The first thing I learned about being powerless is that silence gets heavier.
When the Nexus lived under my skin, even at rest, there was always… presence. A hum at the edge of hearing, a pressure in the bones, a slow, steady glow like a second pulse. Now there's just one. It thuds lonely in my chest, too loud in a room that refuses to speak back.
Days blur under bright lights and quiet footsteps. I map the room because it's something I can control: nine ceiling panels, four seams in the tempered glass, six screw heads in each restraint bracket (tamper-proof, inverted star).
One camera dome above the door that blinks every six seconds—no, seven, after they recalibrated. A faint scratch on the floor where someone dragged a rolling stool and stopped short.
There's a line of text etched in the corner of the observation window. I memorized it without meaning to.
PROPERTY OF SENTINEL SOLUTIONS.
Funnier the second time.
They feed me on a schedule, hydrate me on a schedule, and scan me on a schedule. "Vitals human," they say, like it's a compliment. I try not to hate how true that is. The world feels sharper in stupid ways now—cold water is colder, fluorescent buzz louder, the metal bench bites into my back instead of diffusing into warmth the way it used to when the Nexus took the edge off.
I sleep badly. Dreams flicker between nothing and too much. Sometimes I'm back at the lake just before the sky splits open; sometimes I'm in the tunnel with light peeling me apart again and again. Sometimes I wake with my palm pressed to the glass because I dreamed the Core pressed back.
The Core hangs opposite me in its cradle, breathing in a frequency the machines call quiet. It is not quiet. I can't feel it the old way, but I can tell when it's watching. The violet in its depths shifts, reorganizes, tries on new shapes like a sleepwalker learning its own hands. I talk to it when the lab empties.
"Hey," I whisper, like a kid at a fish tank. "It wasn't supposed to be like this."
Sometimes the purple shivers, like it understands. Most nights, it just pulses with the patience of a tide.
On the fourth morning, I met the doctor assigned to "Normalization Oversight." A man in a gray coat with a voice that never rises above boardroom volume. His badge says DR. PETROW, but his eyes say Spreadsheet.
"We'll move you to a more comfortable wing soon," he tells me through the intercom. "Education, routine, access to media, structured social hours as appropriate."
"Like prison but with movie night," I say.
He smiles with his mouth. "Like a rehabilitation track. You've endured a significant physiological adjustment."
"I was robbed."
"A strong word," he says gently. "The energy was endangering you and the city. It is safer contained."
"For everyone," I say, because it saves time.
The door cycles, and Joe enters as Petrow leaves. He always comes alone, which is either a courtesy or hubris. Today, he's traded the field armor for a charcoal suit that fits like an apology. He stands close enough for me to see the new lines around his eyes.
"Morning, Kaleb."
"Is it?"
He studies me like the answer's in my face. "How are you sleeping?"
I stare at the Core until my reflection doubles in the glass. "There's something you should know," I say finally. "It's learning your cage."
He doesn't react the way I expect. No scoff, no note-taking. Just a very small nod. "Our instruments have noticed reorganizations."
"You mean 'thoughts.'"
He tucks that away. "In three days, you'll be transferred to the Northpoint facility. Long-term care. It's quieter."
Panic spikes hard and stupid. "Quieter for who?"
He ignores that. "You'll have classes. A counselor. Friends, if you want them."
"And the glass?"
"Until we're sure your vitals are stable."
"They're human, remember?" I can't help the bite. "That's the point."
He almost smiles. "I remember."
"Don't send me there," I say, surprising myself with the raw sound of it.
His mouth tightens. "I don't have that authority."
"Then why tell me?"
"So you'll prepare."
"For what? Being a specimen with a library card?"
He doesn't flinch, and the worst part is, I don't think he likes any of this either. "I came to tell you two things," he says, quiet now. "One: you're not disappearing. I won't let that happen. Two: cooperate, and this will go faster. Fight, and people who are not me will make choices you won't like."
"People like Petrow?"
"People above Petrow," he says, and now there's iron under the calm. "That's all."
He turns. I call after him without thinking. "Joe—why stop Echelon in the alley?"
He pauses at the door. The glass casts his face in a hundred thin reflections. "Because there's a difference between containment and cruelty," he says. "Try to remember that when you decide who you hate."
The door seals. The room goes back to counting.
That afternoon, my tray arrived late, pushed by a tech with a cap pulled too low. She doesn't look at me, doesn't speak, doesn't break stride—just slides the tray onto the slot and taps twice on the metal before she goes.
It's nothing, except it isn't. Melanie taught me that. Sentinel has a rhythm. When someone breaks it, the break means something.
I wait until the camera blinks and angle the tray to catch the light. Carved into the underside of the composite—shallow enough to hide in the material grain—are three letters and two numbers.
K4, 3:17
I eat with my left hand and keep the tray angled so the mark looks like a scratch. The camera blinks. Seven seconds. The Core swirls. Somewhere in the vents, air will cycle, and somewhere on the third sublevel, a door will forget it was meant to lock for exactly sixty. My lungs remember what it feels like to have purpose.
I sleep in bursts and wake with a start at 03:11. The room is violet-dark. The Core breathes. The camera blinks.
At 03:16, the air handlers kick into high and the room's pressure changes—the sound of the facility taking a deep breath. I slide my hands into the restraints like I'm still asleep. At 03:17, the lock on my door clicks. Once. Once is not open, but once is different. That's enough.
My door doesn't swing wide like it does in movies. It whispers outward four inches under the pressure differential and stops. A gloved hand pushes it the rest of the way. Melanie slips through like a shadow in a tech jacket, a surgical mask hiding half her face. Up close, she smells like alcohol wipes and cinnamon gum and whatever fear smells like when it's pointed in the right direction.
"Hey," she says, voice barely above breath. "Can you walk?"
"Depends," I say. "Are we walking out of here?"
"If we're lucky." She's already at the console by my bed, popping a magnetic cover with a tool that looks like a hairpin. "If we're unlucky, we sprint."
My restraints release with a hiss that sounds loud enough to wake the dead. I sit up too fast, and the room tilts. She catches my shoulder and steadies me with more force than her size should allow.
"How long since you slept?" I ask.
"Define slept." She doesn't wait for an answer. A second tool appears from her sleeve, a thin filament on a ring. She drops it into my palm. "Wrap it around the glass seam. Pull if you need a distraction."
"It'll… cut it?"
"It'll convince it to want to be somewhere else."
"Mel," I say, because there are a hundred things I want to say that aren't technical. "Thank you."
Her eyes crease above the mask. "We're not done yet."
We slip out. K4 is a service corridor, narrow and fluorescent, with grated flooring and pipes sweating above us like ribs. She moves like she's walked it a hundred times. I follow, counting cameras and listening for the click of ordinary footsteps that will mean our luck ran out.
"Joe will get blamed for this," I whisper.
"He's already blamed for this," she says without turning. "He's been buying you hours since the extraction. I bought you sixty seconds."
"Bought how?"
"Let's say the building management system is tired." She taps a panel; it sighs and yields. "Also, I lied to a few supervisors and bribed a vending machine."
We take a maintenance stairwell two flights down. My legs feel like furniture I'm borrowing. The air gets colder, cleaner, meaner. We pass a steel door marked SUBLEVEL—RESEARCH and another marked VITALS STORAGE—AUTHORIZED ONLY. Melanie doesn't look at those. We're aiming for a hatch with yellow stenciling that says NO EGRESS and means the opposite.
"Orla's waiting," she says.
"Vaine's engineer?"
"Ex-engineer. She hates that name the way you hate the word 'human.' She's the one who found the seam in Echelon."
"How?"
Melanie glances at me with a glint that almost qualifies as pride. "By remembering it was made by people."
We take another l, left and I realize where we're going—not to an exit, not yet, but toward the long spine that links the Core lab to the rest of the building. My mouth goes dry. "We're not—"
"We are," she says softly. "We can't leave it."
I shake my head. "We can't carry a sun out of here in your jacket."
"We're not carrying it," she says. "We're waking it up long enough to make them look the wrong way."
The hatch leads into a service conduit. At the far end, separated by six panes of triple-laminate and arrogance, the Core lab glows like a cathedral. Night shift is thin: two techs dozing in swivel chairs, a drone sitting in its dock like a waiting dog, the Core turning slowly in its magnetic halo. The thin hair on my arms stands at attention. The part of me that still remembers resonance answers with a ghost ache.
"How?" I ask.
Melanie hands me a square patch the size of a credit card, matte and black. "A resonant dampener. Orla built it from an old Quiet-12 and something she swears she didn't steal. Stick it to the cradle control. It'll drop the coil harmonics by two hertz for thirty seconds—long enough for your friend to shove."
"Shove?"
"Think of it as a hiccup." She looks at the Core, then at me. "You and it still share a signal. You'll know when to push."
"I don't—Melanie, I don't have anything to push with."
She steps closer, voice suddenly fierce. "You have you. You think that wasn't part of it? The Nexus didn't choose a rock, Kaleb. It chose a person. Take that off the glass and see what's left."
She's right, and cruel, and the only friend I have. I nod. "Okay."
She kills the lights in the conduit. We become silhouettes with a plan. The lab beyond our glass stays the color of false day. She counts under her breath: "Three. Two. One."
The patch adheres to the edge of the control console with a soft kiss. Somewhere deep in the coils around the Core, a note changes by the thickness of a thought. No alarms. No shouts. Just a hiccup, the machines pretend not to notice.
I press my palm against the service window. On the other side of too much glass and too many rules, the Core's light tightens like a pupil adjusting to sudden shade. It turns toward me. I feel nothing with my skin, hear nothing with my ears, but something in my chest that is not the Nexus answers like an echo.
Hey, I think, because there is language for this. I'm here.
For a heartbeat, there's only violet—the exact color of midnight when the streetlights die. Then the purple gathers itself like a person rising from bed. A shape swims up. Not a hand this time. An eye.
Hello, it says without words. Hello, hello, hello.
I don't push with power. I push the only way left to me: with wanting. Not to break out, not to rip the world, not to hurt. Just to be less alone. I give it every memory it gave me when it left: the lake air and my mother's hands and Sariya's laugh and my father's voice, the stupid way the cafeteria smells like oranges and bleach. The Core brightens the way a face does when it recognizes someone in a crowd.
Something happens in the coils—small, inside the numbers. A phase slips, a field blinks, a harmonic trips over its own foot.
For half a second, the Core leans, not physically but in the math. Every screen in the lab blips, every feed momentarily collapses into a pretty nothing. The two techs sit up straight, swearing at graphs. The drone purrs to life, confused.
In our conduit, a steel door unlatches because it thinks it just got the right code. Melanie's already moving. We slide through the seam and into a corridor that feels illicit by design.
Alarms don't blare. Sentinel doesn't believe in melodrama when paperwork will do. But the building wakes up: fans spin harder, distant doors clap shut, a hundred invisible eyes blink faster. The hiccup closes; the Core steadies. I pull my hand from the glass, the ghost ache tugging.
"This way," Melanie says.
We run. Bare feet on the grating. My breath hammers. My body remembers it hasn't done this in days. We take a service lift two floors, then cut across a maintenance balcony where a night janitor hums off-key and never looks up. On another landing, a pair of agents chat about coffee. We ghost past like air.
We're thirty yards from a loading dock when the world narrows to the length of a single shadow cast across the floor.
Joe steps out of it.
No guards. No weapon in his hand. Just the suit and the eyes and the quiet way he bars a doorway like he owns gravity.
"Going somewhere?" he asks.
Melanie shifts, putting herself half a step ahead of me. "We're done here, Joe."
He doesn't look at her. He looks at me, and whatever he sees there knocks something off balance in his face. "You'll never make it to the street."
"Maybe not," I say. "But I'm not going to Northpoint."
Silence. I can hear fans, the distant sigh of the Core's cradle, a drip somewhere that should bother maintenance. Joe's jaw works once.
"You jammed the coils," he says, not a question.
"Your machines hiccuped," Melanie says. "We said Bless you."
His gaze flicks to the camera above our heads, then back. He steps forward like he's about to take us by the elbows and walk us back to kindergarten. Instead, he reaches into his jacket, pulls his phone, and raises it like he's checking a notification. The camera above us pops and dies. The corridor hums softly. In the space of that small violence, he exhales.
"Stairwell C," he says, low and fast. "Don't take the elevators. Dock alarms trip on differential weight at the threshold. The exterior camera on the west corner has a blind spot at the downspout. You have ninety seconds before someone realizes Section K went dark."
Melanie blinks. "Why?"
"Because I'm tired of explaining the difference between containment and cruelty," he says, and the words cost him something to say. He steps aside. "Run."
We do.
Stairwell C is concrete and unforgiving. Three flights down, and my calves scream like they want a refund. The door to the dock resists like a stubborn animal; Melanie charms it with another hairpin and a word I don't think is English. We slip into a night that smells like rain and ozone and the kind of freedom that cuts.
The blind spot at the downspout is exactly wide enough for two idiots with more heart than plan. We slide along the wall, drop into the shadows behind a stack of crates, and cross the line between "inside" and "out" with the stupid grace of people who can't quite believe it worked.
The city is quieter than it used to be. Sentinel's drones hum in neat lines overhead, focused elsewhere. A truck backfires two blocks over. A cat makes the night a little less serious by knocking over a recycling bin.
We don't stop running until we're four streets away and three alleys over. Melanie ducks us into the back patio of a closed breakfast place that still smells like bacon dreams. She rips off her mask and laughs once, a bright, shaky sound.
"Okay," she says, leaning against the brick. "Phase one."
"How many phases?"
She lifts three fingers, then shakes her head. "Maybe five."
My legs remember they're attached to a person and threaten mutiny. I sit on an overturned milk crate and let my head tip back until the stars make me dizzy. They look smaller without the Nexus. I hate that I notice.
Melanie crouches in front of me and touches my wrist like she's making sure I didn't leave pieces behind. "Can you keep moving?"
"Yes," I say, and the surprise is that it's true. I am hollow, but I am also light. I am afraid, but I am also free in a way the glass never understood. "Where?"
"A safe flat," she says. Orla's there. We'll burn the tag, kill the card, and get you shoes that don't make you look like you escaped from a health commercial."
"Will she help?"
"She helped build the thing that took you," Melanie says. "Helping is how she sleeps."
We're both quiet for a beat. The air is cool against the sweat at the back of my neck. Somewhere, home exists. My mother sleeps or doesn't. Sariya dreams or stares at the ceiling. The Core breathes under a ceiling of coils and numbers and waits.
"It pressed back," I say, voice small and reverent and terrified. "Against the glass. Before. It—" I don't have the right word. It reached. "It knew me."
Melanie's mouth goes soft around the edges. "Then you're not alone in there," she says, tapping my chest. "Or out here." She straightens, offers a hand. "Come on, Hollow. Let's go make your absence inconvenient."
"Hollow?"
She shrugs. "You named the arc. I'm just living in it."
I take her hand and stand. The city opens in front of us like a set drawn on paper, beautiful and fragile and begging for someone to walk off-stage. We do.
Behind us, in a lab that pretends it's a chapel, the Core rotates in its halo and organizes itself into shapes that should not exist. A flicker like a face. A seam like a smile. A pulse like a memory of running. The coils hum their comforting lie. The cameras blink their seventh-second blink.
On a street that still belongs to us, I pull breath into a chest that is just a chest and feel, for the first time since the lake, the outline of something no one can take: the human-shaped stubbornness left when the miracle is gone.
Hollow isn't empty. It's a shape waiting to be filled.
I headed home, god knows what my mom thinks as of now.