He hadn't spoken the name out loud.
Even now, walking the polished, echo-hushed corridors of the Academy's diagnostics wing, Kael kept it sealed in his throat.
Vanth.
The name had flickered across Tavi's terminal like a secret too old to be remembered. But Kael had known it before she said a word. It had echoed through his thoughts, surfaced behind his eyes during sleep—if what he'd been doing could still be called sleep.
He remembered standing at the vault, frost biting his gloves, the vault's glow casting faint blue shadows under his jaw. He'd felt it stir before he'd seen it. Like a breath he didn't take. Like a memory he hadn't lived.
And then: You remember me because I remember you.
They hadn't spoken since. Not in words. But the pressure in his skull hadn't gone away.
Observation 4C was sterile by design—bright walls, muted air, nothing human left in the room except the person being observed.
Kael sat still while Sovereign med-techs looped sensor arrays around his sync collar. They didn't make eye contact. Their silence was professional, but not neutral. Not anymore.
He was no longer a cadet to them. He was a signal. A breach.
"Vitals steady."
"Neural drift minimal but present."
"No lattice echo detected at this layer."
They were lying. He could feel the hum behind his spine—low, just beneath conscious hearing. Like a whisper that didn't need words.
He closed his eyes.
You are remembering out of order.
That is expected.
The shape of your thoughts will change.
He flinched. Just slightly.
A med-tech wrote it down.
He was released after six hours. No real explanation. Just a low-ranking officer and a one-word statement: "Cleared."
Kael didn't feel cleared. He felt rerouted.
The walk back to the dorm tiers was quiet, but not empty. Cadets moved in clusters, talking low. Conversations paused when he passed. He heard his name, sometimes softened by protocol, sometimes not.
"Virex was back in deep-dive."
"Wasn't even full sync—just bled through a Tier I frame."
"He's not one of us anyway. Just a test asset."
He stepped through the Theta corridor entrance, hand tightening unconsciously around the latch.
Inside, Dane sat at the edge of his bunk, arms on knees. No armor. No pretense.
"You alright?" he asked.
Kael didn't answer at first. He crossed to his own bunk. Sat down. Leaned forward until his elbows pressed to his thighs, hands steepled like a prayer half-forgotten.
"They were looking for something," he said. "Not damage. Not deviation. Just… something to write down and send up the chain."
"Did they find it?"
Kael shook his head slowly.
"I think they don't know what they're looking at. I think that scares them."
Dane said nothing.
Which, Kael realized, meant he agreed.
That night, Kael isolated himself in the sim chamber—no rig, no trainer, no link.
Just replay logs.
He pulled up his first week of sync footage: the standard Sovereign exo frame, nothing more than a walking tank with servo response lag. He'd scored high. Clean reaction times. No stutters. No flicker.
Now, watching it again, he saw things he hadn't known to look for.
Pauses. Half-movements. Frame shifts that anticipated his thinking by fractions of a second.
Vanth hadn't been activated yet. But something had already been watching. Or remembering.
He rubbed his eyes. Tried to clear the fuzz building behind his focus.
His terminal chirped. A hidden file slid into view.
/echo-node/archive-return: stack-09/
[open?]
LINK TRACE: UNSTABLE – NEURAL PREDICTION ACTIVE
He didn't open it.
Not yet.
But it had waited for him to be alone.n