The world had gone quiet.
Not peaceful and quiet.Not gentle or healing or still.
Hollow quiet.
The kind of silence that comes after something terrible. The kind that waits for you to breathe wrong so it can break again.
I stood in the crater where the Nexus sphere used to be—if you could even call it a crater. It looked more like a cauterized scar ripped into the Earth, smooth and black and radiating faint veins of red beneath the surface. As if something beneath the skin of the world was still trying to pulse.
My boots crunched over glass and ash. The air smelled like ozone and burned memory.
My hands wouldn't stop shaking.
They had saved Booker. But something else… something worse… had crawled in with it.
I couldn't hear the others. Couldn't bring myself to turn around. I didn't want to see what they saw when they looked at me now.
I already knew.
Not a hero.Not a leader.Not even a brother.
Just a warning.
I knelt and touched the earth, half-expecting it to scream.
Instead, it responded.
A low resonance moved up my arm—deeper than vibration. Not energy. Not heat.
Recognition.
The ground shimmered faintly as glowing lines etched themselves outward, delicate and ancient, like sigils buried in stone. It wasn't a map. It was a pathway. A language the Nexus had been speaking long before we ever tried to understand it.
And it led somewhere.
Far beneath the ruins, deeper than the shelter, something pulsed in reply.
A spark.A tether.A memory.
Aaliah.
I didn't hear her voice. I didn't see her face. But I felt her.
She was still there.
Somehow.
Still trying to reach me through the bones of the world.
Then came the pressure.
Not physical. Not emotional.
Existential.
It pressed in from all directions like the world had blinked, and the shadows had rearranged themselves.
The Harbingers were moving.
I didn't know how I knew. I just knew. The way a storm knows where to break. The way instinct pulls before thought.
Four pulses. Four wrongnesses.
One twisted the air like dying stars collapsing inward—every path I imagined around it unraveled. The future couldn't hold it.
Another wasn't presence—it was absence. A void so complete, my breath caught trying to track it.
A third one. Southwest. New. Unfamiliar but… resonant. The Nexus inside me didn't recoil—it reached toward it. Curious. Wary.
And from the east…A shriek. Not sound. Not spirit. Just pure, splintering force.
I stumbled a step as my ribs tightened. The pull of it all made my skin buzz, my bones ache.
They weren't hiding anymore.
They were ascending.
"Kaleb!"
Chase's voice barely registered at first.
He skidded down the rubble, breathing hard, holding some scorched relay stone from Rev's tech. His voice shook with something I rarely heard from him—real fear.
"We caught something," he said. "Rev linked into one of the older data-tether conduits, and it—just look."
I didn't take the device.
I didn't need it.
The Nexus reached through me. And in that instant—I saw.
Not with my eyes.
With something deeper.
A ruined fortress. Government insignias half-melted into its walls. The air around it shimmered with residual destruction.
Four heroes lie dead. Twisted. Crumpled. Their armor turned to slag.
And in the center—him.
A figure I didn't recognize. Bronze dreadlocks. Skin like volcanic obsidian. Eyes that flickered with constellations he wasn't born beneath.
His voice cracked through the world like prophecy.
"There are no gods but consequence. And we have waited long enough."
Then silence.
The vision faded.
And I stood there. Heart hollow. Fists clenched.
Not because I feared him.
Because in the last second, those heroes didn't look afraid.
They looked like they were starting to doubt everything they believed in.
I exhaled, long and low.
Light didn't shine off me anymore.
It bent inward.
Drawn. Consumed. My aura was no longer radiant—it was recessive, a hunger beneath the skin. The shadows stretched just a little too far behind me. My reflection in the melted glass flickered with red. The veins in my arms felt like they weren't holding blood anymore—just pressure.
"I have to move," I said.
Chase didn't ask where.
He knew.
The shelter was broken. The others were recovering. The city had fractured. And beneath it all, something ancient was waking up.
Not a machine. Not a signal. A lock.
And me?
I was the key.
Whether I wanted to be or not.