There's a thin line between being protected and being contained. And I was standing right on it.
Five days had passed since homecoming — five days since Breaker crashed through my life and Joe Wann handed me a leash disguised as freedom. Sentinel called it "monitoring for my safety."Right.Like putting a cage around a bird and calling it a shelter.
They'd installed a signal tag in the black card they gave me. I could feel it sometimes — a faint pulse in my pocket, like it was alive. Every few seconds, it sent a ping straight back to Sentinel's network.
The hum of it followed me everywhere — in the hallways, in the quiet of my room at night, even in my dreams.
Freedom with eyes on me. Or none at all.
That's what Joe had said.
By Thursday, even the air around school felt heavier. Sentinel had quietly embedded itself into the campus under the title of safety contractors. Two plainclothes agents stood by the entrance, pretending to be campus security. There were cameras in every corner now — the kind that didn't blink when you looked at them.
Students still whispered about the homecoming attack, but not like it was a tragedy. More like gossip. Someone had seen me near the stage before the lights went out. Someone else swore they'd heard Breaker say my name. Every rumor stuck to me like static.
Sariya texted me before the first period:
"You okay?" They're saying Sentinel's back at the gym again."
I typed out I'm fine and sent it, even though it felt like a lie the moment it left my thumb.
History class was uneventful. Mr. Garza went on about industrial revolutions while my mind drifted toward something else entirely — the quiet rhythm of my pulse syncing to that faint signal hum I could never escape. And a few rows away, I could feel her watching me.
Melanie Santos.
The new girl who wasn't new at all.The "transfer student" who handled the chaos at homecoming like she'd trained for it.And the same girl whose left earring pulsed blue every few minutes — not jewelry, but a micro-comm link straight to Sentinel's net.
She didn't talk to me during class. She didn't need to. Her presence was enough — a constant reminder that my life wasn't mine anymore.
I tried to walk out fast when the bell rang, but she was already waiting in the hall.
"Kaleb," she said softly.
I stopped. "What now? A wellness check?"
Her voice dropped lower. "I'm not here for Joe."
"Then you're wasting your time."
"Listen to me," she said. "We need to talk. Somewhere off grid."
I frowned. "Off grid? You mean away from Sentinel's eyes?"
She nodded once. "Sweetwater Park. After school. No card, no phone."
"And if I say no?"
She looked right at me. "Then someone else will come looking for you. And they won't be asking questions — they'll be collecting data."
She turned and walked away, leaving me with a hallway full of noise and a mind full of static.
By the time the last bell rang, I'd already made my decision. If Sentinel was watching me, then the only way to breathe was to step outside their camera frame.
Sweetwater Park was half-hidden beneath the old bridge, quiet and forgotten. I hadn't been there since I was a kid. The grass was patchy, the benches rusted, the air thick with the sound of cicadas and running water.
Melanie sat alone under a dying streetlight, hood up, tablet in her lap.
"You came," she said, without looking up.
"I'm a sucker for bad ideas," I said.
She smiled faintly. "Then you're in good company."
I leaned against the railing. "So? What's this about?"
She turned the tablet toward me. Sentinel's logo filled the screen, stamped over a classified header.
SUBJECT: YOUNG, K ALECLASSIFICATIONNN: PROJECT APEX — PRIORITY REINITIATION DATE: 10/27/2022 INCIDENT OF ORIGIN: LAKE PARAGON EVENT AUTHORIZED BY: DR. CELIA VAINE (Meta-Genetics Division)
My pulse jumped at the sight of it. "Lake Paragon…" I murmured. "That was three years ago. A party."
"Not to Sentinel," she said. "That night, their global satellite network recorded an energy event unlike anything they'd seen. Temporal displacement, radiation flux, gravitational distortion — all traced to one source."
I looked up slowly. "Me."
She nodded. "You were at the center of it. The instant the reading stabilized, Sentinel locked your genetic ID and flagged it under Project Apex. Dr. Celia Vaine wrote the first and only full report before she vanished six months later."
"Vaine," I said. "Why does that name sound familiar?"
"She worked with your father," Melanie said. "Back when Ignis Rex was still Sentinel's golden symbol. She helped build their power indexing system. She's the reason metas even have classification numbers."
"So she found me," I said.
"She found something," Melanie corrected. "Her report doesn't describe your powers — it describes a merger. Her notes call it 'contact with a cosmic interface structure: The Nexus Phenomenon.' She wrote that you weren't just exposed to it… You became it."
I stared at her. "You mean the Nexus. That's what gave me my powers that night."
She nodded. "Sentinel doesn't fully understand what The Nexus is, but they know it's beyond meta-science. The energy doesn't obey our laws of time, cause, or decay. They think it's alive."
"Alive?"
She closed the tablet and leaned forward. "Kaleb, whatever bonded to you at Lake Paragon wasn't meant to exist here. Sentinel calls you Project Apex because they think you're the evolutionary ceiling — the point where human and extra-dimensional energy intersect."
I felt my heartbeat spike. "So what? They want to study me?"
"They already are," she said. "Every time that tracker pulses, it logs your vitals and sends telemetry to Sentinel HQ. Every spike in your heart rate, every emotional surge, every flare of energy — they record it."
I looked down at the grass. "That's why they tagged me."
"That's why they're keeping you," she said. "They're trying to duplicate what happened at Lake Paragon. If they succeed, you're not their miracle anymore — you're a blueprint."
"And blueprints get replaced," I said.
She nodded.
The night air felt colder then. A gust of wind rattled the trees above, sending loose leaves spiraling across the park.
I ran a hand through my hair. "So what now? You blow the whistle and hope they don't erase you?"
"I can't expose them," she said. "They'd bury me before the story hit the feed. But I can slow them down. You, on the other hand…"
"What about me?"
"You can jam them."
I frowned. "How?"
"By turning their signal against itself," she said. "That card they gave you? It's not just a tracker — it's a transmitter. If you can manipulate its feedback frequency, you can create interference. Make it look like you're in multiple places at once. To Sentinel, that reads as a system fault."
I blinked. "So… fake my own signal?"
She nodded. "A false trail. It won't last long — maybe a few hours at a time — but it'll give you breathing room."
"And in exchange, you want what?"
"I want truth," she said. "Breaker mentioned the Nexus. He knows things no one outside Sentinel should. If you ever see him again, I need to know what he's after."
I looked at her, studying her face for cracks — some sign this was a trap. But all I saw was conviction. And something else. Guilt.
"I'll think about it," I said.
She smiled faintly. "That's all I'm asking. And Kaleb?"
"Yeah?"
"Stop thinking of yourself as a test subject," she said. "Start thinking like a variable."
Then she stood and walked toward the bridge, disappearing into the amber glow of a passing car's headlights.
I stayed for a long time after she left, staring at the dark reflection of the bridge in the water below.
Lake Paragon. That night, I stopped being just a kid. That was when the Nexus chose me — or maybe when it needed me.
Whatever the case, it wasn't an accident. Sentinel didn't create me. They just caught the signal first.
And now I was going to give them one they couldn't trace.