General Hospital spoilers reveal that when Jason returned to the outskirts of Five Poppies, the air felt heavier than before, like time itself had calcified around the perimeter of the old compound. There was something in the silence to deliberate to orchestrate and Jason felt it like a pulse.
An echo from a wall that never really ended to code into his memory had come from a source long presumed dead. A whispered cipher slipped between blood and betrayal. One that had haunted him for years without context until now. As he entered the perimeter through an overgrown service tunnel hidden beneath a collapsed water tower, he reached the reinforced vault that had defied all his previous efforts.
This time he didn’t need to guess. His fingers moved with grim certainty as he input the alpha numeric string. Each keystroke sounding like a gunshot in the dead silence. When the door slid open, it wasn’t just dust or decay that greeted him. was the unmistakable chill of human misery, of secrets so deep they had warped the air itself.
Inside was a subb network of rooms, archives, and long abandoned surveillance hubs still faintly powered by emergency generators. The walls were covered in maps, pin photos, encrypted files half decrypted, and old WSB insignias burned into every corner. Jason moved quickly but methodically, pulling files, recording serial numbers, capturing data feeds that somehow were still running.
He found a terminal still warm, still pulsing with life. And when he plugged in the decrypted key from his pocket, what unfurled was more than intellect was horror. Three profiles popped up. Britt, Joselyn, Vaughn, each tagged active status. read. The timestamps were recent. Brit’s video featured her chained to a gurnie in a sterile room lit with flickering fluorescent lights, whispering something Jason couldn’t quite make out, but mouththing his name over and over again.
Justine’s footage was worse. He was pacing in what looked like a narrow cell, her hands shaking, eyes darting as though someone had just left or was about to arrive. Thorne, however, wasn’t pacing. Was lying still on the floor of a dimly lit chamber. A man collapsed under torture or sedation. His body barely moving, his breathing shallow.
Jason froze, his instincts waring with the logical part of his mind. They were alive, not just hypothetically, not part of some cruel rer. were alive, that they were being kept somewhere off-rid behind layers of lies and logistical slight of hand in facilities only the most clandestine sectors of the WSB would know.
Jason’s heart pounded not with relief, but with rage. He had seen enough to understand that their captives weren’t just criminals. They were ghosts of his own past. Fragments of operations deemed immoral to continue, reactivated in secret. And now, as he stood alone in the bowels of five puppies, he realized he had just kicked open the door to a nightmare no one was meant to wake from.
The files labeled program echo referred to controlled memory eraser, targeted personality deconstruction, behavioral rewiring, a cocktail of psychological and neurological torment that he had only heard about in whispers during his darker assignments. Brit was listed as subject 1A medical leaison failed defector with a subnote reading execute upon protocol breach.
Joselyn had a different label entirely. Asset acquisition Jenzie Sap’s pilot followed by a remark that chilled him proximity to Morgan. Emotional leverage confirmed. And Vaughn, who Jason barely knew before this, was now listed as containment liability, which meant they had no intention of letting him survive long-term.
Jason began pulling the hard drives from the control panels. Each one hot to the touch, as if he, even the machines didn’t want to give up their secrets. He knew now that the code he used hadn’t just opened a door, it had triggered something. Somewhere, someone knew this room had been access. He could feel it in the shifting vibrations beneath his feet, in the way the lights flickered one second longer than necessary.
As he escaped back through the tunnel, data clench in his hand. The woods around him no longer felt like shelter. He felt like a trap. The darkness seemed to follow him. Shadows folding in ways that made no sense. But none of that mattered. What mattered was that he now knew they were still leaving. And that meant he had to act. Not tomorrow. Not after planning, no.
He had enough proof to expose at least part of the operation. But he also knew that doing so would make him a target again. Not just for rogue agents, but for the system that birthed them. When he reached the old cabin hideout, he spread the documents across the floor and began mapping the coordinates embedded in the data.
There were three possible locations for the prisoners. an abandoned psychiatric facility in rural Pennsylvania, an offshore rig converted into a detention lab, and a decommissioned NATO site buried under miles of snow in Greenland. All three were real. All three were alive, and all three had encrypted security teams rotating every 48 hours.
