The girl wasn't supposed to be alive.
Kael stood on the edge of the crater, wind tugging at the edges of his hood. All around him, the Dregs were silent—too silent. No sirens, no scavenger bots, not even the usual buzz of broken air-conditioning vents that never stopped coughing into the sky.
Just smoke.
Ash.
And her.
She was curled at the center of the collapse, clothes singed, breathing ragged. Kael could feel it before he even saw her. The pulse. Like his own. Like lightning behind her heartbeat. But this was different. Wilder. Raw.
He jumped down without hesitation, boots crunching glass and fractured steel. Every step closer made the pull in his chest stronger—something deep in his blood reacting like a compass needle snapping toward magnetic north.
She twitched. Eyes opened. Violet.
Kael froze.
That color shouldn't exist. Not naturally. Not in this city. Not in any city.
"You awake?" he asked carefully.
The girl blinked, dazed. "Am I dead?"
"Depends how you define it."
She tried to sit up and winced, arms trembling beneath her. "Where am I?"
"Dregs sector. Judging by the scorch marks, ground zero of a detonation. Didn't see the blast. Felt it, though."
She blinked again, slower this time, like her mind was catching up to her body. "Who are you?"
"Kael."
"…Lira." Her voice cracked.
Then it happened.
A flicker. No, a fracture.
Behind her eyes, something shimmered. Like broken mirrors trying to reform. Her hands twitched, and the earth beneath her warped not cracked, not shattered folded, like someone had tugged on the fabric of reality and it had creased.
Kael took a step back.
"You need to calm down," he warned.
"I—" She gasped. "I don't know what's happening to me."
The shadows bent. Debris shifted in patterns that shouldn't have been possible. Kael knew this effect—knew it intimately. But hers wasn't gravity or electricity. It was something stranger, more ethereal.
Memories.
The very space around her was echoing images fragments of old conversations, a door that wasn't there, a man screaming from a memory that didn't belong to Kael or her.
It was like reality had become glass and she was tapping it with a hammer.
Kael reached forward.
And for a second, he saw something impossible: himself. Not just a reflection. A different version of himself older, scarred, eyes filled with guilt—standing where he stood, reaching the same way.
Then it was gone.
"I'm getting you out of here," he said, voice steady.
Lira's eyes widened. "Why?"
Kael didn't answer. Couldn't explain the knot in his gut that told him this girl mattered. That whatever power she had was tied to his own in ways he didn't yet understand.
They barely made it five steps before the sky screamed.
A rift opened above them, a black tear surrounded by crimson light. Drones poured out. Not the cheap, rusted city drones. Military-grade. Syndicate tech.
Kael cursed under his breath. "Too fast."
Someone had tracked the surge. And they sent a retrieval squad.
A voice crackled through the open air, loud and emotionless:
"SURRENDER ASSET 0-3. RESISTANCE WILL BE MET WITH LETHAL FORCE."
Lira whimpered. "Asset? What does that mean?"
Kael didn't answer.
His hands crackled with electricity.
His body grew heavier, center of gravity anchoring deep into the ground.
The pulse inside him was no longer humming.
It was screaming.