Chapter Three: The Quiet Currents
News in Helion City didn't travel through official data-streams; it moved like a virus. It leaked through the cracked pipes of the lower wards, whispered in the steam-filled kitchens of the hab-blocks, and carried by the people who knew that silence was the only true currency.
By the third day of Kael's recovery, three very different sets of eyes had turned toward his hospital bed.
The first was the most painful.
His mother, Lysa Veyr, arrived just after the dawn shift ended. She looked smaller than he remembered, her frame swallowed by a worn-out work coat. Her hands were the story of her life—roughened by thirty years in the fabrication plants, the skin stained with grease that no soap could ever fully lift.
She sat beside his bed for a long time without saying a word. She didn't cry; in the Southern Quarter, tears were a waste of moisture. She just stared at his bandages as if trying to memorize the parts of him that were still whole.
"You should have called," she finally said. Her voice was thin, like overstretched wire.
Kael managed a small, jagged smile that pulled at his stitches. "Didn't exactly plan on playing tag with a demon, Ma."
She let out a short, sharp breath—not quite a laugh—and pressed her forehead against his knuckles. Her skin smelled of the caustic soap they used at the plants. "Your father would've shouted at you," she whispered. "He would've called you a damn fool, then gone back to that alley with a lead pipe to find whatever was left of that thing."
The mention of Aron Veyr—missing for five years, vanished into the dark void of an off-world contract—hung in the air like a ghost. It was an unfinished sentence that neither of them knew how to close.
Two levels above the infirmary, the atmosphere was a different kind of cold.
Director Halden Sorell wasn't a man sculpted by "authority"; he was a man sculpted by irritation. He sat in a sealed administrative chamber, nursing a cup of synthetic coffee that had gone cold an hour ago. He flipped through Kael's incident file with a rhythmic, annoying tap of his finger.
"Non-resonant," Sorell muttered, his voice flat. "Survives a demonic encounter that should have turned him into a red smear. Then he alters the ruin execution patterns without so much as a spark of resonance. Either our testing equipment is garbage, or the boy is a glitch in the system."
Across the desk, Lieutenant Corin Vale stood with his arms folded tight. He was a man who lived for order, and Kael's file represented a mess he didn't want to clean up. "Glitches destabilize things, Director. They make people ask questions."
Sorell leaned back, the leather of his chair creaking. "Exactly. Which is why we either put a collar on this anomaly... or we erase it."
The third interest was the most distant, and by far the most dangerous.
Far beyond Helion's smog-choked sky, tucked away in a drifting orbital construct made of black alloy and silent, pulsing light, a monitoring array shifted. It wasn't human; it was a vast, cold intelligence designed to watch for ripples in the fabric of reality.
A single metric flickered on a dark screen.
SHACKLE VARIANCE DETECTED.
There was no alarm. No flashing lights. Just a silent adjustment of focus, as a needle might turn toward a magnet.
Back in the ward, Kael stared out the narrow viewport at the city below. The traffic lines looked like glowing veins of blood pumping through the steel canyons. Somewhere out there, kids his age were training to bend reality, their eyes shimmering with power.
He flexed his fingers. For the first time in his life, the world didn't feel like a wall he had to climb. It felt like something... responsive.
Mira was leaning against the wall, her arms crossed over her technician's jacket. She'd been watching him for a while. "If the Academy is really watching you," she said quietly, "then the life we had is over. Nothing stays simple once the suits get involved."
Kael nodded. He thought about the cold fracture inside his mind. "It never was simple, Mira. We just pretended it was."
She hesitated, then reached out and placed a small, scratched data-chip on his bedside table. "I pulled the public Academy entrance criteria. And some threads from the underground forums. The stuff the teachers don't want us to see. Just in case you decide to stop being 'static.'"
Their eyes met. It wasn't a romantic moment; it was the look shared by two people realizing they were standing on the edge of a cliff.
Outside, Helion City continued to grind and churn, indifferent to the boy in the ward. But beneath Kael's skin, the fractures were widening.