The seed fed on what that cost him and asked for more.
So he gave it more.
One after another.
The man who fixed shoes on the corner.
The children from the classroom, whose names he had filed alongside their habits and their lunch preferences.
Julius, who had spent four months misreading encouragement and was now something that no longer needed encouragement at all.
Every one of them cost something that did not have a number attached to it.
The seed grew stronger with each one.
Sun grew emptier at the same rate.
A precise exchange.
One Kael had designed.
One Sun had no way out of.
He did not look at faces.
He looked at movement. Structure. The fastest path to still.
Kael stood to the side and watched, with the expression of someone observing a demonstration they had spent considerable time preparing for.
"This is my life's work," he said, not to Sun specifically, just to the room. "Mortals can only resist it if they are rankers. The body needs to be strong enough to push back. Ordinary people have nothing to push with."
Sun did not respond.
He was beyond responding.
He was beyond most things.
The seed was full now.
Fuller than it had been since it woke up.
And the fullness felt like standing in a place where everything had already been taken, and there was nothing left to protect.
Which meant there was nothing left to slow him down either.
Which was, perhaps, what Kael had intended from the beginning.
Break the thing that makes you hesitate—
and what remains is pure forward motion, with no destination worth moving toward.
Then his parents came through the door.
Sun stopped.
They moved like the others.
Wrong.
Wrong.
Wrong.
Wearing the faces he had spent five years memorizing from a chair by the window.
He stood there.
And he could not make himself move toward them the way he had moved toward everyone else.
His body simply refused the instruction.
A four-year-old child's body knowing something that three thousand years of experience was trying to override.
His mother's hand came up.
Thumb extended.
Sun felt something crack open in his chest.
Something the seed could not reach.
Could not consume.
Could not use.
She was not there anymore.
He knew that.
Whatever raised that thumb was not Mary.
It was the last echo of a habit in a body that no longer had the person to go with it.
It meant nothing.
It meant everything.
For a moment, his body refused again.
Not doubt.
Not hesitation.
Something older.
Something that existed before both.
Sun exhaled once through his nose.
The anger did not arrive.
It was already there.
It was simply no longer held back.
He looked at his mother's face one more time.
The face that had laughed softly and said he was mostly alright.
And he said something quietly.
Not quite words.
Not quite prayer.
Just the only thing left to say.
Then he moved.
He made it fast.
That was the only mercy he had left to give.
When it was over, Sun stood in the middle of what had been his home and breathed.
The seed hummed against his ribs with everything it had consumed.
He turned.
He looked at Kael across the destroyed room.
Kael looked back.
The uncertainty was still in his expression.
The same uncertainty that had appeared when Sun stood up after the stabbing.
But there was something else now underneath it.
The specific look of someone who got exactly what they prepared for—
and is only now considering what comes next.
Sun said one word.