Debris still clung to my jacket like ash from a slow-burning fire. I hadn't slept—not really. Not since Chrono pulled me into that fracture. Not since I saw the version of me that could burn the world.
I shook off the weight, forcing my thoughts back to the now. Jacob and I had regrouped in what was left of an old apartment complex—a two-story building whose roof barely held. The others had gone silent after the android ambush. No comms. No pings. Just static.
I pressed a hand to the side of my head, focusing. "Chase, come in."
Nothing.
I glanced at Jacob, who sat near a broken window, fiddling with the regulator cores inside his gauntlets. His forearms were already bruised from the last blast he fired mid-air.
"You good?" I asked.
He winced and gave a strained grin. "Next time I try mid-air propulsion through concrete, remind me I'm not a missile."
I half-smiled. "Noted."
We moved out at first light. The goal was simple: find Maddie, Chase, Rev—and Booker, if he was still... himself.
Atlanta was crumbling. Entire districts had been carved out by Harbinger drones, each sector sterilized like an infection. The androids hadn't just patrolled the streets—they'd mapped them, marked them, owned them.
We stuck to the shadows.
Now and then, I'd catch glimpses of red glitches—faint flashes like Chrono's ribboned light—curling at the edge of my vision. I ignored them. I had to.
Two hours in, Jacob picked up something on his scanner. "Pulses—two of them. Biometric signatures, close."
"Who?"
He squinted. "Can't say. One of them is Maddie's frequency. The other… feels scrambled."
We followed the signal north, weaving through alleys and across collapsed bridges. Eventually, we reached the remnants of a collapsed train station. Beneath it, a makeshift shelter had been built from scavenged tech.
A soft hum resonated as we approached, and then—movement.
Maddie emerged from behind a stack of shielding plates, her eyes wide with relief. "Kaleb! Jacob!"
I ran to her. "Are you alright?"
"Better now. Chase is inside," she said. "Rev's still missing. We tried to contact you, but the signal's jammed. Something's broadcasting from the center of the city—some kind of dome."
I felt it. The pull. The gravity of something new pressing into my thoughts like a tide rising in reverse.
We stepped inside the shelter. Chase was pacing, visibly shaken. "You're not going to believe this," he said without looking up. "I cracked part of the drone network's encryption. There's a new signal—a master command code overriding every android in the region."
He pulled up a projection.
A figure materialized in wireframe—tall, lean, head hooded and crowned with a silver geometric halo. Equations spun like constellations behind him.
"Who the hell is that?" Jacob asked.
Chase looked at me. "They call him the Grand Calculus."
My throat tightened. "Another Harbinger?"
Chase nodded. "He's different. He's not just muscle or illusion or brute tech. He's math. Living, sentient math. Every action, every strategy, every move he makes is pre-calculated across thousands of simulations. He doesn't improvise—he predicts."
"Like a walking probability god," Maddie muttered.
"He's taken over the central tower in Atlanta," Chase continued. "And get this—he's rewriting the city's infrastructure. Code, architecture, power grids. All of it."
"Why?" I asked.
"To prepare," Chase said. "For something called 'The Equation of Convergence.' He mentioned it in a broadcast loop I decrypted. I don't know what it is yet, but whatever it is… It's massive."
I turned to the map. The broadcast dome. The Android network. The calculated strikes. It all lined up.
"He's orchestrating something. And it's connected to the Nullwave tech."
That's when we heard it.
A scream.
It echoed through the underground walls—familiar. Raw.
Booker.
I bolted toward the sound before anyone could stop me, barreling through rusted corridors and half-buried hallways until I reached a locked medical chamber.
Inside, Booker was strapped to a repurposed med chair, twitching violently. His eyes glowed faintly with a foreign hue—violet laced with static.
"Booker!" I shouted, slamming my palm to the override panel.
The door hissed open.
Maddie and Chase rushed in behind me.
I crouched beside him, grabbing his shoulders. "Hey! I'm here. I've got you."
He jerked his head toward me—his eyes wild, filled with pain… and something else.
"Kaleb…" he whispered. "I saw… stars. Not ours. Memories that aren't mine. Equations. Weapons. Death."
He convulsed again.
Chase ran a scanner across him, face tightening. "There's a residual waveform. Not just gamma anymore. There's another frequency… quantum in nature. His memories are… being rewritten."
"No," I whispered. "It's not just him. It's them. The Harbingers. They're testing something on him."
"Or through him," Chase added. "They might be embedding code—mental triggers—directly into his neural lattice. If the Grand Calculus wrote an equation to do this…"
"He's trying to convert Booker," Maddie said. "Not physically. Mentally. Like programming a god."
I gritted my teeth and stood.
"Then we stop the program."
Jacob loaded a new charge into his gauntlets. "Damn right we do."
But even as I spoke the words, something deep inside me stirred. I felt… unsteady. Like I was occupying two places at once. One foot here, in this ruined city. One somewhere else—somewhere darker.
As we prepared to move out, Booker opened his eyes again—clearer this time, but colder.
"You're going to lose, Kaleb."
My blood turned to ice.
"What did you just say?"
His mouth trembled. "He said… You can't stop convergence. It's already begun."
Then he collapsed.
We stood in stunned silence, each of us realizing something fundamental had shifted.
The Grand Calculus wasn't just leading the next wave.
He was calculating the endgame.
And if Booker was right—if his mind had been touched by the same darkness I'd seen—then the line between what was real and what was destined… was breaking.
Jacob put a hand on my shoulder. "You alright?"
I didn't answer.
Because for the first time since I gained this power…
I wasn't sure who I was anymore.
The silence after Booker collapsed wasn't peaceful.
It was heavy. Unnatural. Like something ancient had just exhaled through him, leaving us in the residue of something not meant for our world.
I stood frozen, watching his chest rise and fall in shallow, slow motions. Chase kept scanning him with increasing urgency, fingers dancing across his tablet.
"There's a residual pulse," he muttered. "Not just in his body—his memories. Something foreign is still clinging to him, like a parasite woven into his mind."
"A virus?" Maddie asked, kneeling beside him.
"Worse," Chase said. "It's predictive code."
He tapped something and projected a web of Booker's neural activity into the air. A pulsing series of fractal spirals bloomed like a living equation, shifting and changing every time we looked at it.
I stared at it too long. It hurt. Not just my eyes—my thoughts. Like the pattern itself was pulling at something deeper. A frequency only the Nexus could feel.
Jacob stepped away from the light. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"
"It means," Chase said slowly, "that whoever the Grand Calculus is… he's not just a strategist. He's an architect of reality."
"And Booker's the blueprint," I added.
A cold wind swept through the shelter, rattling rusted beams. We weren't alone.
I turned toward the far end of the tunnel, where the shadows twisted unnaturally—like they were breathing.
"Did anyone else feel that?" I asked.
Jacob raised a hand, his gauntlet humming. "Yeah. And I don't like it."
Something was watching us.
We moved out fast. If the Harbingers had found us again, we couldn't afford another ambush. Especially not with Booker unconscious and the entire city wired into a living grid of killer machines.
We traveled light, carrying only what we needed—Chase's tech, Maddie's kinetic coils, Jacob's arm guards, and my oower, which pulsed with less stability every hour.
I could feel it. The Nexus wasn't dormant anymore. It was simmering, clawing for dominance.
And something told me the Grand Calculus had predicted that too.
We reached a rooftop just as the sun dipped below the ruins. From here, we could see the central tower Chase had mentioned—a sleek spire rebuilt from the bones of the old city. It shimmered with a silver glow, geometric shapes cycling across its outer shell like living runes.
"There," Chase said, pointing. "That's where the master frequency's being broadcast. The Nexus is reacting to it."
"The Nexus?" Maddie repeated.
Chase turned toward me. "Not just his power. The entity. The intelligence. Whatever it is inside him—it's responding like a signal to a flare."
I clenched my jaw. "So I'm being summoned."
"Worse," Chase said. "You're being invited."
The wind picked up again.
From the base of the tower, drones began to rise—hundreds of them, all moving in perfect sync.
They didn't fly toward us. They hovered—waiting. Watching.
A moment later, all of our comms buzzed at once.
Then came the voice.
Cool. Calculated. Terrifying in its composure.
"Kaleb. I see you."
The message was short. Precise.
Chase paled. "It's him. He just spoke through our private channel. He bypassed three encryption walls like they were tissue paper."
The tower's lights brightened, and something rippled out from its center—like a heartbeat across the entire city.
Boom.
Every android on the skyline turned in unison—to us.
"Get down!" Maddie yelled, throwing a kinetic shield around us as the first wave of drones opened fire.
Energy blasts streaked through the air. Jacob countered with a shockwave, flinging one drone into another, then another.
Chase launched two micro-turrets that hovered in mid-air, spinning with magnetic fields to catch enemy projectiles.
I launched a pulse of red force, flattening three at once. But they kept coming.
For every drone we took down, three more replaced it. And through it all, that calm, confident voice echoed through the city.
"The Equation of Convergence is not a plan. It is destiny. All variables align. All constants collapse. Resistance is a myth."
I pressed a hand to my chest. The Nexus responded—red light bleeding into my fingertips, my vision fracturing with quantum static.
It wanted out.
Not just to defend me.
To fight.
To burn.
We needed to fall back.
Jacob blasted open a stairwell in a nearby building, and we slid down one floor at a time, evading the endless swarm above.
At the bottom, I leaned against a wall, panting. My reflection stared back at me from a shard of broken glass.
But it wasn't my face.
Not exactly.
The version I saw had darker eyes. Veins lit with red-black energy beneath pale skin. A smirk that didn't belong to me. A hunger that pulsed with cruelty.
I blinked—and the image was gone.
But I knew what it meant.
He was coming.
Maddie touched my arm. "You okay?"
I nodded, lying. "We need to regroup. Now."
Chase checked his scanner. "There's an old Stormcell safehouse near here. We can shelter for a few hours, maybe longer if we cloak."
Jacob grunted. "Let's move before we get flattened again."
We slipped through the back alleys like ghosts, skirting surveillance nodes and jamming incoming pings. The storm wasn't over.
It was just beginning.
As we reached the shelter, Booker stirred again—this time, whispering to himself.
I leaned in to listen.
"Kaleb... he showed me. Not just the city. The world. A sky rewritten. A machine buried in the earth. A rift opened in time... where you kill everything."
His eyes met mine, sharp with something ancient behind them.
"And the worst part?" he said.
I swallowed. "What?"
"You smiled when you did it."