Theron woke to silence.
Not the absence of sound—that would have been mercy. This was the silence of being listened to. Of existing in a space where every breath was data, every movement was information, every thought became a frequency that someone, somewhere, was learning to read.
He'd been in the new cell for three days.
Three days of the guards avoiding his eyes.
Three days of meals slid through slots by hands that trembled slightly.
Three days of watching Solen's reports appear on the observation window—tiny figures moving behind reinforced glass, taking notes on what he was becoming.
...
On the fourth morning, they came for him.
Not the usual guards. These wore different uniforms. Darker. More ceremonial, in the way that violence sometimes dresses itself up to make people comfortable with what's about to happen.
"Prisoner Theron Amina," one of them said, reading from a tablet like Theron was a file to be processed. "Director Voss requests your presence in the integration suite. Voluntary participation in extended compatibility testing. You have the right to refuse."
Theron's hands went numb. The hum in his chest spiked—involuntary, a frequency that made the guard's eyes go wide.
"What if I refuse?" Theron asked, and his voice came out wrong. Too low. Threatening in a way he hadn't meant it to be.
The guard's hand moved toward his belt. Toward something that would put Theron down if he became inconvenient.
"Then we sedate you and move you anyway," the guard said, and Theron could hear the fear underneath the flatness. Could hear the spike of adrenaline. Could hear the recalculation of whether he was still docile enough to move without restraints. "Refusal is noted. Participation is mandatory. You have two minutes to prepare."
There was nothing to prepare.
His entire existence now occupied a single cell and whatever they decided to do with it.
But his blood was boiling. It was making his skin feel too tight. It was making the hum in his chest want to break through and shatter everything in the room.
Theron forced it down.
Made himself still.
Made himself controllable.
Because showing them what he could do would only accelerate what happened next.
He followed them out.
...
The integration suite was not a laboratory.
It was closer to a conference room—chrome table, uncomfortable chairs, walls lined with monitors. But underneath the clinical aesthetic, he could feel it: the machinery. The frequency-readers embedded in the walls. The sensors that had learned to taste fear in a person's resonance pattern.
Voss was waiting.
She looked different than she had in his dream—older, maybe, or just more tired. She wore the same grey suit. It had wrinkles now that he noticed them. Director-level wrinkles. The kind that came from making decisions that haunted you.
But when she saw him, her eyes did something. A flicker of something that wasn't clinical. Fear, maybe. Or recognition.
"Theron," she said, gesturing to a chair across from her. "Thank you for coming."
"I didn't have a choice," Theron said, but he sat anyway. His hands were shaking. He put them flat on the table so she wouldn't see it. So the monitors wouldn't record it as instability.
"No," Voss agreed. "Not technically. But I appreciate the courtesy of pretending."
She pulled out a folder.
Inside were photographs.
But not of him.
Of other people. Younger, mostly. Some older. All with that same translucent quality to their skin. That same look of having been hollowed out and refilled with something that didn't quite fit.
Theron's stomach turned.
He recognised one of them. A girl from the lower levels of Gallowmere. She'd been in basement-tier classes. He'd seen her maybe twice. Now her eyes were empty in a way that suggested she'd been empty for a long time.
"Do you know what these are?" Voss asked.
"People like me," Theron said.
"People like you," Voss repeated. "Dormant flares who awakened. Some in our facility. Some in others. Some discovered by the Compatibility Board in the early stages, before they could cause problems."
She turned the photographs face-down.
"Your brother was like these people," Voss continued. "Talented. Dangerous. Intelligent enough to understand what was happening to him. Which made him unpredictable."
Theron's hands clenched on the table.
The metal creaked slightly. Just slightly.
But Voss heard it.
"And I'm not," Theron said.
It wasn't a question.
He could hear it in her frequency—the relief mixed with something else. Disappointment, maybe. She'd wanted to study another Kaelen. Instead, she'd gotten something quieter. Something that might be more useful.
"You're controllable," Voss said carefully. "Or you appear to be. Which in the long term is either a mercy or a death sentence, depending on who's doing the measuring."
She leaned forward, and Theron saw something flicker across her face.
Guilt.
Genuine, worn-thin guilt. Like she'd been carrying it for years.
"Here's what I'm going to tell you, and I want you to listen very carefully," Voss said. "Your brother is dead. Not imprisoned. Not transferred. Dead. He died on Day 52 of integration in a cascade event that destroyed an entire containment wing and killed six people."
Theron felt his chest crack open.
But he didn't move.
Didn't show it.
The guards were watching from behind the glass, and they were looking for signs of instability. Signs of the kind of power that couldn't be controlled.
But his blood was boiling now. It was hot and vicious and making his vision sharpen into something predatory.
She's lying, a voice in his head said.
Or not lying. Just incomplete.
Because Kaelen had told him—in the dream, in the frequency that moved through the walls—that Kaelen had written instructions. That Kaelen had expected this. That Kaelen wasn't just passively dying on Day 52.
He was planning on Day 52.
...
"Before he died," Voss continued, and Theron forced himself to listen, "he wrote things. Left notes. Instructions, maybe. Things that made it clear he understood what he was becoming. And he understood what you might become. And he spent a lot of time worrying about that."
She opened another folder.
Handwriting. Dense. Urgent.
He recognised it from Kaelen's notebook—the same tight script, the same way of crossing out words as if they weren't quite right.
But not all of it.
These were pages he'd never seen. Kaelen's voice, but different. More urgent. More prepared.
"He wrote: 'T will be different. T doesn't have my anger. He'll be patient. That's more dangerous. Patient people burn slower but they burn longer.'"
Voss looked up from the paper.
"Is he right?" she asked.
Theron's heartbeat was doing that double-pulse thing again.
Two hearts.
Two frequencies.
Fighting and synchronising in unpredictable patterns.
His hands were clenched so tight that blood was running under his fingernails from where he was pressing crescents into his palms.
The anger was so loud now he could barely hear himself think.
"He's right," Theron said quietly.
And then, because the anger needed somewhere to go:
"How did he die? Exactly. Because your frequency is off when you talk about it. You're hiding something."
The guards behind the glass stiffened.
Voss's hand went to her collar—a tell, a nervous gesture.
"His resonance cascade," Voss said, and her voice was careful now. Controlled. Which meant she was definitely lying about something. "Destroyed the containment wing. The structural damage alone—"
"You would have a body," Theron interrupted.
His voice was coming out wrong. Deep. Dangerous.
The frequency in his chest was making the monitors behind him flicker.
"You would have documented the cascade. You would have recordings. But you're not showing me those. You're showing me notes. Pages. Things that can't be verified."
Voss stood.
The movement was quick—defensive.
"That's enough," she said.
"Is it?"
Theron stood too.
The guards moved toward the glass door, hands on restraint devices. But Theron wasn't going to run. He was just standing there, bleeding under his fingernails, his blood boiling hot enough to make his skin feel like it was cooking from the inside.
"Because what I hear is someone who doesn't know if her prisoner is actually dead or not. Someone who's guessing. Someone who's scared that he might not be dead."
Voss's jaw tightened.
"Sit down," she said.
"No."
The word hung in the air between them.
Theron could see it now—the calculation in her eyes. Whether to sedate him. Whether to escalate. Whether the risk of an awakened flare going dangerous was worth the information she thought she could extract.
But something else was happening too.
Because Theron's blood was boiling, and his fear was boiling, and underneath both of those was something that felt like certainty.
Kaelen wouldn't have written those instructions if he'd expected to just die on Day 52.
Kaelen had expected to do something on Day 52.
And if Kaelen had done something on Day 52—if the cascade, the destruction, the six deaths—had been planned—
Then Kaelen wasn't dead.
Kaelen was running.
...
"Sit down," Voss repeated, quieter this time.
This time, Theron sat.
But he didn't look away from her.
And he made sure she could see it in his eyes:
He knew she was lying.
He knew his brother was alive.
And he knew that this whole facility, all these tests, all these careful procedures—they were built on the assumption that Kaelen was dead.
Which meant they were built on nothing.
"You're going to tell me what happened on Day 52," Theron said.
His voice was steady now, even though his hands were still shaking.
"Not the official version. The real version. Because if you don't, I'm going to stop cooperating. And we both know what happens then."
Voss sat back down slowly.
She looked older now. Smaller. Like the weight of whatever she was about to say had already started crushing her.
"His cascade wasn't an accident," she said finally, very quietly. "It was controlled. Deliberate. He... orchestrated it. The destruction was intentional. The deaths were—"
She stopped.
"Were necessary," Theron finished. "To cover his escape."
Voss didn't answer.
But she didn't deny it.
Theron felt something in his chest shift.
The anger was still there, boiling hot. But underneath it was something else now.
Hope, maybe.
Or the kind of clarity that came from realising your brother wasn't dead—he was just surviving.
The same way Theron was learning to survive.
Small.
Invisible.
Patient.
"Where is he?" Theron asked.
"I don't know," Voss said, and her frequency told him she was telling the truth. "He disappeared. We've been looking for three years. But he left behind something. Instructions. A network, maybe. People who know more than I do about what he was planning."
She pulled out one last page.
Not Kaelen's handwriting this time.
Someone else's.
Someone with neat, careful script:
If you're reading this, Voss, then K made it out.
Which means he's still alive.
Which means this whole facility is built on a lie.
Here's the real question:
What are you going to do about it?
"Who wrote that?" Theron asked.
"I don't know," Voss said. "But it was left in Kaelen's cell. After the cascade. After he was supposed to be dead."
Theron felt his blood boil hotter.
Because that meant somewhere, in the city or the country or the world, his brother was alive.
And he was still fighting.
And he'd left behind instructions for people who wanted to fight too.
"What do you want from me?" Theron asked.
Voss looked at him for a long time.
Like she was trying to measure something.
Like she was trying to decide whether to tell him the truth or feed him a lie.
"I want you to find him," she said finally. "I want you to find your brother. And I want you to stop him from doing what I think he's planning to do next."
"And if I refuse?"
"Then you go to the cleansing facility," Voss said. "Where they experiment on people until there's nothing left. Where your brother can't save you because he's already dead to the world, and the world has forgotten he was ever alive."
She leaned forward.
"But you won't refuse. Because you know he's alive now. And because you know that patience burns longer than anger. And because your brother taught you that the best way to survive is to make them think you're helpless while you're learning to burn."
Theron's hands were still shaking.
His blood was still boiling.
But he nodded anyway.
"I'll cooperate," he said.
And as he said it, he could almost hear his brother's frequency moving through the walls.
Could almost hear Kaelen laughing.
Welcome to the real game, little brother.