Ethan Kai remained seated beneath the cold, relentless downpour of the sprinklers, his chest rising and falling with deliberate slowness as he fought to calm his racing heart. Water flattened his hair against his scalp and soaked through the fabric of his clothes until they clung to him like wet cement. He was aware, distantly, of the sirens and the sting of the smoke in his eyes, but his mind was still locked behind that door; still somewhere in the shattered palace, standing in the shadow of Betrayer.
He barely registered the crash of a door being flung open beside him. Steve Pettinger stumbled out of the Comm Center, wild-eyed and flailing as if he had been spat out of the room itself. His deflated chest rose and fell in short, panicked bursts, and his stomach, bulbous and unrestrained, bobbed like an overfilled sack. Water poured off his bald head in glistening rivulets, soaking what remained of his hair and plastering it in limp strands around his ears. His standard-issue shirt, pale blue and now fully drenched, clung to him like a second skin.
He stopped short when he saw Ethan, slouched against the near wall across from the blackened remains of the shuttle department door. Ethan's knees were pulled up to his chest, his arms wrapped tightly around them like a man holding in something far worse than panic.
"Ethan! How did you—When did you—Never mind! We have to get out of here. I think a bomb went off!" Pettinger's voice cracked in mid-yell, and his gaze darted between the ruined hallway and the stairs behind him. His hands fluttered helplessly, as though he could not decide whether to help Ethan up or bolt for the exit.
Ethan said nothing. He watched the man without expression, his eyes dry in spite of the water cascading down his face. His thoughts remained submerged in the impossible. They looped through images and words no person in the real world could have experienced. A part of him, dispassionate and detached, analyzed Pettinger with the same cold clarity he had once reserved for field assessments. Lazy. Soft. Panicked. The man was a trembling sack of excuses loosely molded into the shape of authority. And, unsurprisingly, a coward.
The hesitation did not last long. Pettinger chose self-preservation over courage and turned away, waddling down the hallway with his soaked shoes squeaking like the retreating rhythm of failure.
Ethan did not move.
But he felt it. It was much like a stone dropped into still water. A sharp sting of recognition, then the spreading ache of shame. Pettinger had run. And he, for all his training, for all his years in uniform and the medals collecting dust in a shoebox at the back of his closet, had done the same. The form had changed, that was all. Pettinger had bolted down a hallway. Ethan had run back for a door and closed it.
Neither of them had stood their ground.
He had fled. Not from an explosion, not from gunfire, not from anything his Army training had prepared him for. He had fled from a voice. From a man, or whatever Elan Morin truly was, who had looked at him as though seeing through every inch of him and named him interloper. A word that felt less like an insult and more like a judgment passed.
The worst part was, he had felt it. Not just fear. Terror. Something deeper than instinct. Ancient, maybe. Primal. The kind of fear that did not argue, did not negotiate, did not think. It just took hold and dragged him backward, as though something inside had cracked open and screamed no more.
So he had turned and fled through that door, through the unraveling stone, through the fire and the alarms, and dropped to the ground like a man who had survived something only because it had let him go.
And now he sat here. Minutes passed in a slow crawl. Drenched. Hollow. He had seen a coward run and knew—knowing—he was watching a mirror.
He had survived.
But survival was not courage.
And this did not feel like victory.
His gaze slid from the Comm Center door that had been the gateway to the one that had been his escape—now outlined in blackened concrete, charred and cracked. Scattered at its base were fragments of stone that had no place in this world. He reached down and picked up a jagged piece, turning it slowly in his fingers. The texture was wrong. Too coarse. Too real. He closed his left hand around it and squeezed.
The pain that followed was sharp, immediate. It bit into the soft flesh of his palm with no surreal dulling, no sudden shift into dream-logic or metaphysical drift. It grounded him. Anchored him. It was real.
What now?
He should probably call someone. Report it. Explain it, if that were even possible, before the fire department arrived. Or the police. They would be here soon. But even as he considered it, he felt the impulse drain away. Who would he tell?
His ex-wife? She had left him less than a year after he had retired from the Army, his attempt to salvage their fraying marriage proving as hollow as her vows. She had taken the house, the cars, and everything else with any value. She had not taken his guilt—he had carried that himself. Divorced before forty. No kids. No shared history worth preserving. She was gone. And good riddance.
His parents?
His father had served, but any connection between them was buried under completely opposed interests. Where Ethan had found joy in fantasy, in stories of other worlds and strange powers, his father had sunk into the bottom of a glass and the numbing rhythms of sports and cable news. A man of habit. A pale man of tired muscle and silence. Ethan loved him, as a son was supposed to, but there had never been understanding between them. Only distance.
His mother? She was Korean, a church-going woman with sharp eyes and sharper judgments. She had met his father when he had been stationed overseas, and she had never really warmed to Ethan's indulgences. Books were sinful. Fantasy, doubly so. More than once, she had seized a novel from his hands and dragged him to the chapel to repent. She had never been cruel, only stern—and stingy with her praise. She approved of his paychecks. Bragged about them to her friends at Sunday service. His rank, his military record. But not him.
No. He could not call her either.
There was one friend. One person he might reach out to...
But the thought evaporated at the sound of pounding footsteps. He turned his head just as two uniformed police officers burst out of the stairwell at the end of the hall. Both had weapons drawn. Their eyes swept the destruction, then locked on him.
They raised their weapons.
"Hands where I can see them!" one of them screamed, his voice hoarse with adrenaline.
Ethan did not move. The stone fragment sat heavy in his hand, still digging into his palm, still real.
The command echoed off the soaked hallway walls, harsh and shrill. Both officers advanced with trained efficiency, their knees bent slightly, firearms braced in a two-hand grip. Their eyes flicked constantly, not just at Ethan, but to the surrounding damage; the scorched stone, the blown-out doorway, the surreal mess of ancient rubble on modern carpet. The one in front, leaner, with a tight jaw and buzz-cut hair, kept his weapon trained on Ethan's chest as he barked the next command. They're not half-bad. Ethan observed as he watched their movements with a trained eye.
"Down on your stomach! Arms straight out to the sides!"
Ethan moved slowly. No sudden gestures. No resistance. He set the stone gently on the floor beside him and extended his arms, then moved forward onto his stomach, cheek pressing against the soaked carpet. The fire alarm shrieked overhead. Cold sprinkler water sprayed across his back like a baptism gone wrong.
"Clear hands," the second officer said, approaching with practiced caution. "He's compliant."
"Cover me."
The buzz-cut officer holstered his sidearm long enough to draw a pair of cuffs from his belt. With one knee on Ethan's lower back and the other on the floor, he pulled both arms behind Ethan in a smooth motion and snapped the cuffs around his wrists. They were tight, but not cruelly so.
"You are under arrest for suspicion of arson and destruction of public property," he said, voice steady but loud over the noise. "You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law."
Ethan said nothing.
The officer continued, switching wrists and checking the cuffs. "You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford one, one will be provided for you. Do you understand these rights?"
Still nothing.
"He's not answering," the second officer muttered. "He's choosing to remain silent."
Ethan kept his breathing even. This was not the first time he had felt cuffs on his wrists. Not the first time he had laid flat on the ground, surrounded by shouting men and imminent escalation. In the Army, this was called tactical suppression. In civilian life, it was just arrest procedure. Either way, you shut your mouth, kept your pulse down, and let the machine do what it had been trained to do.
Even if that machine had no idea what it was really dealing with.
They pulled him up by the arms and walked him away from that door. It was a war zone of smoke and mist and stone fragments that no one would understand. One officer led the way; the other maintained control behind him. As they emerged into the stairwell, the fire alarm changed pitch—closer now to a mechanical scream.
"Got a male, early forties, detained," the buzz-cut officer radioed in. "Scene's hot. Possibly explosive origin. Damage's extensive. We need fire to push in now."
The response crackled back through the static: "Copy that. Fire's en route."
They guided him down two flights of stairs, boots splashing in puddles forming on each landing. Ethan kept his head down. His muscles ached from the cold, and his palms still stung where the stone had bitten into them.
Outside, the air was heavy with sirens and flashing light. Fire trucks had begun to circle the lot. EMTs stood by. More officers were sweeping the area. People in uniforms pointed and barked into radios. Stretchers were prepared without knowing if there were wounded.
They loaded him into the back of a black-and-white cruiser, ducking his head through the doorframe like they had done it a hundred times—because they had. The cruiser smelled of antiseptic and wet vinyl. The doors locked automatically when they shut.
Buzz-cut slid behind the wheel. The other officer, stockier and quiet, rode shotgun. Nobody spoke. Ethan kept his head against the window, watching the mist gather and the world roll by in fragments. He said nothing. No questions. No outbursts. His mouth remained shut. Because he had not run from them. He had run from something far worse.
The cruiser moved through the wet city streets, tires slicing through shallow rivers on the asphalt. It was as if the sprinklers had set off a real storm outside. Rain was falling in cold sheets, dimming the glow of streetlights suddenly activated by the shadows cast by the heavy clouds into smeared halos. Ethan sat motionless in the back seat, the cuffs pressing into his wrists, his soaked clothes leeching warmth from his skin.
He said nothing. He would not speak. His training whispered the same rule, again and again: when everything is unknown, say nothing. Not to clarify. Not to protest. Silence was the only weapon left to him. So, he listened. And he thought.
He thought about what would happen when they reached the station. About the questions that would be asked, the assumptions made, the conclusions drawn. And there would be conclusions; wild ones, desperate ones. Because there was no explaining this. Not without sounding insane. Not without inviting the padded cell and the long hallway with the locked doors. He could not explain a scorched stone hallway erupting from a public transportation building. He could not explain a doorway that had once led from the Shuttle Department and had opened onto myth and nightmare. So, he would not try.
He would be willfully ignorant. Detached. Just a man who happened to be in the wrong place. That was the narrative they needed to believe. And if he gave them nothing—no fuel, no outbursts, no inconsistencies—they would have no choice but to let him go.
He was no forensic expert, but he had a fair idea how the investigation would unfold. Bomb squads. Surveillance footage. Structural engineers. Security logs. Everything would be scrutinized, and none of it would make sense. No residue. No components. No motive. They might assume it was a gas leak or industrial failure. But eventually, when no evidence supported a charge, they would have to release him.
And yet, that was not what filled his mind. Now that the panic had drained away, something else was rising in its place. At first, he did not recognize it. It crept in quietly, like warmth returning to frozen limbs. But by the time they turned onto the main boulevard toward the station, he saw it clearly.
Wonder.
It bloomed inside him with an ache he had almost forgotten existed. A distant echo of childhood—of books read beneath blankets with a flashlight, of anime marathons deep into the night, of imagining what it might be like to be there, really there. Not as an actor. Not as a reader. But as a participant. As someone who mattered.
The fear remained. Of course it did. Fear of what he had seen, of Lews Therin raging in his madness, and Elan Morin standing like death incarnate beneath a crumbling palace. Fear of how real it had all felt. But the wonder was stronger.
It was the impossible, made manifest.
He leaned back, the vinyl seat cold against his spine, and behind his bound hands, his fingers found the rough texture of the bandage on his right palm. Beneath it, he could still feel the brand. That strange, circular, key-shaped sigil burned into his flesh by a man who had no business existing.
It no longer radiated heat. No cold. But the raised ridges of it were unmistakable. He pressed his thumb gently against the edge, tracing its shape beneath the wrappings. I could do it again, he whispered to himself.