Page 70 of Pulse Zero
They can’t.
Her fingers slip from mine.
And the last thing I feel is the embers in the air dying with her.
I wake up choking.
The room is dark except for the faint glow of the clock in the safehouse bedroom.
4:11 a.m.
My sheets are twisted around my legs. Sweat chills against my skin, cold and clammy, as though I’ve been dragged out of a lake instead of a dream.
For a moment, I just lie there, staring at the ceiling.
It’s always the same—the nightmare or the memory. I don’t think there’s any distinction between them anymore. But the nightmare doesn’t fade the way normal dreams do. It never has.
Three years later, and I can still feel the weight of Ash’s body in my arms, still hear the power crackling through the air, still see the light when it hits her.
My shadows stir along the walls, restless. They always react when I wake up like this.
I sit up slowly and drag a hand down my face.
“Enough.”
The shadows settle, though they don’t disappear completely. They never do anymore. When you die and return, parts of you don’t come back the same.
Seven years ago, I was a weapon owned by Bellrose Institute—their first successful Pulse Zero Event, at least the first successful one they deemed worthy enough to keep. Proof that death could be weaponized. Malcolm Bellrose called it a breakthrough, a controlled resurrection. A new stage of human evolution.
I called it slavery.
The Institute called me their soldier, and for two years, I did everything they wanted of me—track Ascended who slipped through the cracks, kill the ones who wouldn’t cooperate, recruit the ones who could be controlled.
Ash was one of those recruits.
Twenty-one years old, fire manipulation, temper like a lit match. She tried to burn down half the facility the first week they captured her.
Malcolm loved that about her.
So did I.
They paired us on missions because we were efficient together. Shadows and fire worked well in the field. Fear and destruction tend to compliment each other.
Somewhere between the blood and the orders and the things we were forced to do, we became friends. More than that. She was like my little sister. We were the closest thing either of us had to family.
Long jobs turned into late nights, and late nights turned into deep conversations. We learned a lot about each other during those first two years, like what our lives were like before Bellrose. For both of us, those lives felt so far away. We were completely different people.
Technically, we weren’t people. We were dead.
Malcolm needed legally dead Ascended operatives, tools that could act for the Institute as ghosts. They gave us resources and missions and purpose, but never freedom. We were deniable enforcers, fixers for Ascended-related messes, weapons used to suppress independent Ascension.
He started with me because I already had skills he coveted. He engineered Cason’s kidnapping because the abduction of a Bellrose heir would trigger public attention and draw eyes to him instead of me. It also garnered plenty of sympathy for the Institute. My death may have been made public, but it became nothing more than a footnote, collateral, something no one looked twice at. Cason wasn’t bait. He was the distraction.
When I awoke, I was legally dead. I had no legal protections, and Malcolm owned my existence completely. No rights, no identity, no recourse. Any exposure would mean he’d make sure I disappearedfor real.
Eventually, Ash and I came to the conclusion that Malcolm never planned on stopping. Ascended everywhere were being hunted, erased, owned, killed.
We decided to finally fucking do something about it.
