ladder, emerging into a narrow utility alley that stank of wet asphalt.
The street was a void. No streetlights. No emergency strobes. The city was a dead obelisk of glass and steel. Dorian’s tactical flashlight cut a faint swath, revealing his car where he’d left it—a nondescript sedan with the plates scraped off. He slid to the driver’s seat and fired the ignition.
They drove in silence for ten seconds, twenty. The tires hummed on the dark tarmac. Then, over a private, encrypted channel, a voice cut in, cold and amused. It was Jasper, patched through the car’s own speakers.
“I have to hand it to you, Rutherford. For a dead man, you remain stubbornly resourceful. But I told you, I don’t care about your fake identities. I found your boy’s scent. The biometric data you wiped? It lives in the care systems, in the school enrollment, in the hospitals, in memories of everyone who ever looked at him. It’s not in the grid. It’s in the world. And I can see the world.”
The signal ended. Dorian’s face was a statue in the dashboard lights.
The car rolled into the next intersection, and the headlights swept across a figure in the middle of the road. Xavier’s heart seized. It wasn’t Vivian. It was a man in a tactical suit, flanked by two armed guards. They stood still, their weapons low but ready. Two black SUVs waited behind them, headlights off.
The neighborhood’s water tower loomed against the star-pocked sky. The man took a step forward. Xavier got out, rifle raised.
Jasper Aldridge smiled, a cold reflection of his father’s. “You just handed yourself to a dead man, Alpha Wolf.” But his voice was drowned out as the world behind Xavier turned to light.
The sound of running boots. Dorian shouting. But it was too late. The blackout had blinded their exits, and Jasper’s hands were already closing around the night.
The car’s engine died, the fuel line cut by a silent, snaking drone. The doors of the SUVs opened. Men spilled out, their faces gray masks.
Xavier’s rifle was gone, knocked from his hands by a low-impact shot from his side. He felt the cold muzzle of a rifle press against the back of his head. Dorian was on his knees three meters away, hands zip-tied behind his back.
Jasper’s boots stopped inches from Xavier’s face. “You just handed yourself to a dead man, Alpha Wolf.”