That is All I Ask For: Chapter 14: Ghost Lines

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Dante wasn’t sure what made him agree to the meeting.

Maybe it was curiosity. Maybe guilt. Or maybe it was that gnawing sense that Adam Shade wasn’t finished with him yet.

The man had left him broken once—picked him up out of nothing, groomed him into something useful, and then dropped him the moment a scandal threatened his image. And now, years later, here he was again.

Smiling.

Waiting.

The racetrack Adam had chosen for their meeting was empty. Not abandoned—too clean for that—but unused, like it had been built solely for this one conversation.

Dante stood in the middle of the track, arms crossed, watching Adam walk toward him with the same smooth confidence he’d always had. Expensive coat, grey streaks in his black hair now, but otherwise unchanged.

“You came,” Adam said, voice warm. “I wasn’t sure you would.”

Dante didn’t answer.

Adam smiled wider. “You’ve grown. Stronger posture. Clearer eyes. I always knew you’d get there.”

Dante clenched his jaw. “What do you want?”

“To offer you something better.”

Adam gestured behind him. From the shadows of the pit, a sleek race car emerged—driven by a woman no older than twenty-two. Her driving was sharp. Precise. Familiar.

“She trained in the same program I designed for you,” Adam said softly. “Built from your data. Your instinct. Your techniques.”

Dante frowned. “You cloned me.”

“I refined you.”

The words landed like cold steel.

“She’s fast,” Adam continued. “But you? You were art. Still could be.”

Dante’s fists curled at his sides. “Why now?”

“Because Micah’s back. And you’re starting to forget what it felt like to win on your own.”

That hit a nerve—and Adam knew it.

Dante didn’t say anything. Just turned away.

“Think about it,” Adam called after him. “I’m not your enemy, Dante. But Micah? He’s not your salvation either.”

At the Zero Eclipse HQ, late at Night. The server room was humming. Quiet. Cold.

Micah stared at the latest anomaly logs, scrolling through line after line of data on a split-screen. Every time Dante or Daniel completed a sim run, the engine telemetry showed minor fluctuations.

Small. Just enough to throw off calibration by a tenth of a second.

At first, it looked like stress on the engine housing.

But Micah had run this setup before. These readings didn’t feel like stress.

They felt like manipulation.

He pulled up network access logs.

Three pings. All outside regular engineering hours. All routed through a shared terminal on the second floor—assigned to a junior telemetry assistant.

“Too easy,” Micah murmured, fingers flying across the interface.

He knew what this looked like: someone poking around to sabotage, not crash. Just… undermine. Quietly. The kind of interference meant to sow doubt, to make things fall apart slowly enough to look like incompetence.

He leaned back in his chair, mind ticking.

Adam’s influence didn’t come like a storm. It came like rust.

At the garage the next morning, Meredith found him standing in front of the lift bay, staring into nothing.

“You look like you haven’t slept,” she said gently.

Micah didn’t look at her. “There’s a leak in the tech team. Small. But deliberate.”

Meredith’s heart dropped. “Sabotage?”

“More like surveillance.”

She swallowed. “Adam?”

Micah nodded. “We don’t have proof yet, but I’ve already isolated the terminal. I’m handling it.”

Meredith hesitated. Then said, very softly, “I think I need to tell you something.”

That got his attention.

She drew in a breath. “About five years ago, when Eclipse was still a sketch on paper… I took a consulting job with a private AI startup. Just a few months. Harmless work.”

Micah waited.

“Found out last week that the company—well, its shell parent—was run by one of Adam Shade’s holding groups.”

The silence that followed was heavy—but not cold.

“I didn’t know,” she whispered. “And when I found out, I wanted to bury it.”

Micah gave her a long look. “You didn’t bury it. You told me.”

“I didn’t want to become another crack in this team.”

Micah’s voice was quiet. “We’ve all got cracks, Meredith. What matters is whether we break.”

The midday light slanted through the glass ceiling of Eclipse HQ, casting long bars of shadow across the floor. Daniel leaned against the server tower in the diagnostics bay, arms crossed, watching Micah scroll through data.

“You’re sure?” he asked.

Micah didn’t look up. “We’ve had three calibration delays in the last two weeks. All during sessions where someone accessed the network remotely.”

“And it’s not just a bad update?”

Micah shook his head. “They’re manually injecting lag into the feedback loop.”

Daniel let out a low whistle. “You think it’s someone inside?”

“I know it is.”

Micah turned the screen toward him, highlighting a terminal ID in red.

Daniel squinted. “Jian? Seriously?”

“He’s low-level, works nights, usually quiet. Too quiet.”

Daniel scratched his chin. “Think Adam got to him?”

Micah gave a small, bitter smile. “Adam doesn’t get to people. He makes them think they chose it.”

Jian’s office was tiny. Cluttered with specs and notes, leftover coffee cups and crumpled energy bar wrappers. Meredith stood beside Micah and Daniel as Jian walked in, clearly not expecting company.

“Hey,” he said, nervous. “Is something wrong?”

Micah didn’t bother with pleasantries. “We need to talk.”

Jian’s eyes darted toward his monitor, then back. His hands fidgeted.

“I’ve been watching the telemetry logs,” Micah continued, voice calm. “You’ve been sending data externally.”

“No, I—” Jian started, but Meredith held up a small drive.

“We’ve already traced the relay. We know it was going to a cloud node registered under Altshade Automotive Research.” She looked him dead in the eye. “You know whose name that is?”

Jian didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.

Micah sighed, and for a moment, he looked less angry than... disappointed.

“Why?” Daniel asked. Not accusatory—just tired. “Why would you risk everything?”

Jian looked cornered, ashamed. “He said he just wanted to study our engineering patterns. That it would help the industry. And he offered to clear my student loans. I didn’t think it would hurt anything.”

“You were selling us,” Meredith said, quietly furious.

“I didn’t mean to—”

“But you did,” Micah cut in. “And now you’re done.”

Jian opened his mouth, maybe to beg. But Micah just turned away. “Your contract’s terminated. Your credentials are already revoked. Security will escort you out.”

Daniel followed Micah out, silent.

When they were alone again, he said, “You handled that better than I would have.”

Micah gave him a tired look. “The old me would’ve thrown a wrench at his face.”

Daniel chuckled. “I remember.”

Micah didn’t laugh, but the ghost of a smile tugged at his lips.

Meredith lingered in Jian’s office after everyone left. She sifted through the papers, the empty wrappers, the post-it notes scribbled with gear ratios and diagnostics.

Among them, she found something odd—a slip of paper folded four times.

She opened it.

It wasn’t technical. It was personal.

“No matter how fast you drive, you’ll never outrun who made you.”

Below it, a stamped logo: Altshade Automotive Legacy Division.

Meredith’s hands shook.

This wasn’t just sabotage.

This was programming.

Dante stared at the ceiling of his apartment, the city’s lights bleeding through half-drawn blinds.

Adam’s words wouldn’t stop echoing in his head.

“Micah’s not your salvation either.”

“I built you to win.”

“You’re starting to forget what it felt like to race on your own.”

Dante closed his eyes.

He thought about the old days. The scandal. The silence. The months of crawling through nothing.

Micah had been the first person who didn’t flinch at his name.

The first person who looked at him and stayed.

And yet, when Micah needed that from him—Dante had doubted.

He sat up suddenly and opened his drawer. At the bottom lay the encrypted drive Adam had handed him during their last meeting.

“If you ever want to remember who you really are,” Adam had said, “watch this.”

Dante stared at it for a long moment.

Then slowly, he slid it into a desk drawer, locked it, and placed the key on the shelf above it.

Unused.

For now.

The garage was nearly empty when Meredith walked in.

She found Micah sitting alone at the main console, eyes on the array of monitors but clearly not seeing them. His shoulders were hunched forward, a rare sight. He looked... tired, not from lack of sleep, but from holding too much in for too long.

She stepped beside him and held out the folded slip of paper.

Micah took it wordlessly, unfolding it, eyes scanning the message.

“No matter how fast you drive, you’ll never outrun who made you.”

He let out a slow breath. “Sounds like Adam.”

“There’s more,” Meredith said, lowering herself into the chair beside him. “The logo at the bottom belongs to the legacy division Adam mentioned to Dante. I think he’s been building this whole thing from the inside out. Not just rival teams, but ideologies. Mindsets.”

Micah set the paper down carefully. “Control disguised as support.”

“Exactly,” Meredith whispered.

Micah leaned back in his chair, arms crossed, gaze far away.

“Do you ever wonder,” he said quietly, “how many of us he’s shaped without us realizing?”

“All the time,” she admitted.

There was a pause before she added, more softly, “That’s what scared me about telling you earlier. That maybe I was just another tool in his machine.”

Micah turned to her. His expression softened—no condescension, no judgment. Just calm, quiet truth.

“You’re not a tool,” he said. “You’re the reason this team didn’t fall apart when I left. The reason Daniel kept showing up. The reason Dante didn’t give up.”

Her throat tightened.

“I made a lot of mistakes,” she said. “But I’m not going anywhere. Not again.”

Micah gave her a tired smile. “Good. Because I can’t do this without you.”

The Next Morning, Dante arrived at the garage before sunrise.

The rest of the crew wouldn’t be in for another hour, but he knew—somehow—that Micah would be there.

He wasn’t wrong.

Micah was adjusting torque values on the new stabilizer mount when he heard footsteps and looked up.

Dante stood just inside the bay, hands in his jacket pockets.

“You’re early,” Micah said.

“You’re always here before everyone else.”

Micah smirked faintly and turned back to the mount.

Dante stepped closer. “I didn’t watch it.”

Micah’s hands paused. “Watch what?”

“The drive Adam gave me. The one that’s supposed to ‘remind me who I am.’”

He pulled the tiny silver key from his pocket and placed it on the workbench.

“I locked it away,” Dante said. “Because who I am isn’t in there. It’s here.”

Micah turned slowly to face him. There was no rush, no demand in Dante’s tone. Just... sincerity.

“And who’s that?” Micah asked.

Dante looked him in the eye. “Someone who wants to stay. Someone who wants to rebuild what we lost. If you’ll let me.”

Micah studied him for a long moment. The silence between them stretched—but didn’t feel heavy this time. It felt full.

He nodded once. “Alright.”

Dante exhaled, the tension leaving his shoulders.

Micah glanced at the key again. “Don’t throw it away.”

Dante raised a brow. “Why not?”

“Because one day,” Micah said, “you’ll need to remember just how close you came to becoming someone you weren’t. And how you chose not to.”

Later that morning, the team gathered near the simulation rig. Laughter returned in small doses—Daniel teasing Meredith about her obsession with calibration ranges, one of the engineers arguing passionately over tire compounds.

Micah stood off to the side, watching them.

For once, he didn’t feel outside the circle.

Dante joined him a moment later, sipping from a water bottle. “Still think I oversteer on turn six?”

Micah gave a dry laugh. “Absolutely.”

Dante nudged his shoulder. “Then help me fix it.”

Micah looked at him.

And this time, he didn’t turn away.

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