10:15 AM.
Jennifer woke up screaming.
Not a normal scream. A frequency. A single sustained note that came from somewhere deeper than her throat — somewhere behind her ribs, in the same place where Jae-min's void lived. The glow beneath her sternum flared white-hot. The monitors on the wall popped and staticked. Ji-yoo's knife hummed in her hand.
Alessia threw herself across the cot, pinning Jennifer's shoulders to the mattress.
"Jennifer! Jennifer, look at me!"
The scream cut off. Jennifer's eyes snapped open. The irises were entirely blue — no pupil, no white, just an ocean of light that made everyone in the room take a step back.
She wasn't looking at Alessia.
She was looking through the wall. Through the building. Through the frozen city.
Southeast.
"It's talking to you," she whispered. Her voice was layered — two tones at once, like a chord played on a single string. "Right now. Through the void. It's... it's showing you things."
Jae-min crossed the room in three strides. Knelt beside the cot.
"What is it showing me?"
Jennifer turned her blue eyes on him. And for a moment, Jae-min saw something he hadn't expected.
Fear.
"Everything," she said.
...
10:22 AM.
Jennifer was sitting up. The glow had dimmed to a manageable pulse. Alessia had forced two glasses of water and a protein bar into her. Her hands were shaking. But her mind was clear.
"It's broadcasting," she said. "Not at me. At you. But I'm picking up the leakage because my telepathy resonates at a similar frequency." She pressed her fingers to her temples. "Think of it like two radio stations broadcasting on the same channel. I can hear both. You can only hear the one tuned to your receiver."
"What's it saying?" Uncle Rico asked.
"It's not saying. It's showing." Jennifer closed her eyes. "Images. Impressions. Feelings. It's... younger than we thought. The entity. Not physically — it's been alive for a very long time. But emotionally. Cognitively. It thinks like a child."
"A child that bends space," Ji-yoo muttered.
"A child that doesn't understand what it is." Jennifer opened her eyes. "When it called Jae-min, it wasn't a tactic. It wasn't a trap. It was a cry for help. Imagine being five years old and waking up in a body you don't recognize, on a world you don't understand, with abilities you can't control. That's what happened to it when the gamma hit."
Jae-min was quiet.
"The wound," Jennifer continued. "The crack in its leg. That's not from a fight. It's from traveling. It jumped — spatially, the way I blink but on a planetary scale. The jump tore its leg apart because it doesn't know how to control its own power yet. It's been limping across Asia for nine days, following Jae-min's frequency, because Jae-min is the only thing in this hemisphere that feels like home."
Silence.
"The only thing that feels like home," Uncle Rico repeated.
"Same species. Same frequency. The void inside Jae-min is singing the same song the void inside the entity is singing. And the entity has been alone for nine days in a frozen world where nothing else makes sense. It's scared."
Jae-min sat on the floor. Back against the wall. The void pulsed in his chest — the low, persistent hum that had been there since the entity first sang back.
Hurt. Cold. Need. Come.
He hadn't answered. But the message hadn't stopped. It was still there. Still pulsing. Still waiting.
"Can you talk to it?" he asked Jennifer. "Through the leakage. Can you send something back?"
"I shouldn't. The last time I pushed toward it, I ended up unconscious for three hours."
"I know. But I need you to confirm something. The void might be showing me what I want to see. I need an independent read."
Jennifer studied him. Blue eyes still too bright. Blood vessels burst across the whites. She looked like someone who had stared at the sun and survived.
"What do you want me to ask?"
"Ask it what it wants. Not what it needs. What it wants."
...
10:34 AM.
Jennifer closed her eyes.
The glow beneath her sternum expanded. Slowly. Carefully. Not a full push — a whisper. A telepathic nudge directed southeast, toward the thing that knelt in the dark.
Jae-min watched her face. Watched the tension in her jaw, the furrow between her brows, the way her fingers curled into fists against her thighs. She was listening. Receiving. Translating.
Alessia stood behind the cot. One hand on Jennifer's shoulder. Monitoring pulse and breathing the way she'd monitor a patient in post-op. Professional. Steady. Ready.
Thirty seconds.
One minute.
Jennifer's breath caught. Her eyes flew open.
"It wants its parent."
The room went still.
"The entity. It wants its parent. The one that was with it when the gamma hit. When the star exploded, there were others — a cluster, a family, something like a pod. The radiation hit them all. Most of them died. The juvenile survived because it burrowed into the ice. But when it came out..." Jennifer's voice cracked. "Nothing was left. Just ice and silence and a new body it didn't understand."
She wiped a strand of hair from her face. Her hand was trembling.
"It's been searching for another of its kind since it woke up. Across its planet. Across the void between planets. Across whatever distance brought it here. And then, nine days ago, it felt Jae-min."
Jae-min said nothing.
"Not Jae-min's power. Jae-min. The person. The void inside him. The piece of broken time." Jennifer looked at him. "You're the first thing it's found that feels like what it lost. It doesn't want to eat you. It doesn't want to fight you. It wants you to be its family."
Silence.
The heater hummed. The monitors flickered. Outside, the entity knelt in the frozen dark, seventy meters of impossible material and wounded space, and its leg pulsed blue-white in time with Jae-min's heartbeat.
Come.
Ji-yoo broke the silence.
"Jae-min. Don't."
He looked at his twin.
"Whatever you're thinking right now, stop. This thing is seventy meters tall. It bends reality. And just because it's lonely doesn't mean it's safe. A hurt child with a loaded gun is still a loaded gun."
"I know."
"Then why does your face look like that?"
"Like what?"
"Like you're about to do something stupid."
He didn't answer.
...
11:07 AM.
Jae-min went to the window alone.
Alessia let him. She didn't follow. She didn't argue. She just pressed her hand against his back as he passed and left it there until he was out of reach.
He stood at the glass. Forehead pressed against the cold. Eyes on the southeast.
The entity was smaller now. Not physically — still seventy meters. But the distortion field had contracted further. Tighter. The shimmer barely extended fifty meters from its body now. All that energy funneling inward, feeding the wound.
The crack in its right rear leg was sealed halfway. The blue-white glow was fading. In another five or six hours, the fracture would close completely. The entity would stand. And then it would either come to him or it would leave.
Or something else would happen.
Jae-min reached into the void.
Not to push. Not to send. Just to listen. The way he had that first night when the glass fell and vanished and the world cracked open and showed him the hunger underneath.
The void responded. The hum deepened. The resonance strengthened. And somewhere in the frozen dark, the entity's head lifted.
Not toward the building. Toward him.
Through the wall. Through the concrete. Through the steel and the glass and the fourteen floors of frozen air. The entity wasn't using eyes. It was using the same frequency Jae-min was using. The void connected them like a wire strung between two towers.
And on that wire, a new note traveled.
Lower than the others. Slower. Fading.
Alone. Long time. Alone. You. Same. You. Come.
Jae-min's hand trembled against the glass.
He pulled out of the void.
Walked back to the center of the room.
Everyone was watching him.
"The leg is half-healed," he said. "Five or six hours before it's fully functional. After that, it either comes here or it walks away."
"Or?" Uncle Rico said.
"Or something else finds it first."
Yue stood. "What do you mean?"
Jae-min turned to her. "Jennifer said the entity was part of a pod. A cluster. Most of them died when the gamma hit. But most isn't all. What if there are others? What if something else followed the same signal the entity followed — my frequency — and it's out there right now, moving toward Manila?"
The room was silent.
"Two of those things," Ji-yoo said quietly.
"Or ten. Or a hundred. We don't know how many survived the gamma. We don't know how many are out there. All we know is that this one found me, and it found me because I'm loud."
"You're loud?" Alessia asked.
"Every time I open a portal. Every time I pull something from the storage dimension. Every time the void hums, I'm broadcasting a spatial signal. The entity heard it from hundreds of kilometers away." He paused. "If there are others, they heard it too."
Uncle Rico set the Benelli on the crate. Rubbed his face with both hands.
"So what you're telling me is that we're sitting in a building that's broadcasting a dinner bell to every spatial nightmare on the planet."
"Yes."
"And your solution is to keep sitting here?"
"No." Jae-min picked up his phone. Opened the notes app. "My solution is to stop broadcasting."
He typed:
OPTION 5: STOP ALL SPATIAL ACTIVITY. CLOSE THE VOID. NO MORE PORTALS. NO MORE STORAGE DIM. STARVE THE SIGNAL.
He stared at it.
Then added:
RISK: IF I CLOSE THE VOID, I LOSE THE ONLY CONNECTION TO THE ENTITY. I GO BLIND. WE GO BLIND.
"Jennifer," he said. "If I seal the void completely — shut down every spatial frequency I'm emitting — can you still track the entity through telepathy?"
Jennifer was pale. Exhausted. The glow beneath her sternum was barely visible. But her mind was sharp.
"I can try. The leakage is faint. If you shut down your void, I might lose the connection too. But I might not — the entity's broadcast is getting stronger as it heals. The closer it gets to full functionality, the louder it broadcasts." She paused. "It's a gamble."
"Everything is a gamble." Jae-min looked around the room. At the people who had followed him into this bunker. Who had trusted him with their lives. Who were standing in a frozen apartment on the fourteenth floor, staring at a seventy-meter monster through a double-paned window, and waiting for him to decide what happened next.
"I'm not going out there," he said. "Not today. But I'm also not going to sit here with a neon sign on my chest. From this moment, no spatial activity. No portals. No storage access. Nothing that emits a frequency. We go dark."
"And supplies?" Uncle Rico asked. "We've been pulling food, water, ammo from your storage dimension for nine days."
"Whatever's in the unit stays in the unit. We ration what we have. If we need more, we raid. On foot. Like everyone else."
"Jae-min," Alessia said. Her voice was quiet. Careful. "You're not everyone else. You're the only one who can—"
"I know what I am." He met her eyes. "And right now, what I am is a liability. Every second the void is open, something out there is tracking it. The entity found me. If there are others, they're finding me too. I need to shut it down before this gets worse."
Alessia didn't argue. She just looked at him with those calm blue eyes and nodded once.
He crossed the room. Took her hands. Kissed her knuckles.
"I'll still be me," he said. "I'll just be quieter."
"Promise?"
"Promise."
...
11:48 AM.
Jae-min sat on the floor in the corner of the room. Back against the wall. Eyes closed.
The void was still there. It was always there — a cold ocean behind his ribs, vast and patient and hungry. But he wasn't touching it. Wasn't reaching into it. Wasn't letting it sing.
He was holding his breath. And the silence was suffocating.
But outside the window, the entity's leg pulsed. The blue-white glow flickered. The heartbeat that had matched his own for the last three hours began to slow.
Desynchronize.
The entity couldn't feel him anymore.
Jae-min pressed his back harder against the wall. Closed his eyes tighter. Ignored the pull. Ignored the hum. Ignored the word that pulsed in the darkness behind his ribs like a beacon.
Come.
He didn't answer.
The void went dark.
And for the first time since the freeze, Jae-min was alone in his own mind.
He hated it.