His father's hand on his shoulder pushed down, not forward.
Kael went down.
The cellar smelled like old wood and river clay. His father crouched in front of him, and his face in the low light was very still.
"You stay here," his father said. "Whatever you hear."
Kael was seven. He understood whatever you hear better than his father thought.
He nodded once.
His father held his face between both hands for two seconds. Then he was up the stairs and gone.
Kael found the gap between two floor planks above his head on the third try.
Through it: a strip of the front hallway. His mother was already there, hands open at her sides — not relaxed. The way she held them before she moved fast.
'She does that before training,' he thought.
This was not training.
He had known that for twenty minutes. From the moment his father went quiet in the middle of dinner and stood up without finishing his plate.
Through the gap, past the front room, past the door: shapes in the dark outside.
He counted four. Then five.
He stopped counting when the door came in.
The fight was fast in a way that made it hard to follow.
He watched the light move — the flare of abilities igniting, colors he didn't have names for yet, bursts of force that left marks in the wall plaster. His parents moved the way he had only seen them move once, during the night two years ago when they thought he was asleep.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
'They're not holding back,' he thought.
Then: 'They are.'
He wasn't sure which was true.
His mother kept positioning between the attackers and the cellar floor. Not the optimal angle — he'd watched enough of his father's training explanations to understand that. She was leaving her left side exposed.
She was covering something.
She was covering him.
The fact arrived without weight, the way facts arrived when he was too young to know what to do with them.
He counted six attackers. Gold-tier and above, based on the ability colors. His father had told him once what different colors meant. He had been listening more carefully than his father knew.
The fight lasted four minutes and twenty seconds.
He kept the count because it was something to do with his hands while he didn't move.
Somewhere in the third minute, the fighting moved near the kitchen.
There was a gap in the sounds.
In that gap, he heard his father say his mother's name. Once. Quietly.
Not during the fight. Between.
'He sounds like that when she's reading,' Kael thought.
He pressed his face against the floor planks until the wood left marks on his cheek.
The sound started again.
The silence, when it came, was different from the pauses.
He had been counting. He knew pauses. Three seconds. Maybe five.
This one reached twenty.
He did not move.
Ryan came through the tunnel door in the back wall seven minutes after the silence started. Kael had not known the tunnel door existed. His father had known he would come through it — the wrapped package was already waiting beside it. Oilcloth, bound with cord, sized to fit under one arm.
Ryan said nothing for a moment.
Then: "Your father said you'd stay quiet. He was right."
Kael picked up the package without being told.
The tunnel came out in the forest, half a kilometer east.
Ryan did not let go of his hand until the tree line.
Standing there, Kael looked back. He couldn't see the house through the trees.
He couldn't hear it, either.
'That means it's over,' he thought.
He already knew what over meant.
Ryan opened the oilcloth package and placed it in Kael's hands. Old books. Manuscripts with his grandfather's handwriting on the covers. A folded letter with a wax seal he didn't recognize.
"When you're older," Ryan said. "Not now."
Kael looked at the seal.
He had seen it before. On the inside of his father's cabinet door. He had never asked what it meant.
'I should have asked,' he thought.
He tucked the package under his arm and followed Ryan into the dark.
The official report, filed the following morning:
Subjects DEMAS KORRIN-VOSS and SORA DAEL-VOSS — confirmed eliminated. Threat classification: nullified. Secondary subject (minor, unclassified) — presumed deceased, collateral. File closed.
Thirteen years later, Kael Voss read the report for the first time in Lyra Ashvane's office.
The phrase presumed deceased had an asterisk.
The asterisk referenced a footnote. The footnote had been redacted.