Kael didn't sleep that night.
Not really. His body shut down in short, broken intervals, but his mind stayed awake, pacing in tight, paranoid circles. Every time his thoughts slowed, something else crept in. A sound. A flicker of light. A feeling that didn't belong to the present.
He sat on the edge of his mattress as dawn bled through the thin curtains, staring at his hands. They were steady.
That worried him more than the shaking ever did.
The vision he'd forced the night before still burned behind his eyes. Not the images themselves—those were already fading, slipping through the cracks like water through fractured stone—but the echo. A sense of recognition without context.
Kael stood and crossed the room, pulling a notebook from the shelf. Not the rules. A worn one, its corners bent from years of frantic handling. He opened it carefully.
Pages of fragmented notes stared back at him. Not dates. Not explanations. Just raw, jagged phrases:
Cold floor. Breathing counted.
Voices behind glass.
Blue light hurts them.
Don't cry. It makes them angry.
Kael swallowed hard. He didn't remember writing these. He never remembered writing the worst ones.
The city was quieter this early, stripped of its usual noise. Kael liked it this way. Fewer people meant fewer variables. Fewer chances for his mind to spiral.
Still, he felt exposed. Every reflection in a darkened window made him glance twice. Every passerby who lingered too long set his nerves on edge. Kira's warning echoed in his head: If I stay, they'll find you faster.
"Too late," he muttered.
He doubled back through narrow alleys and transit tunnels, following routes he'd memorized years ago. He wasn't paranoid; he was practiced. By the time he reached the old public archive building, his pulse had finally slowed.
The place was officially a tomb. Funding cut. Records relocated. Unofficially, it was perfect. No cameras. No guards. Just dust, darkness, and information the world had tried to forget.
Kael slipped inside and descended into the lower levels. The air grew colder with each step. He liked that, too.
The archives were a maze of decaying terminals and rotting paper. Kael moved with purpose, his fingers trailing along the spines of boxes. Medical studies. Cognitive research. Defense contracts.
He stopped. One section had been recently disturbed. Dust patterns were broken. Boxes shifted.
Someone else had been here.
Kael crouched near a terminal and powered it on. The screen flickered, lines of corrupted data scrolling past like digital ghosts. The system responded sluggishly, but eventually, a directory appeared.
RESTRICTED FILES.
The echo in his head pulsed insistently, tugging him forward. He accessed the first file. Project logs filled the screen. No names. No faces. Just numbers.
Subjects. Procedures. Outcomes.
Kael scrolled until his breath caught. Several entries were marked INCOMPLETE. One file, older than the rest, was flagged in crimson:
STATUS: UNRECOVERED
Kael reached out, his fingers hovering above the keys. "No," he said quietly.
His hand moved anyway.
The vision hit him like a physical blow.
A sterile room. White walls. Lights too bright to escape. A child sitting on a metal table, wrists restrained. Not screaming. Not yet.
Kael felt the weight of something pressing against his temples. Electrodes. Glass barriers. Voices murmuring behind them.
"Stability is unacceptable," someone said.
"Open cognitive channels," another replied.
Pain exploded. Kael gasped, collapsing forward as the vision shattered. He hit the floor hard, air ripped from his lungs. The archive spun around him.
"Stop," he groaned. "Stop."
He lay there for several minutes, shaking, until his breathing steadied. When he finally pushed himself up, blood dotted the floor beneath his nose.
"Unrecovered," he whispered, a hollow laugh escaping his throat. "So that's what I am."
A faint click. Then another.
Footsteps.
Kael froze. Adrenaline cut through the mental fog like a blade. He moved silently, slipping behind a heavy shelf as shadows crossed the far end of the archive. Two figures entered. Black coats. No insignia. Movements too controlled to be human.
Hunters.
"One minute," one of them said. "The spike came from here."
"Asset still active?"
"Very."
Kael clenched his fists. Asset.
He edged backward, but his foot brushed a loose piece of debris. It skittered across the floor.
Silence. Then—
"There!"
Kael ran.
He sprinted through the archive, weaving between shelves as footsteps thundered behind him. A shot hissed past, shattering a terminal inches from his head. He dived through a side corridor and burst up a stairwell, his lungs burning.
Use it, something inside him urged. You need it.
Kael stumbled, catching the railing as the hunters closed in. He made a decision.
Blue light flared. The world fractured into a thousand possibilities.
He saw their movements before they made them. Angles. Timing. Intent.
Kael moved. He dodged the first strike instinctively, twisting aside and driving his elbow into the attacker's throat with lethal precision. The move wasn't trained—it was borrowed.
The second figure lunged. Kael countered, sweeping the leg and sending them crashing into the wall. Pain tore through his skull. Memories shredded. But he kept moving.
He burst through the exit into the cold morning air, vanishing into the crowd just as sirens began to wail.
Kael collapsed in a far-off alley, gasping. Images spilled out uncontrollably: fighting styles, tactics, movements that weren't his. He pressed his forehead against the cold brick.
"What am I doing?" he whispered.
Far beneath the city, in a dark chamber, alarms pulsed softly.
"Confirmation?" a voice asked.
"Yes. Subject engaged. Ability escalation observed."
"And the girl?"
"No visual confirmation."
The man in the shadows leaned forward. "Find her. If the synchronization continues, we'll lose control."
In the alley, Kael slowly pushed himself upright. His hands trembled, but beneath the pain, something else had stirred. Not rage. Clarity.
For the first time, the question wasn't why this happened to him. It was what they were afraid of.
Kael looked up at the city skyline, his jaw set. "They're coming," he murmured.
And somewhere deep in his fractured mind, something answered back: Let them.