CHAPTER 40: DEAD OR ALIVE

In the span of one minute, Ahce did three things that would change the course of everything that followed.

She forwarded the mysterious audio through multiple encrypted relays, fragmenting the signal across her network of allies, analysts who could trace its origin, cross-reference its frequency patterns, and confirm whether it came from a human voice or a synthetic imitation. Then, with a flick of her wrist, she locked down the compound into full defensive posture.

Alarms didn’t blare. Instead, invisible systems hummed to life, drones deployed to perimeter watch, gates sealed, and the air filtration system engaged. Finally, she gave the third order, the one that made the air in the command room thicken.

"Ash," she said, voice low but steady, "prepare the team for covert insertion. No signatures. No official trail. We move tonight."

The acknowledgment came instantly, a curt

"Yes, ma’am," before the line cut.

Ahce exhaled. She would not allow herself to be baited into a public spectacle. She would not hand herself to the very men who wrapped genocide in the language of governance. Every fiber of her being understood now. This wasn’t about one nation’s sins. This was about a disease that had spread into the conscience of the entire world.

If she were to stop it, she needed more than truth. She needed momentum. The kind of exposure that could not be erased, outrage that could not be silenced, and a chorus of witnesses whose voices no state could bury. The war she was fighting was no longer one of bullets and fire. It was of hearts, of narratives, of people remembering what humanity was supposed to mean.

She needed allies, within the press, in foreign parliaments, in the quiet offices of civil resistance, and in the hearts of soldiers who still remembered duty over doctrine. The cost would be devastating. The work would kill people. She knew that. But the world she had built inside her walls was no longer merely a refuge. It was a frontline.

When she closed her console, the hum of machinery faded into the softer sounds of her world, her grandmother’s humming from the garden, her mother pruning the herb beds, her father turning the pages of his paper, oblivious to the storm gathering just beyond their fences. She looked at them and felt something tighten in her chest, not fear, but clarity, cold, absolute, and unshakable.

If the world sought to lower its population in the name of "sustainability," then she would raise a banner of defiance in the name of life. She would fight for every soul they called expendable.

If Richard’s voice, his voice, had reached her through static and corruption, it could only mean one thing. He was still out there. Changed perhaps, wounded, or worse, but alive. And if there was even a flicker of that truth, then surrender was not an option.

She began to move the pieces. The strategy would demand infiltration deeper than before, into the belly of the machine that had remade the world into a cold equation. They had turned death into mathematics. She would become the variable they could not predict.

"Why now..." she murmured to herself, staring at the waveform frozen on the screen.

At first, she wanted to believe it. The voice, gravelly, exhausted, familiar, was a blade of memory. She listened to it again and again until the audio began to distort, until the silence between breaths became unbearable. That tiny hitch in his tone, that breath he only allowed himself when he trusted her, it was all there.

But she knew better. Voices could be copied. Tones reconstructed. Artificial intelligence could now mimic the rise and fall of human emotion, the tremor of grief, the pauses that made words feel real. Machines could fake mourning. They could fake love. They could fake Richard.

She hit replay once more. The message was brief, ten seconds that tore her open.

"Stop searching for me. Forget about me. Live your life... Be safe."

For a heartbeat, Ahce froze. Then, fury ignited where grief should have been.

Richard, the man who once swore that love meant staying even when the world burned, telling her to give up? To forget him? Impossible.

She listened again, analyzing the cadence, the deliberate break in the sentence, the way emotion seemed too carefully placed.

It wasn’t him.

The real Richard was composed even in chaos. He never indulged in dramatics. He never said farewell, he acted it. Her hand slammed against the desk.

"Bastard!" she hissed, eyes burning. "You think you can fool me with a ghost’s voice? Wait until they catch you pretending to be him. Then we’ll see who you really are."

Yet as the static died, and the signal dissolved into silence, something deep within her stirred, a whisper she despised for its weakness.

What if it was him?

The thought was poison, and yet she could not kill it.

Ahce poured herself a glass of red wine, the liquid glinting beneath the pale city lights spilling through the window. Below, the metropolis pulsed with motion, cars like rivers of light, people like restless shadows. From above, the illusion of peace was almost beautiful. Inside her, it was unbearable.

She stared at her reflection in the glass.

Richard, if you were alive, you’d laugh at me for drinking alone again.

He used to talk about the places they would see once the war was done, snow-dusted mountains, islands where the sun never set, cities that hummed with perpetual life.

"Someday, Boss," he had said once, half-smiling, "when all this is over."

That someday had never come. Or so she had believed.

But tonight, she made up her mind. She would go to one of those places, not for nostalgia, but for a purpose. To chase the ghost that refused to die. To prove he once existed, or still did.

The next morning, Ahce dressed plainly, in denim jeans, a crisp white shirt, dark sunglasses that hid everything she no longer wanted the world to see. No one would recognize her as the woman the news networks debated in whispers. She was just another face. Another traveler seeking quiet.

There’s still time before we leave tonight.

I can’t believe I drank myself to sleep, so we had no choice but to move the schedule.

Damn it!

These emotions are getting in the way!

The café by the pier was sunlit and peaceful. Salt air mingled with the faint hum of engines and the soft clatter of dishes. She ordered coffee and waited, the sound of waves brushing against the docks a strange lullaby. And then, time fractured.

Across the street, a man stood still among the crowd. Broad shoulders. Dark hair swept back. A face she had memorized long ago, though this one bore sharper lines, colder resolve. His eyes, sharp as blades, calm as the sea before a storm, met hers.

The world stopped.

Her heart screamed, It’s him.

Her mind whispered, It can’t be.

They did not move. The sounds of the city faded until all she could hear was her own pulse. Two strangers, bound by silence, by history, by something that might have once been love.

Then he turned away.

And she stood there, motionless, with the taste of wine and memories in her mouth, wondering if fate had just mocked her, or offered her one last chance at redemption.

Her voice trembled, barely audible.

"He’s alive..."