Lying on the scanning bed in Apauex's lab, I watched the way the air moved. It wasn't just oxygen and nitrogen anymore; it was a pressurized system of currents, flowing toward the intake vents in predictable, rhythmic loops. The "Sight" was getting sharper, colder. The black energy from the vial had settled into my optic nerves, stripping away the comfort of color and replacing it with a terrifyingly clear map of how everything was broken.
I could see the microscopic stress fractures in the reinforced glass above me. I could see the heat radiating from the holographic projectors, a dull, pulsing glow that mapped out the lab's power consumption. It was too much. I closed my eyes, but the lines stayed burned into my retinas.
"The rejection rate is falling, but the resonance is climbing," Apauex said. I didn't need to see him to know he was frowning. His voice always had that clipped, impatient edge, like he was constantly annoyed that the rest of existence wasn't as orderly as a math equation. "It's as if his brain is building a new interface to process the energy. He's not a vessel anymore; he's a lens."
"A lens that sees what, exactly?" Mr. Magnetic's voice was a low vibration that rattled the metal frame of my bed.
"Everything he isn't supposed to," Apauex replied.
The heavy door hissed open, and I felt the air pressure shift. I opened my eyes just as Apauex leaned over me, his face a mask of clinical curiosity. He was holding a neuro-link—a crown of silver needles and glowing fiber optics.
"Joe Wann told me you were a time traveler, Kaleb," Apauex said, his eyes narrowing behind his spectacles. "But he forgot to mention why you were able to hold that much power without vaporizing. Sentinel thought it was luck. I think it was architecture."
He pressed the link onto my temples. A sharp, stinging heat flared in my skull, and suddenly, the grayscale world exploded into a web of glowing threads.
"We are going to bridge the gap," Apauex commanded, turning back to his console. "The stabilizer we took from Northpoint needs a handshake. It needs the Anchor to tell it that it's okay to draw from the Core."
As the machine hummed to life, my vision glitched. For a second, the lab vanished, replaced by a memory of the lake party. I saw the red orb descending, but this time, I saw it through my new eyes. I didn't see a ball of fire. I saw a collapsing geometric structure, looking for a foundation. I realized then—with a jolt of cold clarity—that the Nexus hadn't just "hit" me. It had seen the way my original power perceived the world and realized I was the only thing stable enough to keep it from shattering.
That was the tie-in. My father hadn't just hidden my powers to give me a normal life; he'd hidden them because he knew that once I could "see" the world this way, I would never be able to un-see the lies.
Suddenly, a new line appeared in my vision. It was a thin, jagged pulse of neon blue, vibrating at a frequency that didn't match anything in the lab. It was coming from inside me—or rather, from a file buried deep in my own biological data.
I followed the line with my eyes, tracing it back through the facility's network. It was a backdoor. A Sentinel tracking frequency, dormant for years, is now screaming to life because of Apauex's interference.
Joe Wann. He'd tagged me years ago, probably during my first check-up after the coma. Every "normal" day I'd lived, every math test I'd failed, every moment I'd spent with Sariya—Joe had been there, a silent passenger in my blood, waiting for the moment I became useful again.
"The connection is stabilizing," Apauex whispered, his voice full of a rare, dark excitement. "The Core is responding. It's reaching out."
The lab began to vibrate. Not just the floor, but the air itself. I could see the magnetic fields in the room warping, being pulled toward me like I was a drain in a bathtub.
"Apauex, stop," I rasped, the pressure in my chest becoming unbearable. "It's not... It's not drawing energy. It's pulling."
"Nonsense," Apauex snapped, his fingers flying across the light-keys. "The equations are perfect."
"The equations don't care about the Anchor!" I shouted.
Through the wall, my Sight flared. I saw two sparks of light on the horizon, miles away but closing fast. One was a fierce, protective green; the other, a jagged, brilliant blue. Booker. Aaliah. They were coming, and their energy was singing in sync with the thrum in my bones.
But they were walking into a trap.
The Echelon Core at Northpoint didn't just pulse; it screamed—a sound that tore through the telepathic plane, a frequency of pure, unadulterated decay.
The violet light in the lab turned a blinding, violent white. The holographic displays shattered, raining shards of light onto the floor. Apauex stumbled back, his "perfect" calculations dissolving into chaos.
"What is happening?" Magnetic roared, his own power flaring as he tried to hold the room together.
I looked up, and for a split second, the ceiling of the lab didn't exist. I saw the sky over San Diego, and I saw the Echelon Core at Sentinel HQ. It wasn't staying there. The space around the Core was folding, turning inside out.
The Nexus wasn't dying. It was coming home. And it didn't care who or what was in its way.
The floor beneath my bed split open, a chasm of white light swallowing the grayscale world.
"Kaleb!" a voice screamed—Maddie, maybe, or a ghost of Aaliah from another time.
But I couldn't answer. I could only watch as the architecture of my cage began to unravel, atom by atom.
The last thing I saw before the world went white was Joe Wann's face on a flickering, broken monitor. He wasn't looking at the Harbingers. He was looking at me. And for the first time, he looked absolutely terrified.
The Core had arrived.