Darrien felt his father's presence before he saw it — an old, familiar pressure at the edge of awareness, distinct from any god's aura Darrien had ever felt secondhand, because this one had lived quietly inside his own blood since before he'd understood what it meant to carry it.
He was alone in the gym, well past the hour any student would still be training, when the air near the far wall folded inward on itself and resolved into a shape that wasn't quite solid — a projection, translucent at the edges, present enough to hold a conversation and nothing more. Kairos rarely offered his descendants more than that. Presence in full, he'd once told Darrien, was a gift reserved for moments that had already earned it.
"Father." Darrien set down the drill reports he'd been reviewing and rose, not quite a bow, though something in his posture carried the shape of one regardless.
"You've had a difficult season," Kairos said, his voice carrying none of the volume a full presence would have demanded, and all of the weight regardless. "I won't pretend I came here for pleasantries. I need you to tell me about the boy."
Darrien didn't need to ask which boy. There had only ever been one, in four years of teaching at Rockville, whose absence had left a silence this particular.
"Kumo."
"Micah Reed," Kairos said, and something in the way he used the given name rather than the earned one suggested he already knew considerably more than Darrien had expected. "You trained him. Assigned him. Watched him for years before anyone else at this Institute understood what they were watching. I want to know what you saw that the reports never captured."
Darrien considered his answer carefully, the way he'd learned to consider most things where his father was concerned — not because Kairos punished dishonesty harshly, but because he simply always seemed to know the shape of a lie before it finished being told, and the disappointment that followed was worse than any punishment could have been.
"He was the best I ever trained," Darrien said finally. "Not the most talented — talent, this Institute produces regularly enough. He was the most complete. Skill, patience, instinct, all working together in a way I've never seen from someone his age, noble-blooded or not. I assigned him kills most Grandmasters would have hesitated to take, and he never once disappointed me."
"And the visions." Kairos's projection tilted its head slightly, an old, familiar gesture Darrien recognized from his own childhood, though it looked strange now, filtered through something that wasn't quite flesh. "3G confirmed them to Old Josh some weeks before the boy's defection. I assume you were aware, given how closely the two of them worked in that library."
Darrien's jaw tightened, fractionally, before he could smooth it away. "I wasn't told directly. I suspected something. Old Josh doesn't share what he doesn't decide is necessary, and I learned a long time ago not to push him on it."
"Convenient," Kairos said, mild, though something in the mildness carried an edge Darrien knew better than to mistake for softness. "You're a poor liar to me specifically, Darrien. You always have been, since you were young enough that I still had to teach you what a lie even was. Try again."
Darrien exhaled slowly. There was no version of this conversation where deflection actually worked, and some part of him — the part that had spent years watching Kumo become something Rockville had never quite deserved to claim credit for — didn't entirely want it to work anyway.
"I suspected he carried something old," Darrien admitted. "I didn't know whose blood, not with any certainty. I knew Old Josh was protecting him from something, and I knew 3G's involvement wasn't ordinary tutoring. I chose not to ask further, because asking further would have meant reporting what I learned, and I didn't want to be the reason that boy's life got harder than it already was."
"Why."
The question landed simpler than Darrien expected, and somehow harder to answer because of it.
"Because he never had anyone," Darrien said. "Not really. Old Josh, in his way. Two friends who cared for him more than the Institute ever did. Everyone else here saw a weapon worth sharpening, myself included, some days, if I'm honest with you the way you're asking me to be. He deserved one person who saw him as more than that, even if all I could manage was silence instead of anything braver."
Kairos was quiet a long moment, his translucent form flickering faintly, the particular stillness Darrien recognized as his father weighing a response with more care than the conversation had yet suggested it deserved.
"He's gone now," Kairos said finally. "Defected, six weeks past, and not a single source loyal to any of the three of us has managed to place him since. Not the Serpents, for all their reach. Not the Empire's own scouts. Not even Buddha's quieter channels, and Buddha's channels find most things eventually." Something in his voice sharpened, just slightly. "Do you know where he went, Darrien?"
"No," Darrien said, and it was, for the first time in the conversation, entirely true. "I don't. I've turned it over more nights than I'd like to admit, and I have no answer for you. If he reached out to anyone before he left, it wasn't me."
"Would you tell me, if you did know?"
Darrien held his father's gaze — or the projection of it, close enough to the real thing that the distinction barely mattered in the moment — and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he already had an answer ready, one he hadn't consciously prepared before this conversation began.
"I don't know," he said honestly. "I'd like to believe I would, because you're my father, and because whatever's coming for that boy is bigger than anything Rockville was ever equipped to protect him from properly. But I watched an entire Institute treat him like a resource for four years, and I watched him leave the only home he'd ever had rather than keep being treated that way. I'm not certain, anymore, that reporting him back into the hands of people who'd do the same thing again is the loyalty you're hoping to hear from me."
Something moved behind Kairos's translucent features — not anger, Darrien realized, watching closely. Something closer to consideration, the particular expression of a man recalculating a son he'd perhaps underestimated.
"That's an honest answer," Kairos said finally. "Braver than the one you gave me at the start of this conversation, at least." His projection began to fade at the edges, the visit drawing toward its natural end. "I won't ask you to hunt him down, Darrien. I suspect it wouldn't work even if I did, and I've never found much wisdom in demanding what won't be given freely. But if word ever does reach you — where he's gone, what he's become, whatever the shape of it turns out to be — I would ask you to bring it to me before you bring it to anyone else. Not as your god. As your father, who would rather understand this properly than watch three other gods decide the boy's fate without me in the room."
"I can promise that much," Darrien said.
Kairos's presence dissolved fully a moment later, leaving the gym empty and quiet, drill reports still scattered across the table where Darrien had left them. He stood there a long while afterward, turning the conversation over, and found himself, for the first time in weeks, genuinely uncertain which loyalty he'd actually chosen tonight — his blood, his god, or a boy who'd vanished into a silence that, six weeks later, still hadn't given up a single answer to anyone searching for it.