Chapter 14
A Final Reckoning
The subsidy payment of 12,500 Terrals hit his account with a silent, weighty finality. It was more credits than he'd seen in his entire life. A small fortune, earned not by labor, but by the simple, terrifying fact of what he had become. For a long moment, Kaelen just stared at the number, feeling its cold, digital weight. It was blood money, in a way. Paid for by the deaths of Elian the scholar and countless hours of Renly's pain. But it was also a tool. And the first thing he would use it for was to balance a scale.
He took a transit-pod to the older, less-gleaming sector of the arcology where Orphanage 7-Delta stood. The journey felt different. His enhanced senses picked up the subtle decay the district tried to hide: the faint hum of overtaxed power conduits, the microscopic cracks in the permacrete, the tired scent of recycled air that had been recycled too many times. He saw the place not with the numb acceptance of a resident, but with the sharp, analytical clarity of an outsider. A benefactor.
Sister Margret was in her office, her face illuminated by the soft glow of a data-slate, her fingers tracing lines of administrative text. She looked up as he entered, and her eyes, usually so full of placid bureaucracy, widened in genuine surprise.
"Kaelen? I... I heard the news. The entire local network buzzed with the alert from the AVRC." She stood, a rare gesture. "An Esper. We never... there was no indication."
"The algorithm doesn't catch everything, Sister," he said, his voice calm. He gestured to the chair opposite her desk. "May I?"
"Of course, of course." She sat back down, her composure returning, though her eyes still held a flicker of awe and something else... was it fear?
"I'm leaving for Elysian in a few days," he began. "Voluntarily. The Enhanced immigration track."
A complex series of emotions crossed her face—relief that he was safe from the harsh draft, confusion at his choice, and a hint of sadness. "I see. That is... a brave decision. But with your new status, I'm sure you will thrive."
"I didn't just come to say goodbye," Kaelen said, leaning forward slightly. "I came to thank you. And to repay a debt."
He transferred the funds before he could second-guess himself. A substantial portion of his first subsidy, enough to refurbish the entire common room, upgrade the nutritional synthesizers, and provide a cushion for emergencies for years to come. Sister Margret's data-slate chimed. She glanced down it was about a ten thousand terrals, and her hand flew to her mouth. The number on the screen was staggering.
"Kaelen! This is... this is too much! We cannot—"
"You can, and you will," he said, his tone gentle but firm. "This place... it was a roof. It was food. It was sometimes cold, and often impersonal. But it was also a shelter when I had nowhere else to go. You gave me that. This is me ensuring you can give it to others."
The formality between them shattered. She looked at him, truly looked at him, not as a ward or a statistic, but as the man he had become. "You were always a quiet boy," she whispered. "After your father's friend left you here... you just closed up. I always wondered what happened to you, before."
The memory, usually a locked box, felt less painful now. "My parents were researchers," he said, the words coming easier than he expected. "Aetheric theorists. They died in a lab accident on a remote post when I was ten. There was no family. Just a colleague of my father's, a man who promised to look after me. He brought me here, said it would be temporary. He never came back."
He had spent years waiting by the door, staring at the shifting colors of the arcology lights outside, convinced that any day, the man would return. He never did. The hope had slowly curdled into a hard, silent understanding: he was utterly alone.
"You never cried," Sister Margret recalled, her voice soft with a memory she had clearly buried. "You just... accepted it. You studied, you kept to yourself. When you aged out at sixteen, you just packed your single bag, thanked me politely, and walked out. I always worried we had failed you. That we hadn't given you enough... heart."
Kaelen felt a strange tightness in his chest. "You gave me enough to survive. And survival, Sister, is underrated. It forged the resilience that let me become this." He gestured to himself, not with arrogance, but with a simple statement of fact. "This gift isn't about charity. It's an acknowledgment. You provided the anvil. This is just me returning the favor, so you can be an anvil for others."
Tears welled in the old woman's eyes. She reached across the desk, her thin, aged hand covering his. The touch was startlingly warm. "You have a good heart, Kaelen. Despite everything. Don't let the galaxy harden it completely out there."
He stood up, the emotional weight of the conversation becoming almost physically heavy. "The locality monitors will see this transaction. They'll know an Enhancer with ties to this orphanage has made a significant donation. It will afford you more respect, more leverage. Use it well."
He walked to the door, then paused, looking back at the small, tired woman who had been the closest thing to a constant in his fractured life.
"Goodbye, Sister Margret. Thank you. For everything."
He stepped out into the corridor, the door hissing shut behind him. He didn't look back. The past was settled. A thousands terrals debt, in his own strange way, had been paid. The credits were nearly gone, but the weight they lifted from his soul was immeasurable. He walked towards the transit-tube, not as an orphan saying a bitter farewell, but as a man who had finally closed a chapter on his own terms. The future on Elysian was a terrifying, exhilarating unknown. But for the first time, he felt he was leaving nothing of true value behind.