Aeva was standing at the workbench when Kazuki got back. Arms crossed. Eyes on the door.
She had been standing exactly like that, he suspected, for the entire time he was gone.
He placed the black disc on the table between them.
She looked at it. Then at him. Then at his left eye.
"You went alone," she said.
"I know."
"I said you weren't going alone."
"I know."
She looked at him for another second, holding the anger at a precise, controlled temperature. Then she exhaled through her nose and looked at the disc.
"What is it?"
"I don't know. He didn't know either. He took it from Malvorn's archive. It's labeled as a variable in the Core transformation sequence." Kazuki sat down. "It apparently shows up in some timelines and not others. The ones where it shows up the outcome changes."
"Changes how?"
"He didn't say exactly."
Aeva reached for the disc.
The moment her fingers touched it, the hairline groove across its center lit up.
Not blue. Not the Core's color. Something warmer. A pale amber that had no business existing in a piece of Helix technology.
They both looked at it.
Aeva pulled her hand back slowly. The groove stayed lit for three more seconds. Then faded.
"It responded to you," Kazuki said.
"I noticed."
"It didn't do that when I picked it up. The Core pulsed but the disc didn't light."
Aeva looked at her own hand. She turned it over slowly, studying it the way you study something familiar that has just revealed it was never fully familiar.
"Your scars," Kazuki said.
She looked up.
"You've never told me exactly how you got them." He said it carefully. Not accusatory. Just honest. "I know they came before you met Renji. I know they're connected to your power somehow. But the details"
"Kazuki."
"I'm not pushing. I'm just" He stopped. Started again. "Someone told me today that there's something in this timeline that doesn't exist in others. Something that changes the outcome. He noticed it the first time he saw our team." A pause. "He was looking in your direction when he said it."
The garage was very quiet.
Aeva set the disc down carefully. She sat on the opposite workbench. She looked at the floor for a moment not avoiding, just organizing. The way she did before she said something she had been holding for a long time.
"I was thirteen," she said. "There was a facility. Not Helix something older. A research station that had been running experiments on gravity manipulation for about thirty years before I was brought there. They were trying to understand why certain people developed the ability naturally." She touched the scars on her neck without seeming to notice she was doing it. "I was the first one they found who could do it without any assistance. No serum. No technology. Just born with it."
Kazuki waited.
"The experiments weren't violent. That almost made it worse — the fact that they were clinical. Measured. They treated it like any other data collection. They didn't understand that what they were doing to a thirteen-year-old had weight that their instruments couldn't measure." She paused. "One of the experiments went wrong. An overload. The gravity field collapsed inward. It should have killed me."
"But it didn't."
"It left the scars. And when I woke up the power was different. Stronger. More precise. Like something had been refined." She looked at the disc. At the faded amber groove. "I've never understood why. The scientists couldn't explain it either. Their instruments registered the overload as a complete system failure. By every metric I should have died."
She was quiet for a moment.
"Who told you about the variable?" she asked.
"The black lightning speedster. His name is Darius. He's from sixty years ahead." Kazuki looked at the disc. "He came here as one of Malvorn's observers. But he's been sitting underground for three weeks instead of sending data."
"Why?"
Kazuki thought about the maintenance corridor. The tired face. The genuine smile at the end.
"Because he needed to see if this timeline was different enough to be worth protecting," Kazuki said.
Aeva looked at the disc for a long time.
She reached out and touched it again. The amber groove lit immediately steady this time, not flickering.
"It's warm," she said quietly.
"The Core pulsed when I first picked it up," Kazuki said. "Like a recognition."
Their eyes met across the table.
Neither of them said what they were both thinking. That the disc had responded to her gravity and the Core had responded to the disc, and those two facts sitting next to each other meant something that neither of them had the vocabulary for yet.
Kazuki thought about Kazuki Prime sitting in the stopped world.
He thought about what Darius said. Someone who had outlived everything he loved.
Every person.
He thought about the thing Darius noticed in this timeline that didn't exist in his. The thing that changed the weight of outcomes.
He looked at Aeva's gold scars catching the light.
He said nothing.
But he kept that thought somewhere very safe. In the part of him that was still underneath everything , just a boy from District 9 who wanted to protect the people in the room with him.
From the corner of the table, Kazuki's personal device buzzed.
One message. Private channel. No sender ID.
He picked it up.
One sentence.
The disc responds to her because she was built to.
Kazuki's hands went completely still.
He looked up at the ceiling. At the walls. At nothing.
Victor Vane had been listening to a private conversation inside a building with no external feeds.
Which meant he had been inside before they arrived Or he was still inside now.
[To Be Continued...]