Seven Days Gone
October 15th, 7:23 AM, Westfield, New Jersey
The missing person flyer hung crooked on the telephone pole, already weathered by a week of October rain. Jhaeron Halden's school photo stared out from cheap printer paper—awkward smile, thick-framed glasses, the look of a kid who'd never expected to be the subject of a manhunt.
MISSING SINCE OCTOBER 8TH. LAST SEEN NEAR OLD MORRISON CONSTRUCTION SITE. IF YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION...
Beside it, someone had stapled a notice about a lost cat. Below it, an advertisement for guitar lessons. Life went on. The world kept spinning. One missing seventeen-year-old barely made a ripple.
Margaret Halden—Granny to Jhaeron, Margaret to everyone else—stood in front of the Westfield Police Department for the seventh day in a row. Her silver hair was pulled back tight as always, but there were new lines around her eyes, a tremor in her hands that hadn't been there before.
Detective Morris met her at the front desk. He had that look on his face—the one cops get when they've run out of answers but still have to face the families.
"Mrs. Halden. I was just about to call you."
"Have you found something?" Her voice cracked with hope she couldn't quite suppress.
"We've reviewed all the security footage from the area. Interviewed everyone who was at the construction site that day." He paused, choosing his words carefully. "The workers all reported seeing someone on the roof. They saw someone fall. But when they got there, there was no body. No blood. Nothing."
"That doesn't make sense."
"No, ma'am, it doesn't." Morris rubbed his face. He looked tired. "We've searched the entire site. Brought in dogs. Nothing. It's like he vanished into thin air."
"My grandson didn't vanish into thin air, Detective. He's out there somewhere. He's—"
"We're doing everything we can, Mrs. Halden. I promise you that." But his eyes said what his mouth wouldn't: after a week with no leads, no body, no evidence, the chances of finding Jhaeron Halden alive were approaching zero.
Margaret left the station with her jaw clenched tight. She'd call the hospitals again. Check the morgues again. Drive to Newark, to Jersey City, to anywhere he might have gone. She wouldn't stop. She couldn't.
Her daughter, on the other hand...
Rachel Halden sat in her office at Morrison, Pierce & Associates, surrounded by depositions and case files. The Patterson case had collapsed spectacularly—her client was going to prison, and her reputation had taken a hit she'd spend years recovering from. She should be devastated.
Instead, she felt nothing.
Her son had been missing for seven days. Seven days of police questions and search parties and her mother's increasingly frantic calls. Seven days of Jhaeron's empty room and untouched homework and the gnawing guilt in her stomach that whispered: You should have paid more attention. You should have noticed. You should have been there.
But she wasn't there. She was here, in her office, working on a new case because work was what she knew. Work made sense. Work had rules and procedures and outcomes she could control.
Her phone buzzed. Another call from her mother. Rachel let it go to voicemail.
She told herself she'd call back later. She told herself she was helping by keeping the money coming in, by making sure they could afford the private investigator her mother wanted to hire. She told herself a lot of things.
None of them made the guilt go away.
Somewhere Else. Somewhen Else. Beyond the Edge of Known Space.
In the vast emptiness between stars, where even light struggled to reach, something hung suspended in the void.
It was a ship, though calling it merely a ship was like calling a hurricane merely wind. It stretched for miles—impossible architecture of silver and gold, organic curves flowing into geometric precision, materials that were part metal, part crystal, part something that existed between states of matter. Sections of it seemed to phase in and out of visibility, as if the ship existed partially in other dimensions.
No human eyes had ever seen it. No human instruments could detect it. It existed in a frequency of reality that Earth's technology couldn't begin to touch.
Inside, deep within its labyrinthine corridors, a massive chamber hummed with power.
The room was circular, easily two hundred feet across, with walls that curved upward into a dome overhead. The walls themselves were alive with light—patterns that flowed and shifted like water, like thought, carrying information in languages no human tongue could speak. The floor was seamless, reflecting the glow from above like a dark mirror.
In the center of the chamber stood a pod.
It was enormous—fifteen feet tall, ten feet wide, made of the same impossible materials as the ship itself. Transparent crystal or glass or something else entirely formed its outer shell, and within, viscous liquid glowed with soft blue-green light. Floating in that liquid, suspended by nothing visible, was a figure.
Jhaeron.
He hung motionless in the fluid, eyes closed, face peaceful. He wore nothing—the liquid preserved his modesty while the tubes and wires connected to his body maintained... something. Life? More than life? His chest rose and fell in slow, rhythmic breaths that seemed timed to the pulse of light running through the tubes.
Those tubes—dozens of them—ran from the pod to a massive sphere that dominated one side of the chamber.
The sphere was easily thirty feet in diameter, suspended in an antigravity field that made it hover five feet off the ground. Its surface was black, utterly black, the kind of darkness that seemed to absorb light rather than merely reflect none. But within that darkness, energies swirled—red like fresh blood, crimson like dying stars, scarlet like rage given form. They moved in complex patterns, spiraling and folding in on themselves, and with each pulse, more of that energy flowed through the tubes into the pod, into Jhaeron.
Jhaedara stood before the pod, hands clasped behind her back, golden eyes fixed on her grandson's floating form.
She'd barely moved in the past week. Barely slept. Her kind didn't require sleep the way humans did, but even she needed rest, and she'd allowed herself none. How could she, when the boy floated there on the edge of something she didn't fully understand?
Behind her, three figures worked at holographic displays that materialized from the air itself. They were shorter than Jhaedara—only six and a half feet tall—with the same porcelain skin and too-long limbs, but their robes were white and silver, marked with different tattoos. Physicians. Scholars. The closest thing her people had to doctors.
"Matriarch," one of them said, his voice carrying those same impossible harmonics. "His cellular structure continues to adapt. The Essence integration is proceeding, but—"
"But you don't know what's happening." Jhaedara didn't turn to look at him. "You've said this every day for a week, Kelvaros."
"With respect, Matriarch, we've never seen a case like this. He's human—or was human. The Essence should have killed him outright, or at minimum, required years of careful integration. Instead, his body is absorbing it at an exponential rate. We've never recorded anything like this, not even among our own kind."
"He's not purely human." Jhaedara's voice was soft but carried an edge like a blade. "His father was one of us. That bloodline runs through him, dormant perhaps, but present."
"Even so—"
"Just keep him alive, Kelvaros. That's all I ask."
The physician bowed his head and returned to his work.
Jhaedara moved closer to the pod, pressing one hand against the crystal surface. Inside, Jhaeron floated, oblivious, his young face peaceful in a way it never was in waking life. She could see traces of his father in his features—the line of his jaw, the shape of his nose. But he had his mother's eyes, his mother's mouth.
I lost your father, she thought, her golden eyes dimming with ancient sorrow. I lost my son to that wretched planet, to that woman who couldn't even see what she had. I won't lose you too, child. I won't lose what's left of him.
Her hand trembled against the crystal. So much time wasted. Seventeen years watching from afar, forbidden by law and custom from interfering, watching her grandson suffer in silence while she could do nothing but observe. Watching him grow up alone, unloved, broken by a world too small and cruel to appreciate what he was.
What he could become.
"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I'm sorry I couldn't come sooner. I'm sorry I let you suffer so long. But you're safe now. You're—"
Alarms shrieked through the chamber.
Every holographic display flared red. The physicians spun from their stations, faces showing the first hint of panic Jhaedara had seen from them in days.
"Matriarch! His energy readings are spiking!"
Jhaedara's eyes snapped to the pod. Inside, Jhaeron's body was changing.
His chest expanded, growing broader. His arms lengthened, muscles forming where there had been only skin and bone. His legs stretched, adding inches, then feet. His face was shifting—cheekbones rising, jaw strengthening, features that had been soft and boyish hardening into something else.
"What's happening?" Jhaedara's voice cut through the alarms like a whip.
"The Essence—it's being pulled into him! The entire sphere is—"
She looked at the massive sphere. The red energies inside were churning faster, faster, flowing through the tubes in torrents now instead of gentle streams. The level inside was dropping. Visibly. Rapidly.
"Shut it down!" Kelvaros shouted. "Close the feed lines before—"
Too late.
The sphere pulsed once, brilliant and blinding, and then went dark. Empty. Completely drained. Every ounce of energy that had swirled inside it for the past week now resided in Jhaeron's transforming body.
In the pod, he was still growing.
Six feet. Six and a half. Seven. His frame expanding to match the height, shoulders broadening, chest deepening. His scrawny arms filled out with lean, dense muscle. His legs lengthened and strengthened. Even his hands were changing—fingers growing longer, more graceful, exactly like Jhaedara's.
His face had lost all traces of boyish softness. High cheekbones. Strong jaw. Features that were no longer quite human, that carried the same alien beauty as the woman watching him.
And then his skin began to change.
The tan human complexion lightened, shifted, transformed into that same porcelain white. Like living marble. Like moonlight made flesh.
"By the Eternal..." one of the physicians breathed.
The pod couldn't contain him anymore. Cracks spiderwebbed across the crystal surface. The liquid inside began to boil.
"Get back!" Jhaedara commanded.
The physicians scattered as the pod shattered.
Crystal exploded outward in a shower of fragments that hung in the air for a moment, suspended by some force, before clattering to the floor. The liquid splashed out in waves, evaporating before it could touch the ground. And standing where the pod had been, supported by nothing, was Jhaeron.
But not Jhaeron.
He stood seven feet tall, maybe more. His body was lean but powerful, every muscle defined but not bulky, built for speed and grace rather than raw strength. His skin was pure white, luminous in the chamber's light. His hair, wet and plastered to his skull, was no longer brown—it was silver-white like Jhaedara's, like starlight.
The tubes and wires fell away from him, their purpose fulfilled. He hung suspended in the air, still unconscious, still breathing those slow, deep breaths.
And then Jhaedara saw them.
Tattoos.
They hadn't been there before. Now they covered his arms—intricate patterns spiraling from wrists to shoulders, the same shifting colors as Jhaedara's, as all their kind bore. They continued across his chest, down his ribs, disappearing below where clothing would eventually cover.
The Mark of the Ascended. The sign of their people.
Jhaedara's eyes widened. Her hand went to her mouth.
"It's not possible," Kelvaros whispered. "He was human. He was—"
"He was never fully human." Jhaedara's voice shook. "His father's blood was dormant, suppressed by his human half. But the Essence awakened it. Forced the transformation that should have happened naturally if he'd been born among us instead of on that primitive world."
She stepped closer to her grandson's floating form, seeing him truly for the first time. Not the broken human boy. Not the victim. But what he'd always been meant to be.
"He's become one of us," she said softly. "The Essence didn't kill him. It completed him."
Jhaeron floated in the air, unconscious, transformed, caught between what he'd been and what he was becoming. His chest rose and fell. His eyes remained closed.
But behind those closed lids, in the depths of his changing mind, something was stirring.
Something was waking up.
And when it finally opened its eyes, the universe would have to make room for something new.
Something that was neither human nor fully of Jhaedara's kind.
Something in between.
Something unprecedented.
In the chamber, alarms finally fell silent.
And in the void beyond the ship, stars burned on, indifferent and eternal, as they had for billions of years.
Unaware that today, something new had been born among them.
Something that would change everything.