The first week home felt like wearing someone else's skin.
Mom cooked my favorite spicy beef stew with extra onions, the way Dad used to like it. The smell filled the apartment, warm and familiar, clinging to the curtains and the chipped paint on the kitchen doorframe. Mia set the table herself, folding napkins into crooked triangles because she'd seen it in a video and wanted to surprise me. She kept glancing at me while we ate, like she was waiting for the old Elias to crack a joke or steal the last piece of bread from her plate.
I smiled. I nodded. I told stories about "training adventures" that left out the blood and the needles. When Mia asked why my eyes looked funny now, I said it was just the airport lights messing with them. She accepted it the way only an eleven year old can believe it because she wanted to.
But at night the apartment changed.
The song never left. It lived in the spaces between heartbeats, soft enough during the day that I could almost pretend it was just tinnitus from the plane. At night it grew teeth. It seeped into the walls, into the floorboards, into the hum of the refrigerator. Sometimes I woke up standing in the hallway, bare feet cold on the tile, with no memory of walking there. The song would be louder in those moments, almost a command.
On the fifth night I found myself outside Mia's door.
My hand was already on the knob. The wood felt warm, like skin. Inside, she was asleep, curled around Shadow the cat, breathing slow and even. Moonlight slipped through the blinds and painted silver bars across her face. She looked so small. So untouched.
The song swelled. Not loud. Intimate. Like someone whispering directly into the marrow of my bones.
Sleep in heavenly peace…
I jerked my hand back as if the knob had burned me. My reflection stared back from the small mirror on the wall hollow eyes catching the moonlight like polished obsidian. For one terrible second I didn't recognize the man looking at me.
I retreated to the living room couch and sat with my head in my hands until dawn. The song quieted when the first birds started outside, but it never really left.
Therapy started the following Monday. Apex Veil had booked the sessions private, off-books, paid in cash so no insurance trail. The doctor was a soft-spoken woman in her fifties named Dr. Hale. She had kind eyes and a habit of tilting her head when she listened, like she was trying to hear something beneath the words.
We met in a small office above a bookstore. No Apex logos. Just plants, a worn leather couch, and a window that looked out over a quiet street where people walked dogs and pushed strollers.
I told her almost nothing.
I said the mission went wrong. Ambush. Captivity. Torture. Released unexpectedly. I used clinical words post-traumatic stress, dissociation, hypervigilance like I'd read them from a manual. I didn't mention the song. I didn't mention how the Aether felt like a second skeleton inside my ribs, waiting to stretch.
She asked about nightmares. I said I had them.
She asked about family. I said they were the reason I was here.
She asked if I felt different.
I hesitated. The song chose that exact moment to rise again, just the opening piano notes, gentle and insistent.
"I feel… watched," I said finally. "Like something is waiting for me to remember it."
Dr. Hale wrote something in her notebook. "That's common after prolonged captivity. The mind creates a watcher to make sense of helplessness. It's a survival mechanism."
I nodded like I believed her.
That night Luca called.
His voice sounded thinner over the phone, like wind through cracked glass.
"You hearing it?" he asked without preamble.
"Yeah."
"Every damn second. Torin won't answer his phone. Mara… she texted me once. Just three words. 'It's getting louder.' Then nothing."
We sat in silence for a while, the song filling the gaps between our breathing.
"Elias," he said at last. "I keep dreaming about the mountains. Not the ones we saw from the plane. Deeper ones. Ones that move like they're breathing. And in the dream they're calling my name. Not Luca. Something else."
I swallowed. "What do they call you?"
He laughed, short and bitter. "They don't use words. They just..."
I didn't tell him about standing outside Mia's door. I didn't tell him how the song felt like permission now instead of punishment.
The next morning Mom asked me to take Mia to school. It was only three blocks, but she still worried. I said yes. Anything to get out of the apartment where the walls seemed to lean in when I wasn't looking.
Mia skipped ahead of me, backpack bouncing, chattering about a science project involving baking soda volcanoes. I walked behind her, hands in my pockets, feeling the focus crystal they'd never taken back still hanging around my neck under my shirt, warm against my skin like a second heartbeat.
Halfway there she stopped suddenly and turned.
"Eli?"
"Yeah?"
She frowned up at me. "Why are you humming that song?"
I froze. "What song?"
"The one you were humming. The Christmas one. Silent Night." She sang a bar off-key, exactly the way the voice in my head did. "You were doing it without noticing."
My mouth went dry. "I wasn't humming."
"You were. Shadow heard it too. He looked at you funny."
I forced a laugh. "Must be your imagination, kiddo."
She studied me a second longer, then shrugged and kept walking.
But I hadn't been humming.
I'd been listening.
And the song had slipped out through my throat without permission.
That afternoon I went back to Dr. Hale unannounced. She let me in even though I didn't have an appointment. I sat on her couch and stared at my hands until I could speak.
"I think something came back with me," I told her. "Not just memories. Something alive."
She waited.
I lifted my shirt just enough to show the faint silver lines across my ribs—the healed cuts arranged in patterns that looked almost like runes when the light hit them right.
Then I told her about the song. About how it lived inside me now. About how the mountains were starting to answer when I closed my eyes.
She didn't flinch. She didn't call it delusion. She just leaned forward.
"Elias," she said quietly, "have you considered that what came back with you… might not be from the enemy?"
I stared at her.
"Your father," she continued. "He worked those same mines before the surrender. Apex has files. Not many people know, but Harlan Kane was part of the first Veil unit sent to map the Aether veins. He came back changed too. But… different. Hollow, they called it in the reports. Like something had moved in and made room."
My pulse thundered in my ears. The song rose again, louder, almost excited.
"What happened to him?" I whispered.
Dr. Hale closed her notebook. "Officially? Killed in action. Unofficially… some say he never really came home. That the man who died on the border was only wearing his face."
She reached across the space between us and touched my wrist, light, careful.
"The song you're hearing," she said. "It's not punishment. It's a summons. And if the mountains are calling you by name… Answer it.
The room felt suddenly too small.
I stood up so fast the couch creaked.
"I have to go."
"Elias"
I was already at the door.
Outside, the afternoon sun was too bright. People moved past me on the sidewalk, ordinary and whole. I walked home fast, heart slamming against whatever was waking up behind my ribs.
Mia was waiting on the front steps when I got there, knees scraped from playing tag, grinning like nothing in the world was wrong.
"Mom said you could help with dinner!" she called.
I looked at her—really looked. The way her eyes still held light. The way she trusted the world to stay kind.
The song surged, triumphant.
And for the first time, I answered it.
Not with words.
With a single, silent thought.
Not her.
The song paused just for a heartbeat—then continued softer.
I climbed the steps, ruffled Mia's hair, and went inside to help Mom chop onions.
But deep under my skin, the black veins glowed faintly blue.