The sirens screamed like a wounded animal, ripping through the sterile white corridors of Project LUMEN.

  Aera was ten years old. Her hand was clamped tight in her older brother Kael’s, his grip crushing, desperate. Her small body vibrated with something wrong—power humming beneath her skin, unstable, off-key. Around them, the world fractured into chaos: red lights strobing, alarms wailing, doors slamming shut, children crying as boots thundered through the halls.

  Kael was burning alive.

  His power—gravity compression—pulled at him from the inside, folding his body in on itself. A shifting turquoise glow bled through his skin, luminous and cold, rippling like the aurora trapped beneath flesh. The air around him bent and shimmered, colors warping as if reality itself were unsure how to behave near him.

  He was twelve.He was supposed to be a success.

  Instead, he was coming apart.

  “Stay close,” he rasped, breath uneven. “Don’t look back.”

  They were the ones who lived. Not unhurt—just not dead. The needles hadn’t killed them. The procedures hadn’t erased them. That made them valuable.

  That made them hunted.

  The escape plan had been simple. Overload the grid. Create a distraction. Run. Downward, always downward—to the Undercity. Anywhere but here. Anywhere but Dr. Voss’s quiet voice and the cold hands that strapped them to tables.

  They reached the ventilation shaft.

  Freedom was meters away.

  Then the alarms spiked.

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  Heavy footsteps pounded the corridor behind them.

  Aera looked back.

  AEGIS soldiers flooded the hall, dark armor swallowing the red light. Their weapons weren’t lethal—designed to restrain, to capture—but they would break a child all the same.

  “Go.”

  Kael shoved her forward, hard.

  “No—Kael!”

  She stumbled into the shaft as he turned to face them.

  The turquoise light surged, no longer contained—veils of color unfurling around him like solar winds, painting the corridor in cold blues and greens. Gravity screamed. The hallway bent inward, metal shrieking as the floor betrayed the soldiers rushing toward him.

  Light stretched. Sound thinned.

  Kael met her eyes one last time.

  He smiled. Small. Broken. Determined.

  “Live, Aera,” his voice said—everywhere and nowhere at once. “For all of us.”

  Then the world folded.

  A CRACK tore through reality.

  The ventilation shaft buckled. Aera was thrown into darkness as a miniature singularity bloomed behind her—turquoise light collapsing inward, devouring sound, matter, and motion alike. Screams vanished mid-breath.

  When she hit the Undercity floor, the silence was absolute.

  Cold metal. Polluted water dripping somewhere nearby. Her ears rang. Her lungs burned.

  She didn’t look up at the shattered ceiling, stillshimmering faintly with aurora-colored residue.

  She didn’t need to.

  Kael was gone.

  Not dead.

  Gone.

  Aera’s hands shook, power still crawling under her skin, searching for something to tear apart. A single tear slid down her cheek, hot against grime and blood.

  The sirens had stopped.

  The screaming was over.

  Only the hollow remained.

  And in that hollow, something new took shape—hard, sharp, unforgiving.

  SkyReach would bleed.