It happens tonight.
Unless they'd already started counting differently. Unless the scan had fast-tracked everything.
Lucas thought of Theron's face when they met in the library. Scared. Lost. But there. Present. A person.
And Lucas had sent him into the machines anyway.
He grabbed his copy of Kaelen's notebook and shoved it into his bag. He had to move. Had to find a way out of the archives before they realized someone down here had been monitoring things. Before they traced the ghost in the security feed.
He climbed the emergency stairs two at a time, taking them up toward the ground level. His hands wouldn't stop shaking.
Lucas wasn't so much afraid for himself, what scared him most was the realisation that if he doesn't get out and hides away the notebook, it could mean that Theron could never learn about history of this corrupted world, and most importantly about his family... about Kaelen.
...
Voss's office was darkening as evening fell outside. She hadn't moved from her desk.
The live feeds played on loop. Theron seizing. Solen standing. Nurses standing behind her, having lost all hope and compassion, now just strictly following protocol.
The pendant sat in an evidence bag on her desk, right next to Kaelen's file.
She'd pulled it from storage an hour ago. Couldn't explain why. Some instinct that said she should be looking at it while this happened.
Silver. Tarnished. Marked with a frequency signature that was so perfectly, uniquely Kaelen that it might as well have had his name written in neon.
...
If you are reading this, T, I'm glad.
These words echoed in Thsron's head. Voss got the notebook. But Theron hadn't read it freely. He'd read it in a cell, under duress, with the knowledge that he was dying ticking down like a countdown that everyone but him understood.
"She probably had read more than I did already" exhaled Theron.
And he was right.
Voss had read the notebook. Every page. Kaelen's handwriting got worse toward the end, shakier, like his hands were failing him before his mind gave up.
The last entry:
They'll try to control what comes after. Don't let them. The soul flare is a bridge, not a tool. They'll want to weaponise it. Let them think they succeeded. Let them think you're contained. Then burn it all down from the inside.
A pause.
Then, in letters so small they were almost invisible:
I'm sorry I can't be there to do it myself.
Voss set the pendant down.
She pulled up her personnel file and scrolled through the names of people who knew what a soul flare really was. People who'd been here during Kaelen's containment. People who, like her, understood why the Board had decided that some knowledge was too dangerous to preserve.
Twelve names.
She crossed out Solen with a keystroke. The woman had seen too much today. She'd either keep quiet and go along, or she'd start asking questions that would make her a liability.
Voss assigned her a transfer order to the northern facility. Effective immediately.
She removed Lucas Venn's name from the Academy's security system entirely. Not quite deletion—that would trigger an audit—but a quiet reassignment. Off-books. Forgotten.
If the Board came looking for him, they'd find a trail that led nowhere.
If they didn't look, he'd have time to run.
It was the closest thing to mercy she could manage.
The last name on her list was her own.
Maren Voss. Director of Screening Division Operations.
She had a choice to make.
Let the system do what systems did: contain, control, weaponise. Build a life flare in a cage and call it science.
Or.
She pulled up a secure terminal—one that wasn't logged through the main system—and began typing.
The message was encrypted seven ways, routed through dead-drop servers, and designed to self-delete after one read.
.
It took her five minutes to write.
When she was done, she sent it to a single address she hadn't used in three years.
Lucas's off-books contact email. The one Kaelen had given her, years ago, in case.
She typed the subject line:
Day Three. The window is open.Try if you dare.
And hit send.
Then she closed the terminal and turned back to the live feeds.
On one the screens, Theron was still seizing. Still breaking.
Still becoming something the system wasn't prepared to contain.
Theron's last conscious thought was that he couldn't remember his own voice anymore.
He'd been screaming—he knew that from the rawness in his throat, from the way his jaw ached—but the sound belonged to someone else. Something else.
The boy he'd been has began dissolving.
Fragment by fragment.
Memory first. His mother's face blurred in his mind, losing definition. The docks. The sound of his own laughter. Kaelen's voice telling him to just breathe.
Then sensations. The bed was there, then wasn't. The restraints. The lights. The humming that filled everything.
Then nothing.
Not unconsciousness—he was aware enough to understand that this was more than sleep. His body was still there. His eyes were still open. But the connection between them and the thing experiencing them was severing, strand by strand.
Like dying.
Or like being reborn.
He couldn't tell the difference anymore.
The hum inside him had become so loud it had no volume. It just was. The fundamental frequency of existence itself.
And underneath it, something new.
Something that sang in frequencies that had no names.
Something that, if he could have shaped words, he might have called: home.
But words were made for the person he was dissolving to become.
This new thing didn't need them.