Kade dragged himself up from the kitchen floor.
His legs felt like they belonged to someone else—someone who had nearly been crushed out of existence by a glance. He gripped the counter, waited for the dizziness to pass, and forced himself to climb the stairs. Each step sent a fresh throb through his skull.
He locked his bedroom door and slid down against it, back pressed to the wood.
The house was quiet. His mother had gone to bed hours ago, or the Veil had smoothed over her concern, or both. He didn't care. He just needed to not be asked questions. Not right now. Not when his hands were still trembling and the Ori at the base of his skull felt like it had been dipped in ice.
He closed his eyes.
The memory didn't come as a vision. It came as a physical sensation—the weight returning, pressing down on his chest, his ribs, his thoughts. He saw the light again. Not the warm light of the sun. Something that existed on a scale his brain refused to process. When it had turned its attention on him, he hadn't felt fear. Fear was too small a word. He'd felt irrelevant.
And the other one. The shadow. It hadn't looked at him. Not once. But Kade had felt its awareness all the same—a knife held to the throat of his existence, ready to cut if he made a sound.
He pulled his knees to his chest and tried to breathe.
His mind wandered to Tina.
The sound of the door slamming. The word pity hanging in the air like smoke. Her face, exhausted and furious, telling him he was just as bad as Rex. He felt the sadness rise in his chest, heavy and familiar, the kind of grief that wanted to pull him under and drown him in self-loathing. He'd failed her. He'd killed his best friend. He'd become a monster in her eyes and maybe in his own.
His eyes burned.
A faint green glow stirred behind his eyelids, not from the light in the room but from something inside him. The cold at the base of his skull pulsed once, sharp and decisive. The sadness didn't fade—it was still there, still real—but it suddenly felt distant. Like a radio playing in another house. Important, but not urgent.
Kade opened his eyes. The glow had already faded, but the shift remained.
No, he thought. There are bigger fish to fry now.
He couldn't afford to sink into sadness. Couldn't afford to unravel in the dark over things he couldn't change. Tina was gone. Rex was dead. The only thing that mattered now was understanding what he had seen in Nox, and making sure he survived long enough to do something about it.
His father had told him about Nox. He'd described the Lucent and the Dreadbound as gods at war, primal forces locked in an eternal struggle for the fate of humanity. But that wasn't what Kade had seen. The light and the shadow had spoken like colleagues. Like old friends who happened to command opposing armies.
Either his father had lied, or his father didn't know.
Kade opened his eyes and stared at his hands. They were steady now. The Ala in his veins was circulating again, slow and cautious, like a wounded animal testing whether it was safe to move.
He couldn't tell Trent. Not yet. Not until he knew which of the three possibilities was true—deception, ignorance, or something worse. If his father was part of a lie that big, then every word out of his mouth was suspect. If he was ignorant, then he was useless. And if there was a third option, one Kade hadn't even considered, then showing his hand would be suicidal.
The Ori pulsed, cold and sharp.
He remembered what Trent had said about the training. Controlled Ala fields. Places where the Veil's influence was negated. If Kade was going to learn how to stop himself from being pulled into Nox every time his emotions tipped over, that was where he needed to be. Not because he trusted the organization. Because he didn't trust anyone else.
He pushed himself up from the floor.
His reflection in the closet mirror caught him off guard. Same face. Same eyes. But the expression looking back was different. Harder. More deliberate. The face of someone who had decided to wear a mask until he knew who was watching.
He crossed the room and checked his bag. Clothes. Phone charger. The few things that mattered. He'd leave in the morning. He'd say the right things. He'd let his father think he was traumatized by the murder, broken by Tina's words, nothing more than a shaken boy who needed guidance.
And while they taught him how to control the Ala, he'd watch. He'd listen. He'd find out if anyone else knew what he knew.
Kade turned off the light and lay down on his bed, fully dressed, staring at the ceiling.
Sleep didn't come. But when it finally did, he forced himself to stay shallow, to stay ready, to not let his consciousness drift too far into the dark.
He couldn't afford to be pulled back there. Not yet. Not until he was strong enough to survive the attention.
___
Trent Moren returned home just after midnight.
He moved through the front door quietly, set his keys on the counter, and went to the kitchen to wash his hands. The disposal had been straightforward. The body was gone, the blood neutralized, and the Veil had smoothed over the remaining irregularities.
But as he reached for the tap, he paused.
The air felt wrong. Not cold, but disturbed—like a room where someone had recently shouted, even if the sound was already gone. Trent reached for his Ori. The Ala in the kitchen responded slowly, clinging to the space in a way it shouldn't.
He recognized the signature. A Nox Incarnation. Not a physical breach, but a consciousness pulled through. It happened sometimes to Enlightened under extreme stress.
Trent had been gone for less than three hours.
He went upstairs and stopped outside Kade's door. He pressed his palm to the wood and sent a thin thread of perception through it—quiet, unobtrusive, the kind of check he'd done a hundred times before.
Kade was lying on his bed, awake or near enough. But the Ala in his body was moving wrong. It circulated like chilled syrup, slow and reluctant. The Ori at the base of his skull was cold—colder than Trent had ever felt in any Enlightened, even those recovering from severe trauma.
Trent frowned.
The records on Dual Gaze survivors were thin, since there weren't any. But the theoretical models didn't predict this. The Ori should have been hyperactive, not cold. The Ala should have been turbulent, not sluggish.
Something had happened to Kade while Trent was out. Something that left a mark the records didn't account for.
Trent withdrew his perception and stood in the hallway. He considered opening the door and asking directly. But Kade had locked it. That was new. And the quality of his stillness on the other side felt deliberate—not the stillness of sleep, but of someone listening.
The boy was hiding something.
Trent wasn't surprised. Disappointed, maybe. He'd hoped Kade would come to him with whatever was wrong, but the boy had always been independent. Too independent, perhaps. And after tonight, after what he'd seen in that shed, it made sense that he would pull back.
Trent went to his own room and got into bed beside Theresa without waking her. He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling, running through the variables.
Kade's Ori was cold. His Ala was sluggish. And he'd been pulled into Nox without training, without preparation, without any of the stabilizing techniques that kept Enlightened minds from fracturing during Incarnation.
If it happened again—and with the Dual Gaze, it likely would—the results were unpredictable. The organizations Trent was taking him to had resources, controlled environments, people who understood the mechanics better than he did.
But they would also take measurements. Ask questions. File reports.
Trent closed his eyes. He would need to be careful about what they were allowed to see. Kade was his son, not a specimen. And whatever was happening to him, Trent intended to understand it first.
___
Morning came too soon.
Kade stood in front of the hallway mirror, staring at a stranger. The face looking back at him was gaunt, pale beneath the dark skin, with bruised hollows under eyes that glowed faintly even in the dim light of dawn. He hadn't slept. Not really. Every time he'd drifted toward unconsciousness, he'd felt the cold pull at the base of his skull and jerked himself awake, terrified of being dragged back into that throne room.
He looked like a ghost. A revenant. Someone who had crawled out of a grave and forgotten to die properly.
He threw water on his face, changed into fresh clothes, and packed the last of his things into a duffel bag that seemed too small for everything he was leaving behind. Then he went downstairs.
Theresa was already in the kitchen, still in her robe, hair unbound, moving with the frantic energy of a mother who had been told her son was leaving and hadn't been given enough time to process it. Trent stood near the door, fully dressed, car keys in hand, watching Kade descend the stairs with a look that was almost clinical.
Kade felt it immediately—the subtle pressure of his father's attention, scanning his posture, his gait, the tension in his shoulders. Trent was checking for damage. Checking for changes. Kade kept his face blank and let him look.
"Kade, baby, come here," Theresa said, abandoning the toast she was burning.
He crossed the kitchen and let her pull him into a hug that was too tight and too long. She smelled like sleep and the lavender lotion she kept by the bed. The familiarity of it hurt more than he wanted to admit.
"I still don't understand why this has to happen so suddenly," she said, pulling back to look at him. Her eyes were red-rimmed, worried. "Why can't you finish the semester? Why this retreat? And why can't I drive you?"
Kade glanced at Trent.
"The school counselor recommended it," Trent said smoothly, stepping forward. His voice carried that particular tone of authority that made people stop arguing. "After everything that's happened—the accident with Rex, Tina leaving town—Kade's mental health is precarious. The retreat is specialized. Intensive. They don't allow visitors for the first month."
The lie was perfectly constructed. It used real events, real grief, and wove them into a narrative that was almost believable. Kade watched his mother's face shift from resistance to reluctant acceptance.
"A month?" she whispered.
"At least," Trent said.
Theresa looked at Kade, searching his face for confirmation. He gave her the weakest smile he could manage—the smile of a broken boy who needed help. It wasn't hard to fake. He was exhausted, traumatized, and leaving everything he knew. The only lie was the reason.
"Okay," she said finally. "Okay. But you promise me you'll call. Every night. I don't care what their rules are. You find a phone and you call me."
"I promise."
"And you'll eat. Proper meals, not just whatever junk they have lying around."
"Mum—"
"And if you don't like it, if it's too much, you tell your father and he brings you home. Immediately."
Kade nodded, unable to speak around the lump in his throat. This was real. This was happening. He was leaving his mother in a house full of lies, and he didn't know when he'd see her again.
Trent checked his watch. A small, deliberate gesture. "We need to go. Traffic."
Theresa kissed Kade's forehead, then his cheeks, then pulled him into one more hug that felt like she was trying to memorize the shape of him. "I love you," she whispered. "You come back to me, you hear?"
"I will."
Trent opened the door. The morning air was cold and sharp. Kade picked up his bag and stepped outside without looking back. If he looked back, he wasn't sure he could keep going.
The car was a nondescript sedan, the kind that blended into traffic. Trent had packed it the night before—two bags in the trunk, nothing that would suggest a long journey or a permanent move. Kade threw his duffel in the back seat and climbed into the passenger side.
Theresa stood in the doorway, arms wrapped around herself, watching them pull out of the driveway. Kade watched her in the side mirror until she was too small to see.
Then there was only the road.
The car ride was quiet.
Not the comfortable silence of two people who understood each other. This was a different kind of quiet—the thick, charged silence of two people who knew the other was hiding something and were waiting to see who would crack first.
Trent drove with both hands on the wheel, eyes fixed on the road, occasionally glancing at the rearview mirror. Not at Kade. At the traffic behind them. Checking for tails, maybe. Or just a habit.
Kade slumped against the window, letting the vibration of the road numb his skull. He was acutely aware of his father's presence beside him. The man who had buried a body for him last night. The man who had let Tina suffer in his house. The man who might be lying about everything, or might be just as ignorant as everyone else.
He wanted to ask. He wanted to demand answers about Nox, about the Lucent, about why Lord Hope and Carnage spoke like old friends while their armies tore each other apart. But he couldn't. Not without revealing what he'd seen. And until he knew whether Trent was complicit or clueless, that secret was the only leverage he had.
Trent, for his part, said nothing. But Kade caught him looking. Quick, assessing glances at Kade's hands, his breathing, the way he held himself. Trent was measuring him. Checking for aftereffects. The cold Ori, the sluggish Ala—Trent had noticed something last night, and he was still watching.
Neither of them spoke for over an hour.
They drove through the suburbs, then through the industrial outskirts, then through farmland that stretched in flat, brown monotony toward the horizon. The city disappeared behind them. The towns grew smaller and farther apart.
Eventually, Kade couldn't stand it anymore.
"Where are we going?" he asked. His voice came out rough, unused.
Trent didn't look at him. "You'll know when you see it."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one you're getting."
Kade clenched his jaw and went back to staring out the window. The landscape had become desolate—scrubland and dead grass, the occasional skeletal tree. No houses. No other cars. Just empty road stretching toward a flat, grey sky.
Another hour passed. Then another.
Trent turned off the main highway onto a dirt road that didn't appear on any map Kade had ever seen. The sedan bounced over ruts and gravel, kicking up dust that painted the windows brown. They drove until the road ended at a chain-link fence that had been rusted through in multiple places, beyond which lay nothing but more dead grass and distant hills.
Trent stopped the car and turned off the engine.
"Get out," he said.
Kade blinked. "Here? There's nothing here."
"Get out, Kade."
The tone was final. Not angry. Resigned.
Kade opened the door and stepped into dry, wind-scoured air. The silence was absolute. No birds. No insects. No distant hum of civilization. Just the sound of his own breathing and the ticking of the car's cooling engine.
Trent got out and walked around to the front of the sedan. He stood there for a moment, looking at the empty landscape with an expression that might have been satisfaction.
"Come here," he said.
Kade approached, confused, squinting against the wind. There was nothing. Just dirt and dead grass and the endless grey sky.
Then Trent's hands began to glow.
It started as a faint luminescence, the same green that lived in their eyes, but it grew brighter, more intense, until his fingers were wrapped in coils of living light. The air around him distorted, bending like heat over asphalt. Kade felt the Ala in the atmosphere respond—thin and scattered out here, but suddenly eager, drawn toward Trent like iron filings to a magnet.
Trent raised his hands and reached forward.
And he tore the air apart.
It wasn't a metaphor. It wasn't a trick of the light. Space itself ripped open under his fingers, a jagged wound in reality that widened as he pulled, revealing something impossible on the other side.
Kade stared.
Through the tear, he saw a city.
Not a modern city. Not a skyline of glass and steel. This was something older and stranger—towers of pale stone that spiraled upward in impossible geometries, bridges that arched between buildings without visible support, streets that glowed with soft, ambient light. The architecture was a blend of ancient and alien, as if someone had built a metropolis based on half-remembered dreams of civilization. And above it all, the sky was a deep, bruised purple, streaked with ribbons of color that moved like slow rivers of light.
Kade's mouth opened. No words came out.
Trent glanced at him, and for the first time in days, his father smiled. Not the warm smile of a parent. The smug, satisfied smile of a professor who had just shown a student something that shattered their worldview.
"Welcome," Trent said, "to the Enlightened city of Davros."
He turned toward the tear, the glowing edges of which were already beginning to flutter and warp.
"Oh," Trent added, looking back over his shoulder. "And watch your head."
Then he jumped through.
Kade stood alone in the wasteland, the wind tearing at his clothes, his heart hammering against his ribs. He looked at the tear in reality—still hanging open, pulsing with green light, the impossible city visible beyond it. He looked back at the car, at the dirt road, at the empty horizon that led back to his mother and his old life.
He took one breath. Then another.
He thought of Tina's voice, of the door slamming, of the word pity echoing in an empty kitchen. He thought of Rex's blank eyes, of the blood on his hands, of the weight of Lord Hope's gaze crushing down on him until he couldn't exist.
He thought of his father, already walking through the streets of that impossible city, assuming his son would follow because there was nowhere else to go.
Kade looked back once. At the world he was leaving. At the lies that had raised him. At the normal life that had never really been his.
Then he steeled himself, set his jaw, and dove through the tear headfirst.
The hole snapped shut behind him with a sound like thunder rolling backward, and the wasteland was empty once more.