Chapter 13
Kota's knees gave out.
The world turned on its side—orb, ceiling, Aisha's face twisting in slow-motion panic. Her voice reached him like it was coming through water.
"Kota!"
Darkness swallowed the rest.
He came back to himself with a soft weight under his head and a warm pressure on his chest.
For a moment he thought he was still inside that cold, perfect memory-space the orb had forced on him. Then the smell of dust and faint sweat, the tickle of loose threads against his cheek, and the tremble in a breath above him grounded everything.
He opened his eyes.
Aisha hovered over him, leaning forward, hair falling around her face in messy strands. His head was pillowed on her thighs. Tears clung to her lower lashes, unfallen, making her eyes shine too bright in the dim blue light of the room.
They were still on the fourth floor. The same big, single chamber. The air felt thinner, as if some pressure had finally let go.
Kota turned his head. The smaller orb above the central dais hung there, but it wasn't whole anymore. A jagged crack split it from top to bottom, faint light seeping out along the fracture like a dying ember.
Aisha followed his gaze, then snapped her eyes back to him the instant she realized he was actually looking.
"You idiot," she hissed, voice shaking. "You— you absolute— what were you thinking? I told you to stop, I told you to stop, and you just kept walking like— like some kind of puppet, and then you touched it, and you collapsed, and you stopped breathing for a second and—"
The words poured out of her. Not in neat sentences—just a rush of anger and fear and relief tripping over itself. She kept talking, kept scolding, until the edge finally bled out of her voice.
"I thought you were dead," she finished, barely above a whisper.
Her shoulders dropped. She looked away, cheeks coloring faintly.
"I'm… I'm glad you're okay," she added, almost too soft to hear.
Kota swallowed and pushed himself up. The movement set everything spinning; the room smeared at the edges for a breath, then snapped back into focus. The echo of what the orb had done to him still buzzed behind his eyes.
"Easy," Aisha said, catching his arm on instinct.
"I'm fine," he lied, breathing carefully. "Just… fuzzy."
That wasn't the right word. His mind felt crowded, not blurry. Quiet, but crowded.
Images kept trying to surface—his old alley in Inkto, his sister's grin, the beast's silver claws, Marcus's calloused hands, the Rift light swallowing his parents, the smooth inhuman room of memory—and under it all, something new had stamped itself there:
Treacherous Mind – skill learned.
The phrase was too clean, too sharp, like someone had carved letters into the inside of his skull.
Skill.
He'd heard of "techniques," "instincts," "Resonance bursts." Not skills. That word belonged to rumors, academy talk, things kids in the slums repeated without understanding.
He had no idea what it actually meant. No one had ever taught him what Awakening did beyond "you get stronger or you die." Whatever this was felt… structured. Labeled.
He stared at his hands for a moment, flexing his fingers. They looked the same. No glow. No change he could see.
"Kota?" Aisha's voice cut through his thoughts.
He looked up. Her face had gone pale again, all the earlier color drained out.
"I want to go home," she said quietly.
The words hurt more than any of his injuries. Tears, fresh this time, slid down her cheeks in thin, unsteady lines.
He exhaled, slow. Reached up and, after a tiny hesitation, rested his hand lightly over hers where it still braced his arm.
"Yeah," he said. "Me too."
They sat like that for a few breaths, the broken orb humming faintly behind them, the silence of the dead city pressing in.
"Let's get out of here," he said at last. "Back to the shelter. We can… think there. Away from this thing."
A soft chitter came from near the doorway. Dumpling had wedged himself half behind a piece of fallen stone, fur puffed, eyes wide. At the sound of Kota's voice, he shuffled closer, still wary of the cracked orb.
"See?" Kota tried to joke, pushing himself to his feet with Aisha's help. "Dumpling agrees. Bad room."
Aisha made a strangled, almost-laughing sound and wiped at her face with the heel of her hand.
They left the chamber carefully, Kota refusing to look back at the damaged orb. Each step down the stairs steadied his body but not his head. Information kept trying to push through his thoughts in small, sharp stabs.
On the third floor, when he glanced at a long table, lines and pressure points flickered in his vision—weak legs here, warped brace there, how to kick it so it would collapse and shield, not crush.
The flash lasted less than a heartbeat.
Pain stabbed through his temple like a needle.
He hissed under his breath.
"You okay?" Aisha asked immediately.
"Yeah," he said. "Just— headache."
Second floor. He looked at a broken support pillar, and suddenly he knew exactly where a crack ran beneath the surface, how much weight it could take before snapping, what angle of force would topple it.
Another sharp sting. Like being stung behind the eye.
Wabbernet, his mind supplied automatically. The hornets from back home. Tiny, mean, and always hitting the soft spots.
By the time they climbed down the vines and dropped to the ground, he'd had half a dozen more of those intrusions. Each time he focused on something—doorway, wall, stretch of street—details bloomed in his awareness, too fast and too precise, then vanished, leaving pain behind.
Aisha kept shooting him sideways glances. She didn't push, but the tension in her mouth said she knew he wasn't fine.
They found some of their foraged berries and stale rations near the base of the building, where they'd hidden a small stash. Kota forced himself to eat, though every bite sat heavy.
As the purple sky shifted toward its dimmer, bioluminescent "evening," they made their way back toward the central square. The main orb's distant glow pulsed between the ruined buildings like a heartbeat.
Kota tried not to look at it.
He failed.
Just a glance, he thought. Just to see if it's different.
His eyes touched the surface of the great sphere.
The city vanished.
His mind detonated.
Not with light, not this time. With information.
Images slammed into him in brutal fragments:
A sky torn open by a wound of pure darkness.
Shapes that might have been gods or might have been machines, towering over cities that were not Earth.
Demons, or something worse, climbing out of pits of white fire.
A world of glass towers collapsing in perfect, silent sequence.
A sigil burned itself across his mind's eye, a rune that felt like it meant betrayal and choice and inevitable failure all at once.
A name, or something like a name, tried to form—alien syllables that twisted away the moment he almost understood them.
His body registered the pain late.
Heat spilled from his nose. He felt it before he saw it. Then there was wetness on his lips, his chin, his collar.
The pressure behind his eyes turned molten. Something warm slid from the corners—blood trailing down his face in slow, sticky lines.
"Kota!" Aisha's voice shattered through the storm. Far away and right in his ear at the same time.
He tried to look away from the orb and found his eyes already had. He was on his knees without remembering falling, one hand clawed into the cracked pavement, the other braced against his own thigh hard enough to hurt.
The flood cut off.
The pain didn't.
He squeezed his eyes shut, coughed—and red splattered the ground in front of him. His stomach lurched. For a moment he thought he might vomit, but it passed, leaving him cold and shaking.
Aisha dropped beside him, hands hovering, not sure where to touch first.
"Kota, you're bleeding—you're bleeding from your eyes, I—"
"I'm fine," he forced out, the words rusted and wrong in his mouth. He swiped his forearm across his face, smearing blood more than cleaning it. "It stopped. I just… looked too long."
"That's not—" Her voice broke. She swallowed. "That's not fine."
Dumpling pressed himself against Kota's boot, little body trembling.
Kota drew a slow breath, then another, trying to push the lingering images back where they'd come from. The warm coil in his core felt jagged now, like it had grown spines.
Treacherous Mind, the label whispered within him.
Whatever this skill was, it wasn't gentle.
He didn't look at the main orb again. He kept his gaze on the ground, on Aisha's scraped knees, on Dumpling's quivering fur.
"Let's get back," he said quietly. "Before it gets darker."
Aisha slid under his arm, taking as much of his weight as he'd allow. He didn't protest.
They walked in silence, broken only by their footsteps and Dumpling's soft, anxious chittering. Each ruined building they passed flickered with possible uses in his mind—ambush points, collapse angles, blind spots—and each flicker stabbed through his skull like a tiny, precise knife.
By the time they reached their shelter—the half-collapsed building with the single usable entrance—his legs felt hollow.
Aisha helped him down to their makeshift bed of scavenged cloth and insulation. He let himself sink back, the rough fabric scratchy under his shoulders.
"I'm going to clean you up," she said, voice clipped with control. "Don't move."
He didn't argue.
As she fetched water and rags, Kota stared at the damaged ceiling and the faint, shifting glow leaking in from the purple sky outside.
Gods. Demons. Names he couldn't hold. A skill that cut him from the inside every time it tried to work.
He'd wanted to be useful so others didn't suffer.
Whatever he'd touched today didn't feel like mercy. It felt like a knife given to a starving boy and called a gift.