The humming stopped when the authorities arrived, but Kydris still felt it in his bones—a subtle thrumming beneath thought, insistent as a second pulse. He pressed his palms against the cracked pavement, testing whether the vibration was real or madness. The concrete answered with its own frequency, steady and dead. The hum came from inside him.
Firefighters swarmed the wreckage. Rescue teams shouted coordinates. Medics triaged the burned and broken, their voices sharp against the wail of sirens and the hiss of water meeting flame. Ash hung in the air, thick enough to taste—bitter and chemical, coating Kydris's tongue with the residue of forty-seven deaths.
He sat on the curb, spine straight, hands motionless in his lap. Around him, survivors wept or screamed or stared at nothing. He did none of these things. The chaos organized itself in his perception: each sound distinct, each movement tracked, colors saturated beyond normal vision. He counted the cracks in the pavement. Seventeen within arm's reach. The precision disturbed him.
A paramedic knelt beside him, gloved hands hovering near his chest. "Can you stand?" Her voice carried the practiced calm of someone used to disaster, though her eyes kept flicking to his unmarked skin. Most survivors this close to the blast were dead or screaming.
"Yes." The word came out flat. He tried again, adding inflection. "I'm fine."
She studied him—clothes soot-stained but intact, hair barely singed at the edges, skin showing no burns. Her frown deepened. "You were in the central bay when it went?"
"Yes."
"Let me see your arms."
He extended them. She gripped his wrist to examine a smear of ash, and the moment her fingers touched his skin, the hum surged toward the contact point like iron to a magnet. Kydris jerked back.
"You hurt?" Concern flickered across her face.
"No. Just—" He flexed his fingers, searching for an explanation that wasn't insane. "Sensitive."
"Shock does that sometimes." But her tone said she didn't believe it. She stood, gesturing toward the north end of the street where a temporary medical station had materialized. "We're moving survivors to triage. Two blocks that way. Get yourself checked properly."
Kydris nodded and followed, keeping distance between himself and the other shell-shocked workers stumbling toward treatment. His body registered everything with unnatural clarity: the paramedic's elevated heart rate, the heat signature of the woman beside him, the way sound traveled differently through smoke-saturated air. He focused on his breathing, trying to drown the observations in something normal. It didn't work.
The investigator found him twenty minutes later.
She cut through the crowd with the efficiency of someone used to being obeyed—gray uniform pressed despite the chaos, silver threading through dark hair, a pale scar bisecting her left temple. Her badge read Vex Morhen, Industrial Safety Commission. She stopped in front of him, tablet in hand, and her steel-colored eyes tracked across his unmarked face with open suspicion.
"Kydris Vane." Not a question.
"Yes."
"Where were you when the explosion occurred?"
"Central bay. Line Nine." He kept his voice level, mechanical. Recounted the blast, the heat, Reth's voice cutting off mid-word. Each detail precise and bloodless.
As he spoke, his chest constricted. His pulse quickened without cause. Some buried instinct prickled along his spine, monitoring the truth of his own words. He considered lying—shifting his position to the south wing, claiming ignorance—but the impulse felt wrong. Like testing a structure he didn't understand.
"I don't know why I survived," he said instead.
Vex's pen stopped mid-scratch. Her gaze sharpened. "Forty-seven dead. Twenty-three injured. One untouched." She pointed at him. "You. The epicenter."
Kydris said nothing.
She circled him slowly, a predator's assessment. "Vitals steady. Pupils normal. You're not shaking. Not crying." She stopped in front of him. "I've investigated industrial accidents for twenty-three years. Survivors are human about it—grateful or angry or numb in a way that still makes sense. You're not."
"I don't know what you want me to say."
"The truth would be novel." Vex leaned against the wall beside him, lowering her voice. "What were you thinking about when it happened?"
He chose his words carefully. "Reth. The boy beside me. I heard his voice stop. That's when I knew everyone was gone."
Vex watched him for a long moment, then nodded slowly. "We'll be watching you, Kydris Vane. Survivors of impossible accidents tend to attract patterns." She straightened, adding quietly, "You're not the first anomaly we've documented."
The implication settled between them like glass—fragile and sharp.
Hours folded into afternoon, then dusk. Volunteers herded survivors into a converted warehouse serving as temporary shelter—rows of cots beneath flickering industrial lights, the air thick with disinfectant and unwashed bodies. Children clutched salvaged toys. Adults moved like ghosts. Kydris wandered the perimeter, observing.
A boy sobbed into his mother's shoulder three cots down—maybe eight years old, drowning in an oversized factory uniform. The mother's hand trembled as she stroked his hair, her eyes red-rimmed and hollow.
Kydris crouched beside them. "What's your name?"
The boy looked up, tears cutting tracks through soot. "Tem. My papa was in Line Twelve."
"I knew people in Line Twelve."
"They're all dead." The words came out broken. "Mama said Papa's not coming back."
Before Kydris could respond, a man sat heavily on the cot beside them—half his face bandaged, the visible skin beneath charred red and weeping. His hands shook with such violence Kydris heard them, a vibration that made the hum inside him resonate in response.
The burned man's unbandaged eye fixed on Kydris. "You're the one. The impossible survivor."
"What's your name?" Kydris asked.
"Gorvin. South wing." His voice rasped. "You don't look like someone who just watched fifty people burn."
"How should I look?"
"Like me. Like you feel everything." Gorvin's gaze didn't waver. "How do you feel?"
"Empty."
Gorvin nodded as if this made perfect sense. "Then you're better off."
Tem's mother pulled her son closer, eyes cutting away from Kydris. Gorvin stared at nothing. Kydris remained between them—neither part of their grief nor separate from it.
That night, Kydris claimed a storage alcove behind the medical station—concrete walls and a single flickering bulb, far enough from the others to think.
He held his hand up, watching silver threads pulse beneath the skin. Could he control it? He focused, willing the glow brighter. The veins responded, light intensifying fractionally. The hum deepened, spreading through his chest and limbs in coordinated waves.
He pressed his palm against the concrete. The vibration traveled outward, and for three seconds he felt the structure—load-bearing beams, electrical conduits, the weight of hundreds of people above. The factory had been like this. Responsive. This shelter was answering him now.
He tested smaller manipulations. A glass of water on a nearby shelf. He extended the hum toward it without moving, pushing with intention. The water's surface rippled—barely, dismissible as someone walking nearby.
Kydris smiled. Control was possible. Small adjustments. Nothing that would draw attention.
Sleep came in fragments. He woke at 3 AM, cot drenched in sweat though his skin remained cold and steady. The hum had followed him into dreams, showing him the factory in reverse, Reth's unburned face smiling. Thank you for surviving. Someone should remember. Then the image shattered into silver light.
He drifted until dawn bled through the high windows, six hours compressed into what felt like twelve. His senses were sharper. His body hummed with purpose.
Morning brought release papers. No injury. No psychological damage. Dismissed.
Kydris walked toward the factory district along scorched streets, smoke still rising from manholes, sirens fading into urban background noise. The hum in his bones continued, quieter now, patient.
Then he felt it—a disruption in the ambient vibrations. Someone moving with direction. Toward him.
The man appeared at the intersection ahead, gray hair catching morning light, scar running down his left temple. But Kydris's enhanced senses registered him first: footsteps that made no sound, presence that the world absorbed rather than acknowledged.
The man walked toward him deliberately. Eyes fixed. Unblinking.
Kydris's stomach knotted—not fear, but recognition. This man was like him. Or what he was becoming.
"Kydris Vane." Not a question. The man's voice carried an accent from somewhere above-city, refined but worn. He smiled, scar wrinkling in an unsettlingly human way. "My name is Grethon. We need to talk."
"How do you know my name?"
"Because you're not the first."
The words hit like a hammer. Not the first. Others existed. Others had survived. Others had integrated.
〈 PATTERN RECOGNIZED: INDIVIDUAL 'GRETHON' 〉
〈 RESONANCE SIGNATURE: VERIFIED 〉
〈 CLASSIFICATION: INTEGRATED SUBJECT - THIRD RANK ADVANCEMENT 〉
〈 RECOMMENDATION: ESTABLISH DIALOGUE 〉
The system's voice threaded through his thoughts, clinical and certain. Kydris stared at Grethon, questions piling up faster than he could sort them. How many others? What was integration? What came after survival?
Grethon's expression shifted, something almost like sympathy crossing his scarred face. "You feel it, don't you? The hum. The way everything's sharper now." He stepped closer, lowering his voice. "That's just the beginning. What comes next—" He paused, choosing words carefully. "—you're not ready for alone."
Behind Kydris, the city woke to its routines, oblivious. In front of him, a stranger offered answers he wasn't sure he wanted. And beneath both, something vast stirred in his bones, waiting.
Grethon extended a hand. "Walk with me. I'll show you what you're becoming."
Kydris looked at the offered hand, at the man who knew his name, at the empty street stretching toward a future he no longer recognized.
The hum pulsed once—a question without words.
He took a breath, and stepped forward.