The night had been fragile for hours, like a glass heart ticking toward a crack. Kayden lay awake longer than he meant to, fingers tracing the rim of his mug as if that small motion could steady whatever tremor lived under his skin. The visions had ebbed but not gone; his mind kept folding back into that blood-red sky, the blurred commander, the soldiers who saluted like worshipers to a name he neither asked for nor wanted. He breathed shallowly, each inhale a small battle, and convinced himself sleep would thin the residue. It didn't.
APEX sat faint and patient in the corner of his vision, a blue pinprick against the dark. Kayden let his eyes drift to it, willing comfort from the familiar hum. Instead, the orb stuttered, a micro-jolt like a skipped heartbeat. He felt it in his chest before he heard any sound — a frequency too old for the city's machines.
Then the room tilted.
Not visibly. Not physically. The air folded, a seam forming between the light of his lamp and the darkness in the far corner. The temperature dropped so suddenly that Kayden's breath misted out, white and fragile. A silver thread—thin and precise as a scalpel—slid through the seam, painting the shadow with a cold light. His fingers tightened on the blanket.
"No," he whispered, not to APEX or to the signal, but to whatever had found a way back.
The unauthorized console answered with a voice like steel grinding against ice, low and patient and impossibly old. "Reconnection attempt in progress. Lineage recognition: increasing." The words were not aimed at Kayden like commands; they were spoken like a memory returning to a place it once belonged to.
APEX barked in his mind, sharp and ragged. "Commander, sever cognitive link. Resist. Do not identify." The system's commands felt frantic, like someone trying to beat a living thing into slumber. Kayden swallowed, but the pressure in his skull intensified, as if the voice were wading through his thoughts searching for a latch.
He tried to close his eyes and block the incoming images. It didn't help. The signal didn't knock; it threaded. The vision unfolded from within him — a rampart under scarlet clouds, metal boots stamping dust into red spirals, a flag splitting the sky. A face blurred by static turned toward him and the whisper reached his bones: "Arclight…"
Kayden tasted metal. He felt himself teeter at a precipice he had only known in dreams and stories. He wanted to scream, to smash the lamp, to burn whatever it was with noise and motion. Instead he curled inward until the floor pressed into his spine and everything narrowed to one aching point where the voice wanted him.
A knock at the door — soft, then more insistent — sliced through the room like a blade. Kayden didn't hear it as a normal sound. He heard it as a distant human life tapping on the barrier between him and oblivion. He tried to move, to shout something that would cut the tether, but the signal had him; his muscles obeyed as if someone else had given the order.
The knob turned.
Alex stepped in, breathless, eyes bright with the dull sheen of a late night run. He stopped the moment he saw Kayden's posture, the way his shoulders hunched, the way his hands were clenched white against the blanket. His gaze flicked up to Kayden's face and froze there.
Kayden's eyes glowed faintly silver.
Alex's mouth opened, closed, opened again. "Kayden?" His voice was careful, measured, but it carried raw worry too. "You okay?"
Kayden couldn't form a lie. He wasn't sure he could form words at all. The signal pressed its face against the back of his mind and whispered the same sickening invitation: "Return." It made small promises of memory and command, and somewhere in its tone lay the ache of loss — a doorway that had never truly closed.
APEX blasted into his head—a sharp, white flash. "Commander, do not engage. Do not answer. Protect proximity. Anchor: physical contact required." The directive slammed into him, sharp and immediate, and Kayden realized it meant one thing: Alex had to be kept away or anchored, depending on APEX's verdict.
Alex, however, had already crossed the room. He dropped to his knees without thinking, as if the floor knew him and offered him a place beside Kayden. He reached for Kayden's hand the same moment the signal reached for him, fingers finding skin in that tiny, desperate human act.
The connection latched like frost. The intrusive voice recoiled the instant Alex's warmth touched Kayden's skin. For a breathless second everything shuddered and Kayden felt two presences contend in his head — one ancient and voracious, the other irreplaceably human and alive. It was the strangest and most violent tug of war he had ever known. Alex's grip was a lifeline, not just a comfort.
"Don't—" Kayden managed, voice a ragged thread. His knuckles dug into Alex's wrist until pain replaced numbness. "Don't look. Don't let it see you."
Alex's eyes didn't leave him. They were steady but leaking fear. "Kayden, whatever this thing is, I'm not moving." He swallowed. "I'm not leaving." His jaw set. "We figure this out together."
The signal hissed like wind over glass. "Exposure detected. Additional subject present: proximity alpha threshold breached," it intoned, disinterested, clinical, and Kayden felt the words like a slap. It had noticed Alex. It was cataloguing the presence of someone who didn't belong to its war.
Panic skittered across APEX's tone for the first time—sharp, metallic, angry. "Commander, sever physical link! The signal is attempting to co-opt through associative traits. It will try to rewrite Alex as a conduit if allowed!" The warning shoved at Kayden's chest with suffocating force. It presented a binary choice: cut Alex free and risk the signal taking root, or keep Alex anchored and risk the entity learning too much through human touch.
Kayden's world narrowed to the warmth in Alex's palm and the cold in the corner of his room. He could feel the signal tasting the edges of Alex's mind, sniffing memory and love and the smell of cheap coffee, greedy for anything to hold. It wanted another anchor. It wanted to expand its foothold from lineage to friendship.
Alex's breath hitched, and Kayden saw his friend's face crumple — not with fear for himself, but with fear for Kayden. "Tell me what to do," Alex whispered. "I'll do anything."
Kayden's throat closed around a laugh that was more sound than mirth. "Don't let it name you," he said, words scraping. "Don't—don't let it give you a title." He felt suddenly like he was handing Alex a weapon and a curse at once. "Remember who you are. Remember… coffee, stupid jokes, the time you fell off your bike—anything mundane, anything real."
Alex blinked, then nodded like someone repeating a prayer. He began to recite — a stream of everyday trivia, ridiculous memories and humiliations — loud enough to lace into Kayden's head. The signal recoiled at the banality as if it had no category for it. The voice in Kayden's mind distorted with static that hungrier beings might find delicious; the old system didn't compute Alex's mundane anchor. It attempted to translate love into rank and failed.
The room felt impossibly thin; the battle was both cosmic and intimate, fought in the vow of a friend to keep shouting the names of practical things — "peanut butter, that awful band you liked in middle school, your awful haircut in tenth grade" — until the alien memory retched and unclenched.
APEX's tone softened almost imperceptibly. "Hold," it said. "Transmit reality."
Alex kept talking. Kayden let his head fall back, forehead resting against the wall, eyes closed. He clung to Alex's voice like a prayer. The vision of the battlefield blurred at the edges, then wavered, then thinned. The white-haired silhouette dissolved into static; the soldiers' salute fractured into a nonsense rhythm.
Finally the silver thread withered and folded inward like paper pulled back from flame. The room exhaled as if someone had stopped holding its breath for them. Kayden's knees gave and he slid down until he was sitting at Alex's feet, hands still clasped around his friend's wrist. His chest felt split open and mended at once.
Alex's face was wet with sweat, and his voice had the brittle edge of someone who had shouted too loud. "You can't keep doing that alone," he said without heat, only sorrow and resolution. "You have to tell me the truth. All of it."
Kayden stared at his palm where Alex's fingers left an imprint of warmth. He could still hear the echo of the signal, distant and hungry, retreating to whatever fissure it had crawled through. "It will come back," he said finally, the words like ash. "And next time it won't retreat so easy."
Alex tightened his grip. "Then we prepare. We research. We get APEX to patch—whatever it can." He forced a wry, tired smile. "And if it ever tries to call you by that name again, I'll scream about your terrible singing until it goes away."
Kayden laughed once, a small jag of sound that tasted like relief. He looked up at Alex, eyes silver but steadier. "Promise me you'll keep saying stupid things."
"Promise," Alex said without hesitation.
Outside, the city breathed on, oblivious and ordinary. Inside the small room, under a lamp's forgiving light, two friends clung to each other against a signal that had reached across time. The thin line had not been mended; it had only been delayed. But for a heartbeat, the weight had shifted. A small human voice had pushed the ancient thing back into shadow.
Kayden let his forehead rest against Alex's shoulder and closed his eyes. The war, the commander, the soldiers—they were still out there, or in there, or somewhere in between. The unauthorized signal would return. He knew that. But he also knew, now with a raw clarity that steadied him, that he didn't have to meet it alone.