The hum had become constant.
Not in the air — inside him.
Every heartbeat echoed like thunder under glass. Every breath shimmered with faint light.
Azen had stopped pretending he could sleep. The Vein wouldn't let him. It kept showing him pieces — memories that weren't his. A war beneath the city, men carved from light, voices chanting in languages the human mouth could no longer form.
He sat on the floor of his room, sweat running down his face, palms pressed to the cold concrete.
And the concrete pulsed back.
He jerked his hands back, panting. "No. Stop."
But the whisper didn't stop. It had learned his tone, his rhythm — it spoke through him now.
---
Across the compound, Silver was watching the monitors flicker. The feeds from the lower sectors were glitching again — static, distortion, unreadable pulses in the video stream.
"It's him," she said. "He's syncing with the city grid again."
Kane's voice came over the comm, calm as ever. "Then the fracture is close."
Silver frowned. "Fracture?"
"Every system breaks before it evolves," Kane said. "Even human ones."
---
By morning, the air outside had changed.
People in the streets whispered of flickering lights, dreams that bled sound, and machines that started humming without power. The Vein was pushing through every layer — electric, organic, psychic.
And Azen was its core.
He stumbled through the corridors of the hideout, light trailing faintly under his skin. The closer he got to the main hall, the more reality bent — walls vibrating, sound curving in slow waves.
Rex stood there waiting, gun at his side, eyes cold.
"You're losing control," he said.
"I'm not," Azen hissed. "I'm seeing clearer than ever."
"Yeah? Then tell me — whose voice are you hearing right now?"
Azen froze. The hum deepened. The air split with a sound like shattering glass.
---
Kane appeared from the shadows. "Enough."
He walked closer, hands behind his back, eyes glowing faintly in the dim light.
"Azen, you were chosen because you could channel the Vein. Not become it."
Azen's voice cracked, half his own, half something else. "Maybe that's the same thing."
The floor trembled. The Vein flared — threads of gold and violet crawling up the walls. Kane raised a hand, muttering something low and ancient. The light dimmed but didn't fade.
"You need to understand," Kane said quietly. "The Vein remembers everyone who's touched it. Every fragment, every echo. And it's using you to gather them back."
"So what happens when it's done?" Azen asked.
Kane looked at him — not as a leader, but as someone staring at a weapon too powerful to hold.
"Then," he said, "the city breaks."
---
That night, Silver found Azen on the rooftop again.
He didn't turn when she spoke.
"You're scared."
"No," he said. "I'm becoming."
She sighed, stepping closer. "Be careful, Azen. Becoming and breaking look the same until the end."
The wind shifted, carrying the faint hum of the Vein beneath the streets — louder now, deeper.
And for the first time since his awakening, Azen smiled.
Because he could finally hear its heartbeat matching his own.
Interlude — Beneath the Static
There was a place between dream and wakefulness that Azen now called home.
No walls, no sky — only the hum.
He floated in a field of shifting light, fragments of memory drifting past like dust in water.
His mother's voice echoed from somewhere far behind him:
"You were born during a thunderstorm, remember?
The doctor said the monitors kept glitching.
Even then, the city was listening to you."
He tried to reach for her, but every motion left ripples of gold that reshaped the dark.
Then another voice layered over hers — calm, unfamiliar, ancient.
"The Vein is not power.
It is remembrance.
You are not chosen; you are remembered."
He felt something inside him tilt — not pain, not fear, but recognition.
The hum folded into silence, and in that silence he heard his own heartbeat counting down.
When he opened his eyes, he was back in the real world — the roof, the wind, the skyline trembling under the pulse of light.
He whispered, "Then remember me."