Where Fire Ends

The air inside the safe house was thick with unspoken tension. Olivia had shut her laptop, the last of Vanguard’s files burned into their minds. No one spoke. The silence wasn’t indecision — it was the calm before something final.

Jessica stood slowly, flexing her fingers before resting them on the edge of the table. Her voice came out steady, cold. "We don’t just expose them. We burn them to the ground."

Kevin paced near the window, jaw tight, fingers twitching. "We’ve hit them before. Didn’t stop them. This time, we don’t give them room to rebuild."

Leanna nodded, her voice low. "No survivors. No secrets left standing."

Olivia took a breath. "There’s a secure facility outside Bogotá. Not just a research lab — it’s their nerve center. The last of their leadership. If we take it, there’s nothing left to hold the system together."

Jessica’s heart kicked. "Then that’s where we end it."

Under the cover of a moonless night, the team moved through the thick Colombian jungle. The air was wet and close, full of insects and weight. Every step felt like dragging a grave behind them. Vanguard’s facility lay ahead, buried deep in the trees, ringed in motion sensors and pulse-detection fencing.

They reached the outer perimeter just before 0200. Kevin cut through the wire in tense silence while Olivia tapped out commands into her tablet.

The blackout hit like thunder — a complete systems crash, not just lights but comms, sensors, internal protocols. Olivia had built it like a virus. Vanguard’s backups kicked in within seconds, but the delay was enough.

They slipped inside. This time, they weren’t hunting intel. They were hunting an ending.

************************************

Inside, alarms wailed in broken rhythm. Leanna and Olivia stormed the server core, extracting what evidence hadn’t already been encrypted or scrubbed. Jessica and Kevin moved through steel hallways and reinforced doors, clearing each floor until they reached the upper levels.

The control room was empty. Jessica scanned the security feeds. One screen showed a jet warming on the tarmac.

"They're running," she said.

"Not for long," Leanna replied over comms. "Routing all power to the runway gates. I’ll try to stall them."

Jessica was already moving.

************************************

The night air split open as the private jet began to roll.

Jessica sprinted across the tarmac, lungs burning, boots slamming against asphalt slick with fuel and rain. Kevin was just behind her, rifle up.

The first shot hit the wing. The second struck the engine. The jet lurched sideways, sparks screaming against the concrete as it slammed to a halt.

Smoke hissed from the wreckage. The side hatch burst open and a half a dozen suits stumbled out, choking, bleeding, trying to crawl. Vanguard’s leadership. The architects of Project Prometheus. The authors of Lazarus.

Jessica reached the open door and stood over them.

One of the executives, blood on his collar, tried to lift himself. "You don’t understand. If you kill us... you’ll only become what we were trying to stop."

Jessica said nothing. Her silence was the last sound he heard.

Kevin stood nearby, rifle steady but unused. Leanna’s voice crackled over comms: "What do we do with them?"

Jessica stared into the eyes of the man who had signed her life away on a clipboard years ago. Her fists clenched. "We finish it."

The fire was visible from space.

************************************

Days later, the world woke up to headlines: A biotech black site reduced to ash.

A data leak exposing genetic manipulation, mind control, civilian implant trials had gone to every news agency in the world. As a result, Vanguard was gone. What was left behind, that was harder to define.

************************************

Jessica sat on a beach in Belize, staring at the waves. They rolled in slowly, like breath. Like time. She turned her wrist, the scar where her Vanguard chip had been was still faintly visible. A reminder. A warning.

Leanna sat beside her, a bottle of something cold in hand. They didn’t speak for a long time.

Then, "So what now?"

Jessica watched the sun dissolve behind the sea.

"Now?" She paused, letting the word breathe. "Now we live."

And for the first time in a long time, she believed it.

Belize City: Three Years Later.

The office smelled like old books and rain. Jessica sat behind the desk of Black Orchid Investigations, absently cleaning her battered old 1911, the scrape-scrape sound filling the quiet between storms.

The cases were smaller now. Lost things. Lost people. Sometimes lost causes. That was fine. She’d earned small.

Outside, the afternoon sky was turning the color of bruised steel when the knock came. Three sharp raps.

Jessica didn’t flinch. Just called out, "Door’s open."

A man stepped in, nervous, thin, the look of someone not used to asking for help. He dropped into the chair across from her like it might disappear beneath him.

"This is going to sound strange," he said.

They always said that. but then he slid a photograph across the desk. Grainy. Pulled from a security camera.

Jessica didn’t know the man in the picture. Didn’t know his face. Didn’t know his name. That’s what caught her attention. No ID. No record. No history. Like he had never existed. Like someone had built him that way.

Jessica stared at the photograph for a long time. Something cold and familiar twisted behind her ribs.

"Tell me everything," she said.

Because ghosts don’t stay buried. Not in her world. Not for long. "Ghosts don’t scare me," she said, reaching for her coat. "It’s the living ones you’ve gotta watch."

To Be Continued

Look for Jessica to return in Volume 4 of The Dominion Protocol: Black Orchid.