The whole trip back into reality, Aron had stayed exactly where he was now — resting in his arms.
"...You're blind," Zekai whispered.
Sebastian didn't rise to the insult.
Zekai looked down at his chest again — and froze.
The familiar shape resting in his arms flickered, static crawling across it like a bad broadcast signal. Normal for a heartbeat. Then the whole image warped outward, edges bending like a photograph left too close to a flame.
Heavy distortion rippled through Aron's outline. Zekai's breath locked in his throat.
The shape flickered again.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Then it was gone.
His arms were empty. Completely, unmistakably empty.
The weight left first. Then the warmth. Then the pressure against his shoulder, gone in the same instant, like someone had reached in and switched it all off at once.
He couldn't move for several seconds. His mind refused what his eyes were telling him.
"...No." Barely a sound at all. He looked down at his own lap.
Nothing. Just bound wrists. Just empty air.
"No."
SCREECH—!
His chair scraped hard against the silver floor as he shot to his feet. Even Sebastian flinched, hand twitching toward his holster on reflex.
Zekai's eyes tore across the room, fast, frantic.
"Aron?!"
No answer. His gaze raked over every inch of Chamber 12 — behind the table, the seamless walls, the reflective ceiling, the sealed door. Anywhere. Everywhere.
"He was here." Louder now, chest heaving. "He was right here."
Sebastian said nothing. He just watched the collapse happen in real time.
Zekai spun faster, pulse climbing into dangerous territory.
"No." Panic clawed up through his ribs. "He has to be in here. Where did you put him?!"
Behind his own chair. Nothing. Under the table. Nothing. Every corner this metal box had to offer.
Nothing. Just Sebastian. Just silver walls. Just silence pressing in from every direction.
Then the truth landed, slow and merciless.
He'd been talking to Aron this whole time. Apologizing to him. Carrying him through the streets of Greyhaven. Protecting him from a city that couldn't even see what he was holding.
But Aron had never crossed into this room at all. Whatever he'd carried across that threshold had never been a body.
It had been grief, wearing a shape he recognized.
"No—" His breath came apart, teeth grinding. "No."
His head snapped toward Sebastian, fast enough to be a threat on its own.
"You did this." The accusation tore out of him like a blade drawn too fast. "You took him from me while I was out."
Sebastian didn't move.
"You made him disappear!" Zekai's voice cracked against the table's edge as he stepped forward.
"Zekai—"
"WHERE IS HE?!" The shout ripped through the room and rattled the fluorescents overhead. "WHERE IS ARON?!"
The silence after that swallowed everything whole.
Sebastian reached into his coat without hurrying, drew out a glass-paneled tablet, and slid it across the table until it clicked against Zekai's cuffs.
An official casualty manifest sat open on the screen.
Zekai stared down at it — clean photographs, medical files, full names. A Bureau database, methodical and cold.
Then his eyes caught on one face.
Aron. That same self-conscious half-smile. The same tired eyes he'd spent every ounce of himself trying to drag out of a death loop.
[ IDENTIFICATION: ARON LEXI ]
[ AGE: 19 ]
[ ASSIGNED DISTRICT: DISTRICT 7 ]
[ STATUS: MISSING ]
His fingers locked around the edge of the tablet.
Sebastian's voice finally cut through the quiet, level and unhurried.
"Forty-five people went into that distortion zone."
A finger swiped across the glass.
"Forty-two came back down from the sky. Dead. In pieces. One came back alive — barely."
Another swipe.
"You came back whole."
The scrolling stopped, the screen settling back on Aron's file.
Sebastian looked straight at him, nothing on his face at all.
"But him?"
A pause, deliberate, heavy enough to fill the whole room.
"His body never came back."
The silver walls seemed to close in an inch. The air went colder.
Somewhere in the wreckage of Zekai's memory, the pieces started snapping into order on their own.
The illusion of that weight in his arms cracked open, and something colder took its place.
He remembered the throne hall coming apart around him. The blinding light of the fracture. The dark that swallowed everything right after. He remembered reaching for a hand and having reality tear itself in two before he could close the distance.
Every broken piece of it made sense now.
Not death. Something worse.
Aron had never actually crossed back into Greyhaven at all.
A shaking breath left him, his jaw setting hard.
"...Another dimension." The realization hit like a fist.
For the first time since he'd landed back in this city, something dangerous mixed together behind his eyes — hope and despair, tangled up in the same breath.
Because if Aron wasn't dead—
He was still out there. Trapped somewhere in the layers this system had built, waiting.
Across the table, Sebastian caught the shift the instant it happened — the panic burning off, replaced by something sharp and terrifyingly calm.
"You know exactly where he is." Not a question. His cigarette had burned down close to the filter.
Zekai didn't look up from the tablet. His hands pulled against the cuffs, slow and deliberate, and the steel groaned under a pressure that shouldn't have existed.
Black threads of the Fool's authority moved just beneath the skin of his wrists.
"He's still in the Graveyard layer." His voice dropped into something cold enough to make the lights overhead flicker.
"And I'm going back for him."
Sebastian didn't reach for his weapon. He just watched the specialized cuffs start to bend under Zekai's grip like they were made of tin.
"The Bureau isn't letting you walk out of this building." His voice stayed quiet. "To us, you're the reason forty-three people are dead."
Zekai lifted his head. His eyes had gone dark and perfectly clear.
"Then get out of my way."
"I'm bringing him home."
✦ End of Chapter 30 — The One Who Never Returned ✦