They say every system has a breaking point. Sentinel found theirs in me.
By dawn, the city had changed. San Diego didn't look like home anymore. Roads were empty, air traffic grounded, and every digital sign in sight flickered with the same warning:
CITY ALERT: METAHUMAN ACTIVITY — SENTINEL SAFETY PROTOCOL ACTIVE
They called it a safety precaution. I called it a declaration of war.
From my bedroom window, I could see the faint glow still pulsing over downtown — soft, purple waves bleeding through the clouds. It wasn't just energy. It was me. My signal, my pulse, my mistake.
The Nexus hadn't stopped resonating. It was expanding.
Mom had tried to keep me hidden; barricading the door like that would stop Sentinel from coming. But they already knew. They'd known the second the first pulse hit their satellites.
I packed what little I could — a jacket, my phone, the card. Not because I needed them, but because I couldn't sit still. Every second felt borrowed.
By the time I reached downtown, the world had turned mechanical. Drones lined the sky in geometric formation, humming low and synchronized like a digital swarm. Streets were blocked off by armored barricades with glowing Sentinel insignias. The air itself buzzed faintly, ionized from the dampeners they'd activated across the power grid.
They were building a cage.
Melanie was waiting under the pedestrian bridge by the harbor, dressed in all black, her hood pulled up. She looked up when she saw me, her voice sharp. "You shouldn't have come."
"You said we were meeting."
"I didn't think you'd actually show after last night. Do you even know what you did?"
"I improvised," I said.
She stepped closer. "You resonated with a citywide network and nearly crashed Sentinel's main servers. That's not improvisation — that's a declaration."
"Good," I said. "Maybe they'll finally listen."
"Kaleb, they're not listening — they're loading weapons."
Her words hit like ice. "Weapons?"
She nodded toward the skyline. "They've activated Echelon Protocol."
The name was new, but the look in her eyes told me everything. "What is it?"
"Containment," she said. "For anomalies like you. It's a full-spectrum energy suppression grid that can neutralize metahuman output within a targeted radius. It was theoretical until last night. You just gave them a reason to test it."
"So, what — they flip a switch and I vanish?"
"Something like that," she said grimly. "They can't kill the Nexus, but they can isolate it."
"Meaning drain it."
"Meaning lock it away," she corrected. "In a containment core. They've been developing one for years — a hybrid energy cell capable of storing cosmic frequency."
The words sank in like stones. "You're saying they built a prison… for me."
"Not for you," she said softly. "For what's inside you."
I clenched my fists. "Same thing."
The sound of rotors cut through the air above us. We both looked up. Three black Sentinel dropships flew overhead, trailing light-blue contrails. Their searchlights swept the streets in broad arcs.
Melanie grabbed my wrist. "We have to move."
We ran.
The city felt alien — empty storefronts, traffic lights flashing on loop, drones weaving through intersections like predators. The hum of the Nexus inside me vibrated harder with every step, matching the rhythm of my pulse.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
"West district," she said between breaths. "I know someone — an engineer from Vaine's old lab. If anyone can explain what's happening to you, it's her."
"Does Sentinel know about her?"
"Not yet," she said. "She went off-grid two years ago. Calls herself Orla."
We rounded a corner and ducked into a service alley. The air smelled like wet metal and electricity. Melanie stopped, pulling a device from her pocket — a small, disc-shaped gadget no larger than a coin.
She pressed a button, and the edges unfolded, releasing a shimmer of transparent energy.
"What is that?" I asked.
"A scrambler. It hides heat signatures for a few minutes. Sentinel drones won't see us here."
"Won't or shouldn't?"
She didn't answer.
The air crackled faintly, the hum of the scrambler mixing with the steady pulse under my skin. I felt the Nexus reacting again — subtle, but growing. The faint purple shimmer at the edges of my vision made the world feel like it was bending.
Melanie noticed it too. "You're glowing."
"I'm aware."
Her hand went to my shoulder. "Kaleb, listen to me. You have to control it before they triangulate your signal again."
"I'm trying—"
The words cut short as the ground beneath us trembled.
A low-frequency boom echoed across the city — deep, resonant, and mechanical. The sky above the skyline flared bright blue for an instant, then dimmed.
Melanie froze. "Oh no."
"What?"
"They just activated Echelon."
Across the city, Sentinel HQ roared to life. Inside the command chamber, Joe Wann stood before a holographic display of the entire metro grid. Blue lines rippled outward in precise concentric waves, spreading from the tower's center like a sonar pulse.
Technicians called out readings. "Echelon field stable at sixty-two percent." Power cells are charging. "Subject's signal still active within zone three."
Joe's gaze stayed fixed on the display.
"Sir," one of the analysts said, "should we begin power draw?"
He didn't answer right away. His reflection hovered in the glass — calm, cold, conflicted.
"Sir?"
He finally spoke. "Not yet. He's just a kid."
The analyst hesitated. "With cosmic energy density rivaling our entire power grid."
Joe's voice hardened. "I said not yet."
But deep down, he knew it wasn't his choice anymore.
In the alley, I felt it before I saw it — a wave of static that made the air vibrate like glass under pressure. The pulse hit the street with a shimmer, spreading outward in a faint blue ripple.
Melanie grabbed my arm. "That's the Echelon field! We have to move now!"
I tried to run, but my legs felt heavy, like the air had turned to syrup. The Nexus inside me resisted, flickering wildly in color — blue, violet, white. The pulse from the city grid clashed with my own rhythm, creating interference that made everything spin.
"Kaleb!" Melanie shouted, voice distant through the noise.
I dropped to one knee, clutching my head. The world rippled — colors bending, sound stretching.
I saw flashes. Not of the present, but of everything. A thousand versions of the same city, the same sky, the same people — overlapping, blurring, fracturing. L ike reality itself was buffering.
Then it stopped.
The energy snapped back into me with a violent surge that knocked me flat. The ground around us cracked, scorched in a perfect circle of glowing purple.
Melanie knelt beside me, shaking my shoulder. "Kaleb, talk to me!"
I looked up, dazed. "They're trying to cancel me out."
"What?"
"The Echelon field — it's tuned to the Nexus frequency. They're using it to destabilize me."
Her eyes widened. "They're not trying to cancel you, Kaleb. They're trying to separate you."
At Sentinel HQ, Joe watched the readings climb."Containment energy rising to eighty percent."Field synchronization achieved."Subject's vitals spiking—"
Joe cut them off. "Stop it."
"Sir, we can't—"
"I said STOP!" he barked, slamming his hand on the console. The holograms froze.
Everyone in the room went silent.
Joe stared at the data stream, the violet signal slowly dimming under the layers of blue suppression. He could see it happening — The Nexus being smothered, compressed, suffocated.
If they kept this up, the kid wouldn't just lose control. He'd lose himself.
He turned to the analysts. "Shut down the Echelon field."
"Sir, Director Cecelia ordered a full containment—"
Joe's tone dropped into ice. "I don't care what she ordered. Shut it down."
Back in the alley, the pulse faded. The air lightened. I gasped, lungs aching, the glow in my hands dimming back to normal.
Melanie exhaled in relief. "They stopped."
"For now," I said.
She helped me to my feet. "We need to go. Before they change their minds."
I nodded, gripping the card tighter in my hand. Its light had dimmed — weaker, slower — but alive.
"They're not done," I said quietly. "They're going to try again."
Melanie looked at me. "Then we make sure next time, they fail."
But somewhere inside Sentinel's labs, behind glass walls and reinforced circuits, engineers were already assembling something new. A crystalline containment chamber, lined with pulse inhibitors and quantum coils, humming faintly with potential energy.
Above it, a placard read:
PROJECT ECHELON — POWER CELL UNIT 01: THE NEXUS CORE.
The cell wasn't ready yet. But it would be.