Rowan hated silence almost as much as he hated noise.
Too much silence meant you'd missed something. Too much noise meant it was already too late.
Right now, all he could hear was the scratch of his pen in his notebook spiraling loops of calculations, half-reliable glitch data, and pointless scribbles that didn't answer the question clawing at the back of his mind.
Where the hell was Jaden?
---
The others were quiet. Aya sat close to the fire, tending to something with gentle hands. Niko murmured into the air like she was tuning in to a frequency only she and the dead understood. Kael was sharpening a piece of rebar for reasons no one questioned.
Silas sat apart. Not talking. Not pacing. Just… quiet.
Unsettlingly quiet.
"Still no response from the system," Rowan muttered to no one in particular.
"You've said that three times," Aya replied softly.
He paused. "…Fourth, technically."
Aya didn't answer. She didn't need to.
Rowan clicked his pen, then flipped to a blank page.
And stared.
Right in the margin, like someone had written it there just to mess with him, was a name: Jaden. In his own handwriting. Again. For the fifth page in a row.
He cursed under his breath and slammed the notebook shut.
---
It had always been like this.
Rowan didn't trust people. Not because he didn't want to but because he'd been taught that the moment you did, they'd prove you wrong. He didn't hate Jaden. Not exactly. But something about him used to set Rowan on edge.
Too quiet.
Too calm.
Too good at slipping through other people's emotional defenses without saying a word.
It hadn't been a single moment that changed his mind.
It was... small things.
Like the way Jaden always marked water sources in everyone's maps, not just his own.
Or the time Rowan had a panic episode during a storm and woke to find Jaden had silently set up sound-dampening panels around the shelter, no questions asked.
Or when he started noticing that his calculations had been annotated—in neat, tiny handwriting he'd never seen before with corrections, alternative solutions, or gentle nudges.
At first he thought someone was tampering.
Then he realized Jaden had been helping.
Quietly. Secretly. Like it wasn't worth being thanked for.
---
Now, sitting in the wake of his absence, Rowan flipped open the notebook again.
His hand hovered.
And the pages… shifted.
The ink shimmered.
The numbers aligned on their own. Vectors formed. Coordinates locked.
The glitchlines in the zone the ones only Silas and the corrupted could see unfolded like puzzle pieces.
He could see them.
He could follow them.
---
A sharp pulse of pain flared behind his eyes.
Rowan dropped the notebook. The ground beneath it rippled, like reality itself was making space for something new.
> SYSTEM NOTICE:
User Rowan Carter – Talent Registered: Fault Reader
Skill Type: Predictive Mapping | Cognitive Override
Status: Active
---
Kael whistled low. "Well, that's new."
Aya stepped closer. "What did you see?"
Rowan, blinking hard to clear the afterimage from his vision, muttered, "I didn't just see where Jaden is…"
He looked up, eyes bright with a mix of awe and panic.
"…I saw where he's trying to go."
---
Even Silas looked up at that.
His wings, still twitching with divine interference, stilled just slightly.
For the first time in hours, Rowan wasn't calculating worst-case scenarios.
He was chasing a variable.
One named Jaden.
—--
End of Chapter 14
Author notes:
Me being sleep deprived solving variables
Sorry for the short chapter