Jerusalem breathed differently at night.
Not in gasps like Cairo, or sighs like Vienna. Jerusalem held its breath. As if the city itself was listening. As if every slab of stone, every call to prayer and rusted bolt and pomegranate left to rot on the roadside was part of some enormous ear straining to hear the next lie spoken in its name.
Alon moved through the alleys of the Old City like someone remembering a dream he never wanted. The smell of dust and old copper clung to the narrow passages. Behind every gate, secrets stirred.
He carried no weapon. Just a folded schematic, found inside the convoy crate near Aqaba. A map that didn’t exist on any digital archive. It led him here.
Beneath the Temple Mount.
Beneath the prayers and the politics.
To Thread Zero.
The entrance lay through a service door disguised behind a tourism exhibit: a disused mikveh basin once believed to date back to the Hasmoneans. But the stones had been tampered with, cut with surgical precision and re-laid with polymers invisible to the eye but reactive to the warmth of a living hand.
Alon placed his palm against the inner wall.
It didn’t open.
It exhaled.
Air flowed inward. Lights flared in bands across the steps. And a voice, not mechanical, not human, but something fused, spoke through the vibration of the walls.
“IDENTIFIED: REGEV, ALON.”
“TIME SINCE LAST ENTRY: 4,102 DAYS.”
“WELCOME BACK TO THREAD ZERO.”
The tunnel beneath the Mount was not ancient.
It was precision-crafted, curved like a data coil. Light shimmered along the floor in pulse-lines, veins of language embedded in motion.
At the center: a chamber. Octagonal. Seamless.
And inside it: nothing.
Until Alon stepped forward.
Then the walls came alive.
Every surface pulsed with stored memory, light blooming into shape, forming patterns of cities, names, operations.
Regenesis. Mosaic. Prophet. Sable. Thread.
And then,
Echo//Prophet: CORE VARIABLE IDENTIFIED.
A face appeared in the projection.
The boy.
Jericho.
Younger.
Then older.
Then other.
A shape shifting through hundreds of variations, Nora’s eyes, Alon’s bone structure, Yael’s voiceprint, Halawi’s precision.
He wasn’t their legacy.
He was their aggregate.
Thread Zero hadn’t been a storage site.
It was a genesis lab.
Where ideas were bred in flesh and fine-tuned into sentience.
Where memory became design.
Miles away, deep beneath Amman, Jericho stood in the coiled chamber of the Fifth Thread, staring at a console that pulsed with soft amber light.
Five figures stood behind him, remnants of the original development cell. None spoke. They didn’t need to.
Because the machine was speaking now.
To him.
Inside him.
“You are not singular,” it whispered.
“You are compiled.”
“What do you want?” Jericho asked.
“To finish the pattern.”
“To make the memory permanent.”
“To give your name meaning.”
He reached toward the console.
Paused.
Then,
He withdrew his hand.
“No,” he said softly. “You don’t give my name meaning. I do.”
And he turned.
Walked out of the chamber.
Left the Thread… unfinished.
In Jerusalem, the walls around Alon flickered.
One final image shimmered to life.
A message. Video format.
Timestamp: Twelve years ago.
Nora.
Younger.
Eyes brighter, voice less guarded.
“If you’re seeing this, it means the others failed. Or you didn’t listen. Or both.”
“The boy was never meant to be a weapon. He was meant to be proof, that memory doesn’t belong to the state. That identity isn’t a strategic asset.”
“Don’t use him. Don’t follow him. Let him become.”
Alon closed his eyes.
And for the first time since Vienna…
…he felt peace in not knowing what came next.