The infirmary was a liar. It smelled of antiseptic and recycled calm, a deliberate attempt to scrub away the scent of fear and failure that clung to the enclave like a shroud. Kael walked its sterile white corridors feeling like a ghost, his own Aethel Frame a low, troubled hum beneath his skin, a frequency out of tune with the world. He'd spent two days in the forced quiet of his barracks, Jax's words a cage rattling around the bigger, more terrifying cage of the data slate's secrets. Synthesis. A target on your back.
He needed to see Maya. It was a physical need, an anchor in the dizzying vortex of his new reality. He found her in a small, private room, a privilege bought with blood and a broken leg. The limb was encased in a brutalist cage of metal and humming regulators, a piece of Elara's grim art. She looked pale against the white sheets, but her eyes were clear, and the steady, silvery pulse of her Frame was a comfort.
"You look like you've been sleeping in a scrap heap," she said, her voice a little thin, but her spirit intact.
"Feels like it," Kael admitted, pulling a stool to her bedside.
The silence between them was different now. The easy camaraderie of the patrol was gone, replaced by a shared, unspoken trauma. He saw her glance at his hands, his face, searching for the boy she knew, and finding this new, stiller version of him. This zookeeper of monsters. He couldn't tell her about Synthesis, about the true nature of the Stalkers, about the weight of a science that had broken a civilization. The secret was a toxic thing, and he wouldn't poison her with it. Not yet.
"Jax said I'm on leave," she said, her fingers tracing the patterns on her blanket. "He said you are too. A ghost, he called it."
"He's not wrong," Kael said. He felt like one. A phantom haunting the edges of a world he no longer fully belonged to.
He was about to say more when a shadow fell across the doorway. Kael's senses, a tangled web of human instinct and a Hound's predatory awareness, flared. He was on his feet before he even registered the decision, his body a coiled spring.
It was Zane.
He was a shadow of the mountain of arrogance Kael had first met in the storage bay. The raw, earthy power of his Stonetusk Boar was gone, replaced by a discordant, painful flicker that made Kael's teeth ache. He was dressed in the same sterile infirmary jumpsuit Kael had worn, the simple fabric making him look smaller, stripped of his armor and his pride. Beneath the skin of his forearms, a faint, dark web of scars was visible, like lightning trapped in amber. The mark of a broken Frame.
Zane's eyes, however, held none of the brokenness of his body. They were narrowed, burning with a cold, focused resentment. He wasn't looking at Maya. He was looking only at Kael.
"Well, well," Zane sneered, his voice a low, gravelly thing that had lost its booming confidence. "If it isn't the hero of the Shattered Core. Come to visit the teammate you broke?"
Kael didn't rise to the bait. He saw the flicker of pain that crossed Zane's face with the effort of the words. He saw the way the man's hand clenched into a fist, his knuckles white. This wasn't a rival. This was a wounded animal. "I came to see Maya."
"Of course you did," Zane limped into the room, his gait stiff and uneven. He stopped a few feet away, his gaze sweeping over Kael with a corrosive contempt. "I've heard the stories, Scuttler. How you pulled some fancy trick out of your ass. How you stumbled into something that worked. Don't you dare think that makes you one of them. That makes you a warrior." The word was a curse on his tongue. "You're a scavenger. You got lucky."
The Hound in Kael's soul stirred, its hackles rising at the challenge. Threat. Rival. Crush. The Scuttler chittered from its own dark corner. Danger. Flee. Hide. Kael pushed them both down, the mental effort a familiar strain. He was the zookeeper. He met Zane's furious gaze with a quiet he didn't know he possessed.
"It wasn't luck, Zane."
The simple denial was more inflammatory than any insult. A medic appeared in the doorway, her expression a mix of alarm and weary frustration. "User Zane! You are not cleared for exertion. Get back to your ward. Now."
Zane ignored her. He leaned against the doorframe, his whole body trembling, his eyes still locked on Kael. The raw hatred in them was a physical force. An ideological war had been declared in the quiet of an infirmary room. Zane, the hammer, had been proven wrong by the scalpel. And for that, he would never forgive him.
"This isn't over," Zane gasped, the words ragged. "You're a flaw. A glitch in the world. And you know what we do with glitches." He pushed himself off the doorframe, a broken king abandoning a lost battlefield. "We erase them."
He limped away down the hall, the medic following with a sigh of profound exhaustion.
Kael stood in the silence, the fabric of his jumpsuit still creased where Zane had grabbed it. He looked at Maya. Her face was a storm of fear, confusion, and a dawning, terrible understanding. The rivalry wasn't a competition anymore. Zane had been a monument to the old way: power as a thing to be taken, to be accumulated, to be asserted. His failure was a testament to its limits.
And Kael, with his quiet analysis, his accidental Synthesis, his hunt for the ghosts of the past, was a terrifying, walking rebuttal to Zane's entire existence. He was a new kind of power, born from understanding, not force. And in a world built on hammers, the nail gun was blasphemy.
"He's wrong," Maya said, her voice pulling him from his thoughts. "It wasn't luck."
Kael sank back onto the stool, the strength leaving his legs. He looked at her, at the quiet trust in her eyes, the same trust she'd shown him in the ruins. He couldn't carry this alone. He couldn't. The weight of it would crush him, or turn him into something as bitter and broken as Zane. He made a decision. A real one.
"I need to show you something," he said, his voice low. His hand went to the utility pouch on his belt. "And I need you to promise you won't talk about it. To anyone."
She just nodded, her eyes never leaving his.
He pulled out the data slate. In the dim light of the infirmary, it was just a smooth, dark piece of material. Kael closed his eyes, found his Core, and channeled the smallest thread of Flow into his thumb. He pressed the stud.
The slate hummed to life. Ghostly blue light bloomed in the space between them, the text hovering in the air. Maya's breath hitched. Kael didn't speak. He just let her read the first log entry he had found.
Subject: CH-07, 'Lyra.' Base genome… a canis lupus… is adapting beautifully.
He watched her face. He saw the same shock, the same dawning horror he had felt. Her gaze flicked from the glowing words to him, then back again. Her mind, as sharp and analytical as his own, was connecting the dots. The Shard Hound. The wolf.
"The Chimeras…" she whispered, the words barely audible. "They're not… from the wastes."
"No," Kael said. He told her everything. The words tumbled out, a torrent of secrets he'd held for what felt like a lifetime. Dr. Aris Thorne. The Aethel Frame Project. The desperate, failed attempt to fight something called an Exo-Threat. He told her about the final log, the one that had given him a destination.
"Outpost PR-3. The Sunken City."
When he was done, the silence in the room was different. It wasn't the sterile quiet of the infirmary or the tense quiet of their patrol. It was the silence of a tomb that had just been opened.
Maya stared at the data slate, its light painting shifting patterns on her pale face. She wasn't looking at Kael, but he could feel her thoughts, the frantic processing behind her still facade. She had seen a Phase Stalker walk through a solid wall. She had seen Kael's spear bend physics. The enclave's rules, their bestiaries, their entire understanding of the world—it had all been proven false in one bloody, terrifying encounter.
"What Zane did…" she said finally, her voice soft. "He followed the rules. The ones we were taught. Strongest takes the prize. Power is everything." She looked at Kael, her eyes holding a new, steely resolve. "And it destroyed him. Your way… the thing you did… it saved us. The rules are wrong, Kael. The whole damn system is."
It was the most she had ever said to him at one time. It was an oath.
"I have to go there," Kael said. "To the Sunken City. I have to find that outpost."
"We have to go there," she corrected him, and the shift from 'I' to 'we' was as solid and real as the medical brace on her leg. "But we can't just walk out the gate. They'd hunt us as deserters. Zane would probably lead the party himself."
"We need a plan," Kael agreed. A problem to solve. The thought grounded him. "A pretext. Official sanction. We need resources. And…" He hesitated, the taste of ashes returning to his mouth. "We need more power."
His gaze fell on the duffel bag at his feet, where the sheathed Phase Stalker Echo lay, a cold and heavy secret. It was a promise of impossible power and a near-certain death sentence. A system too complex, too dangerous, a live wire he knew he had to grab. Mastering it, surviving it, was the first step on the path west. A path not just out of the enclave, but out of the comfortable lies that had been their cage for centuries.