Kade's mind was empty as he ran through the school.
Not blank with shock. Blank with focus.
Tina's sobbing echoed through his ears, thin and broken, pulling him forward through hallways and corners he barely registered. Another voice had joined hers—a male voice, low and possessive—but Kade didn't listen. He could have. His senses would have let him catch every word if he wanted.
He didn't.
The reason didn't matter. How long it had been happening didn't matter. Even who it was no longer mattered.
He had already decided.
The exits blurred past as he crossed the building faster than anyone should have been able to. His feet barely seemed to touch the floor. Students shouted in surprise as he passed, but he didn't slow. He didn't look back.
The sound led him to the rear of the campus.
An old tool shed sat near the edge of the grounds, half-forgotten and tucked away behind a line of trees. Inconspicuous. Secluded. Perfect.
Kade slowed.
His heightened senses picked up what most would never notice—disturbed grass, faint footprints pressed unevenly into the soil. Another trail ran beside them, deeper, dragged.
His expression didn't change.
Tina's sobbing was louder now. Close enough to hurt.
Kade stopped in front of the shed.
Then he kicked.
The door tore free of its hinges and slammed into the opposite wall with a thunderous crack. Wood splintered. Metal shrieked.
Kade stepped inside.
The sight revealed to him almost made him lose his composure.
For a split second, a thought surfaced unbidden—tie up loose ends.
His father's words from that morning, finally understood. Trent hadn't been talking about packing bags or saying goodbye to friends. He'd been talking about this. About Rex. About the thing Kade had been too blind to see until his new eyes forced him to look.
He felt no anger at Trent. If his father had known and let it reach this point, it was because he believed Kade needed to see it for himself. Needed to choose. That was the kind of man Trent was—one who let you walk to the edge of your own cliffs, trusting you to either fly or fall.
And Kade had fallen. He'd fallen all the way into this shed, into this moment, into the sight of his oldest friend kneeling on a dirty floor with bruises blooming where no one was meant to see them.
The last remnants of hesitation drained out of him.
Tina knelt on the floor.
Her clothes were dishevelled, pulled just enough to expose bruises blooming purple against her skin—carefully placed where fabric would always hide them. Her face was untouched, pristine by design, but tears streaked her cheeks. Her eyes were glassy, distant, unfocused.
She had already given up.
She didn't even react to the door being ripped apart.
Kade's chest tightened.
This was his oldest friend. His sister in everything but blood. Memories flashed through his mind—shared laughter, years of loyalty, one of the two people who had pulled him out of isolation when he was just a strange kid with green eyes.
He had expected rage.
What he felt instead was certainty.
He turned.
A tall boy stood over Tina.
Blue eyes. Handsome. Familiar.
Rex.
His clothes were rumpled, his trousers partially undone. One hand was tangled in Tina's hair, gripping possessively, forcing her head back.
The realization landed fully.
Bitterness swelled in Kade's heart. He felt burning hatred—not for Rex, not for the boy who had done this. The hatred was for himself. He had seen the signs. Noticed the changes. Felt the wrongness. And he had hesitated. He had told himself it was a crush, told himself he was overthinking, told himself to respect her privacy while she was being destroyed in front of him.
Rex released Tina abruptly, letting her collapse to the floor like a discarded puppet. He stepped toward Kade, smiling—that smile—the one that had charmed teachers and classmates and Kade himself for years. Like this was something that could still be explained away. Like charm could stretch far enough to cover what lay on this floor.
"Kade, I know how this looks," Rex said quickly. "Just hear me out. She wanted this—"
Kade exhaled.
A quiet sound. Almost a sigh.
In that moment, Kade no longer knew hesitation.
Rex never finished his sentence.
Kade moved.
One moment Rex was stepping closer, hands raised, confidence bolstered by Kade's silence. The next, Kade's palm connected with his chest.
He had meant to shove. To knock Rex aside, to take him somewhere else, to end this where Tina wouldn't have to see. That was the plan that formed in the half-second before contact.
But his body moved faster than his intent.
His fist passed through flesh and bone and spine like they were wet paper. He felt the resistance for just an instant—the give of muscle, the crunch of ribs—then nothing. His arm was buried to the elbow in Rex's chest, and the boy's face went from confident to blank in the space of a single heartbeat.
Kade stood still.
For a fleeting instant, he registered surprise—not at what he'd done, but at how easily it had happened. He hadn't meant to kill him like this. He had intended to knock Rex away, take him somewhere else, end it where Tina wouldn't see.
Instead, his fist had passed through a human body like it wasn't there at all.
Rex tried to speak.
Kade didn't listen.
He twisted his arm and tore it free.
Rex collapsed.
His body hit the floor hard, eyes wide and empty, a ragged hole torn clean through his chest. Blood pooled beneath him, dark and fast, soaking into the dirt.
Kade looked down at him.
He waited for something—revulsion, grief, horror.
Nothing came.
What he felt instead was a quiet satisfaction, like removing something rotten that had been poisoning the space around it.
That realization settled coldly.
That wasn't normal.
Something inside him had vanished the moment he stepped into the shed. Whatever it was, it took a part of him with it—or amplified it beyond reason. The part that should have been screaming. The part that should have been begging him to take it back.
He still loved Rex. The Rex that existed in his memories, untainted and loyal. The version who had called his eyes cool in preschool and meant it. That version mattered.
The thing lying dead at his feet did not.
He could feel the shift in his mind even now. The way his view of the world had subtly but permanently altered. A line had been crossed, and on the other side, the colors looked different. Simpler. Crueler.
He stood there for a long moment, listening to the silence of the shed. The sound of his own breathing. The distant hum of the school beyond the trees. The absence of Rex's heartbeat, which he realized he had been hearing without noticing until it stopped.
Movement behind him drew his attention.
Tina stirred.
Her eyes fluttered open, unfocused at first. They drifted across the floor, the blood, the shattered door. Then they landed on Rex. Then on Kade.
Blood soaked his arm. His clothes. His hands.
Her eyes widened. Her mouth opened.
Kade tensed.
He wanted to speak. To explain. To tell her that it was over, that Rex could never hurt her again, that he was sorry he hadn't seen it sooner. The words piled up behind his teeth, heavy and urgent.
She never screamed.
Her eyes rolled back and she collapsed again, unconscious before the sound could escape.
Kade stood there, arm still dripping, the words dying in his throat.
Footsteps approached the shed.
Measured. Unhurried.
A familiar voice followed.
"Quite a mess you've made here, Kade."
Kade turned.
His green eyes met another pair, identical in color.
His father stood in the doorway, framed by splintered wood and afternoon light. Trent's gaze moved from Kade to Rex's body, then to Tina's unconscious form, then back to Kade. His expression was calm. Assessing. But Kade saw something else beneath it—a tightness around his father's mouth, a slight whitening of his knuckles where they gripped the doorframe.
Trent was afraid.
Not of the blood. Not of the body.
For him.
"Dad?"
Kade wasn't especially surprised to see his father standing there. Judging from the things Trent had said to him that morning—about loose ends, about leaving soon—Kade had already surmised what he'd meant. If his father had allowed things to reach this point, then there was something he wanted to observe. And that meant he wouldn't be far from the outcome.
None of that mattered now.
Kade was no pawn in whatever game his father was playing. He had made his choice. He had seen it through.
Trent stepped into the shed—or what remained of it after Kade had demolished it—and moved slowly, his green eyes tracking every inch of Kade: his posture, his breathing, the tension in his muscles. His gaze passed over Rex's body on the floor without pause. Tina's unconscious form received no more attention than the blood pooled beneath her.
Under normal circumstances, that scrutiny would have made Kade uncomfortable.
Now, it merely irritated him.
Finally, Trent spoke.
"You're lucky," he said calmly. "The Veil will handle the memories of anyone who saw you moving like a freight train across campus. That was careless. Enlightened do not display their abilities so openly to regular humans. Had you been anyone other than my son, someone would already be on their way to kill you."
The words were delivered without heat, without judgment.
Kade caught the implication at once.
Someone.
A regulatory force, then. Enlightened who enforced order. Most likely, they cleaned up what the Veil could not. And the implication that Kade would face no consequences—because he was Trent's son—told him something else just as clearly.
His father carried weight in that world.
Interesting.
"How much of it did you see?" Kade asked.
"All of it," Trent replied. "From the moment you kicked the door open like a teenager throwing a tantrum."
If that was meant to be humour, it didn't reach his face.
"You lack even the most basic control," Trent continued. "I know you didn't intend to tear the door off its hinges. And you certainly didn't intend to put your arm through that boy."
Kade said nothing.
He had plenty to say—about being thrown into this world without guidance, about being expected to figure everything out alone—but he could see his father wasn't finished.
"But," Trent went on, "I'll admit this surprised me."
He turned fully toward Kade now. For a moment, the clinical mask slipped, and Kade saw something raw underneath—not excitement, not fascination, but a kind of desperate worry that Trent was trying to suppress and failing.
"I never expected you to kill him," Trent said. "A beating, perhaps. A reckless show of strength. But this?" His eyes gleamed—not with pride, but with something closer to fear dressed up as analysis. "This is something else."
He stepped closer, close enough that Kade could smell the coffee on his breath, the wool of his sweater, the faint chemical scent of the university labs that never quite washed off.
"The effects of dual gaze truly are fascinating," Trent said quietly. "I don't think I've ever seen a personality facet amplified so completely in an Enlightened. No hesitation. Not even on your first kill." His gaze sharpened. "Let alone your best friend."
Kade listened without interrupting.
These were the same questions he'd been asking himself.
He didn't know how to explain it. The moment he'd heard Tina's voice, something inside him had aligned with absolute clarity. When he'd seen her kneeling on that floor, Rex's fate had been sealed.
There had been no anger. No doubt.
Only resolve.
He could feel the shift in his mind even now. The way his view of the world had subtly but permanently altered.
"You feel it, don't you?" Trent said, reading the silence accurately. "Something is… different now."
Kade didn't deny it.
"I didn't feel much of anything," he said. "Not during. Not after."
Trent nodded once, as if confirming a hypothesis. But his hand rose, almost involuntarily, and settled on Kade's shoulder. The grip was firm, almost hard, like a man holding onto something he was afraid of losing.
"That," Trent said, his voice slightly rougher than before, "is one of the things that will be addressed during your training."
He dropped his hand and stepped back, the mask sliding back into place. But Kade had seen it. The crack. The father beneath the scientist.
Kade glanced at Tina, still unconscious on the floor.
"The Veil won't fix this," he said flatly.
"No," Trent agreed. "No Ala was used in the act itself. This was… mundane violence." He adjusted his glasses. "The Veil has no jurisdiction here."
"So, it's on us."
"You don't need to worry about this." Trent's voice softened, just barely. "I'm the adult here. I'll take care of it. You head home—I'll be back a bit later."
Kade looked at his father. Really looked at him.
Trent was offering to bury a body for him. To clean up the blood, dispose of the evidence, erase the traces of a murder his son had committed. And he was doing it with the same calm he brought to grading papers or making coffee. But beneath that calm, Kade could see the cost. The way Trent's eyes kept flicking back to him, checking, reassuring himself that Kade was still standing, still breathing, still his son and not something else that had crawled out of Nox wearing his face.
"Okay," Kade said quietly.
Silence stretched between them, heavy but not hostile.
Kade glanced at Rex's body one last time. Then at Tina.
He wanted to go to her. To kneel beside her, to brush the hair from her face, to tell her that she was safe now, that he was sorry, that he should have seen it sooner and killed Rex weeks ago. The urge was physical, a pull in his chest stronger than gravity.
He took one step toward her.
Then stopped.
There was nothing he could say that wouldn't make it worse. She would wake up to a dead body, to blood, to the image of her best friend with his arm buried in another boy's chest. Any explanation he offered would sound like justification. Any comfort would feel like a lie.
He turned toward the exit.
Trent's voice stopped him just short of the doorway.
"I might as well tell you—while the Veil will adjust Tina's memories of anything supernatural, she'll retain everything else."
His pause was deliberate.
"Including the fact that you killed Rex."
Kade stood at the exit of the tool shed, unmoving. He had known there would be consequences—no matter how justified his decision was. He had already lost one friend. Now it seemed the other would remember him only as a psychotic murderer.
He exhaled slowly, as if breathing out what remained of his attachments.
Maybe it was better this way. When he left, she wouldn't miss him or worry about him. She'd hate him—yes—but she would move on. Live a good life. He owed her that much for letting her suffer so long because of his indecision.
He thought of turning back. Of looking at her one more time. Of memorizing her face before she woke up to a world where he was a monster.
He didn't.
"Yeah," Kade said, not turning around. "I know."
Then he walked out of the shed, into the afternoon light, and did not look back.