She moved faster than anything he had ever experienced.
One moment, they were standing in the ruined street, the sounds of the evacuation center fading behind them. The next moment, the world was a blur of color and motion, buildings streaming past like painted lines on a canvas, the wind a scream that was over before it began.
Then they were in front of his house.
The door was locked. He fumbled with his keys, his hands shaking, his mind still trying to catch up to what had happened. The light waited behind him, patient, her presence a warmth at his back that did not fade.
He found Lily in the kitchen.
She was standing at the counter, a glass of water in her hand, her face turned toward the window. She looked at him when he entered, and her expression shifted from surprise to something sharper when she saw his face.
"What happened to your cheek?"
He touched the cut. The blood had dried, but the wound was still there, a thin line that pulsed faintly.
"I need to tell you something."
He told her. Not everything. There was no time for everything, and some of it he did not have words for yet. But he told her about the light, about the creature, about the force that had been waiting in his blood for seven hundred years. He told her about the voice that had spoken to him in the hospital, about the vanishings, about the thing he had been trying not to become since the wave swept through their city.
She listened. She did not interrupt. When he finished, she set down her glass and looked at him with eyes that were older than they had been a month ago.
"You're leaving."
"Six months."
She nodded slowly. "And me?"
The light answered before he could.
"Your brother has asked that you be protected. I give you my word. No harm will come to you while he is gone."
Lily looked at the figure of light for a long moment. Her face was unreadable, her expression something between fear and wonder and a grief that had not yet found its shape.
"You saved us," she said. "In the building. That was you."
"Yes."
"Thank you."
The light inclined her head. It was not a nod, exactly, but something older, something that carried the weight of centuries.
Zane stepped forward and pulled his sister into his arms. She was shaking. He did not know when that had started.
"I'll come back," he said.
"I know."
He held her tighter. "I promise."
She pulled back, her eyes wet, her jaw set. "You better."
He grabbed his bag. He packed without thinking, his hands moving through the motions while his mind stayed in the kitchen, stayed with Lily, stayed with the life he was leaving behind. Clothes. The glove, extra. His laptop, because some habits were harder to break than others. The photograph of his mother that had disappeared and reappeared three times since she left, as though the force could not decide whether to take it or leave it.
He stood in the doorway of his room and looked at the space that had been his for as long as he could remember. The desk. The monitors. The shelf of games he had not touched in months. A life that had been small and safe and ordinary.
He closed the door.
The light was waiting for him in the living room. Lily stood beside her, her arms wrapped around herself, her face the careful blank she wore when she was trying not to fall apart.
"Ready?" the light asked.
He looked at his sister. At the house. At the window where his mother used to stand in the mornings, watching the world wake up.
"No," he said.
She took his arm.
"Good."
The world dissolved into light, and Zane Dagonet left behind everything he had ever known to become something he did not yet understand.