Ethan Kai did not walk. He shuffled, one foot in front of the other, because standing still felt worse. Forward was not the right word; forward meant there was somewhere to go. He just moved toward the bunk, toward the stillness that comes when you have got nothing left. The three steps felt like a mile. When he finally sat, the mattress hissed, and the springs groaned like his own bones.
Water dripped from his soaked hair, tracing paths down his face. He did not bother to wipe it away. What was the point?
Through the crosshatch of steel and plexiglass, smoke twisted like a thing with broken limbs. The stench hit him in waves: cooked meat, melted plastic, and the sharp, metallic smell of a system giving up. The alarms had not stopped screaming. He was starting to think they were not a warning anymore. They were just the sound the world made now. Red lights flashed, painting the cell in blood and shadow, blood and shadow. He squeezed his eyes shut. Coward. The pulse of the light matched his own frantic heartbeat. While he had been fighting it had all made sense, but now that it was over, now that the world was rushing back in to claim him, he could feel the fear creeping back in.
He sat motionless, not out of calm, but because there were no choices left to make. The guards would come. Heavy boots, crackling radios, and disbelieving eyes that saw a mess to be logged, not a man who had burst in flame. They would want an explanation, as if a few neat words could fence in the chaos. What could he tell them? A bad guy from this book by Robert Jordan possessed him and then burnt him up after he had left. They would probably just ask who the hell was Robert Jordan.
His gaze drifted up to the camera in the corner, a dead glass eye that had seen the whole thing. The brawl, the blood. Maybe enough for self-defense. The thought felt hollow. Useless.
He let out a slow breath. Sleep tugged at him, promising not rest, but at least a few moments of nothing. Maybe the Betrayer had found someone else to haunt.
Then, a bloom of cold under the bandage on his right hand.
He froze. A trick of the nerves. Had to be. But it did not fade. It grew, a rhythmic, purposeful heat that felt nothing like fever or a burn. It felt…alive. "Now?" he whispered, the sound swallowed by the alarms. "Now it happens?"
His fingers trembled as he fumbled with the knot. The cloth, soaked in blood and water, clung to his skin. He peeled it away, inch by stubborn inch, revealing puckered flesh. The mark or brand shaped like an old key bent into a circle.
And then, light.
It started as a soft, blue glimmer pulsing with his heart. Not the red of an alarm or the yellow of infection, but a color from somewhere else. Tiny droplets of water hanging in the air caught it, scattering like stars. Green fire, thin as thread, flickered at the edges—a silent flame that burned with impossible intensity.
Ethan stared, his breath caught in his throat. The light did not get brighter; it just got more real, pushing back the concrete and shadows. The shriek of the alarms seemed to thin, to recede.
Then he felt it. Not a person. Not a guard. A presence. The air grew cold, and the hair on his neck stood on end. It was the feeling of being seen, not by eyes, but by something vast and ancient and mechanistic.
Panic finally kicked in, a wild animal in his gut, but his body would not obey. His mind fractured. A violent collage of images—books he had read, movies he had seen, nightmares he had forgotten—slammed into him. Anybody who had enjoyed a good book or movie had flirted with this sort of thing before, from the safe side of a page or a TV screen. But this felt like he was standing center around a thousand times a thousand flickering doorways and each had black hole's gravity trying to pull him in.
The mark on his hand pulsed again, colder this time. It did not use words. It shoved a command directly into the oldest part of his brain.
Out.
The thought was not entirely his, but it was already part of him. He rose from the bunk like a puppet, his marked hand blazing. Three steps, and he was at the cell door. His left hand reached out, pressing against the steel.
The metal was warm. It flexed under his palm, just slightly, like it was not solid at all.
He remembered, with a sudden, stupid clarity, that the door was supposed to slide sideways.
Light flared from his scarred palm. For a heartbeat, the surface of the door rippled. Fear and wonder warred in his stomach. He did not know what was on the other side—salvation or something worse. But this terrible, impossible light was a key, and it was again turning a lock.
He pushed.
The cell door groaned open. Through the mesh window, Ethan saw a man in street clothes sprinting down the corridor. His face was pale with panic, a badge clipped to his belt, a pistol already in his hand.
Behind him, a black wall of armor and shields advanced. Three guards in full riot gear, moving as one unstoppable machine.
The man in front yelled something, a word lost in the din, but his tone was a blade. A command. A plea.
Time seemed to snag on itself. The air in the open doorway was wrong. It wavered with a sickness that bent the light. The distortion crawled over the threshold, a visible tear in the world.
The mark on Ethan's palm burned with cold fire. He did not run. He did not fight. A faint, weary smile touched his lips.
Too late.
He stepped into the wavering air.
The moment his foot crossed the threshold, the man in street clothes lunged, a last desperate tackle to drag him back to reality. Their bodies met.
There was a brief impact, but no sound.
From the guards' view, the two figures simply touched. For an instant, their forms smeared together, blurring into the shimmering doorway like an image wiped from a screen. Then the shimmer collapsed inward with a silent pop.
And they were gone.
The lead guard skidded to a halt, his boots slipping on the wet concrete. He stared at the empty space, his mind refusing to form a word. Another guard stumbled past him, crashing shoulder first into the metal bunk. The cell was empty. The alarm continued to scream into the steam and silence.
***
Nathan Carver did not pause outside the captain's office. He was already down the hall, flipping open the case file—military commendations, honorable discharge, psychiatric hold in a VA hospital, incident statements, redacted mission reports and a photo of a white bandage wrapped over Ethan Kai's right palm. Underneath, a zoomed-in scan showed the burn mark beneath. A stylized key, or maybe a door.
He was halfway through the psychological profile when the station's fire alarm exploded into a banshee wail overhead.
BWOOP. BWOOP. BWOOP.
Red lights spun on the ceiling. A burst of confused shouting rang out from the adjoining hallway, and the staccato hiss of a sprinkler system sputtered to life in irregular bursts.
Nathan looked up.
The smoke came fast—low, oily, electrical. Not a kitchen flare-up. Not some idiot microwaving metal. Something like cooked meat. Greasy.
His pulse kicked up. He closed the folder, tucked it under his arm, and ran.
Around the next corner the hallway was already hazed. Officers were yelling, some moving toward the exits, others running toward the source. Emergency protocols broken up by instinct. He passed a desk sergeant trying to radio dispatch, another coughing hard into his sleeve.
"The hell happened?"
"Smoke coming from holding!"
Nathan pushed past them. The corridor to the cell block was worse—dim, wet, pulsing with red strobe light and dripping water. The smell of scorched meat hung in the air like copper and ozone. Every few steps he passed a camera dome shattered, wires exposed.
He reached the last corner and froze.
Ethan Kai was standing just inside his cell's doorway. A door that was opening and not worse—Nathan had seen him open the door. Sliding it open. From the inside. There had been no buzz of an unlocking mechanism. No override code entered. Just Ethan, standing still, one hand on the cell door as it slid to the left like a curtain parting.
That's not possible, Nathan's brain insisted. But there he was.
Ethan took one step toward the hallway, the flickering light gleaming off his soaked shirt, the mark on his right hand stark with a pulsing blue and green light. He was smiling. Not malevolently, or maliciously, but with the kind of joy a person gets when they have succeeded at something.
At the center of his cell what remained of his cellmate was a pulpy pile of ash and charred soaking bones.
Nathan drew his sidearm.
"On the ground! Now!"
Ethan looked up at him. Then took another step forward. Nathan remembered just briefly the playback of the surveillance that had brought him here and not sure why he lowered the weapon and dove at the man just as he seemed to step into an invisible wall of water and vanish.
In a blur of movement, they had collided with the force of two lives crashing together. Nathan's shoulder struck bone, his legs tangled in Ethan's as they twisted—
—and the world fell sideways.
The hallway, the lights, the smoke—they spun, cracked, stretched like rubber pulled too far. There was no sound. No impact. Only a brief moment of falling, a rush of air, and then—Glass. Tile. And the weight of another world slamming into him.