Keegan learned the rule without anyone ever stating it aloud. People didn't die near him by accident. They died because they mattered. The pattern was subtle at first, almost easy to deny. A fellow patient he spoke with twice was reassigned and never returned. A nurse who lingered too long at his door transferred wings overnight. Nothing provable. Nothing clean. Just absence.
The first death was undeniable. A junior handler assigned to escort him to evaluation smiled too easily, spoke too much, and treated Keegan like a person instead of a problem. They walked side by side through a secured corridor, exchanging nothing important. The handler's name was Eli. Keegan remembered it because he wasn't supposed to. Halfway through the hall, alarms blared. A Hemarch breach warning screamed overhead.
They never reached the shelter door. The lights cut out, and something moved fast in the dark. Keegan was shoved backward as claws tore through the handler's chest. Blood hit the wall, still warm. Eli died without understanding why he'd been chosen. The Hemarch vanished before Keegan could react. The timing was too precise.
After that, the Guild stopped pretending. "You are a psychological vector," the examiner said later, voice clinical. "Hostiles respond to your emotional attachments." Keegan clenched his fists, nails biting into his palms. "So people die because they're close to me," he said. The examiner nodded once. Not comfort. Confirmation.
It didn't stop there. Information leaked. Schedules adjusted. Faces appeared near him just long enough to register as familiar. Then they were taken—sometimes by Hemarchs, sometimes by 'incidents' the Guild classified and buried. Each loss chipped away at his stability. Each one was a reminder that care was a liability.
The Blink Hemarch watched all of it. Not intervening. Not provoking. Observing response curves, emotional spikes, blood-pressure surges. Keegan could feel it during every loss, like a weight behind his eyes. Fear fed the system. Grief sharpened it. The panther learned from pain the way others learned from books.
Keegan stopped asking names. Stopped looking at faces longer than necessary. He kept his voice flat, his posture distant, his emotions buried. Isolation became survival, not punishment. Anyone close enough to matter became a target. Anyone he cared about became leveraged.
One night, alone in his room, Keegan felt the panther's presence settle heavily behind his thoughts. Not hunger. No command. Recognition. He understood then that the world wasn't testing him for strength. It was testing him for detachment. And failing that test meant more blood—never his own, but always someone else's.
By morning, Keegan had made a decision he never spoke aloud. He would survive alone. No attachments. No trust. No leverage. If the world wanted to break him by killing what he loved, then it would never get the chance. The Blink Hemarch watched quietly, as if committing the choice to memory.