Leo didn't go home. Home was a concept tethered to gravity and solid ground, things he no longer trusted. Instead, he fled upwards, a silent scream of energy piercing the atmosphere until the world was a serene, marbled sphere of blue and white. He drifted in the high, cold silence of orbit, his only real sanctuary. This was the one place where his destructive potential was dwarfed by the sheer, indifferent scale of the cosmos. Here, he was safe from them. They were safe from him.
But there was no hiding from the digital ghost he had created.
For hours, he engaged in a form of meticulous self-torture. Tapping into the global satellite network was as easy for him as breathing. He let humanity's collective nervous system flood his senses, sifting through petabytes of information per second, searching for one specific video. He was waiting for his own monstrous anomaly to ripple through the endless stream of data.
He found it just after midnight, Greenwich Mean Time, on a student journalism blog called "Unfiltered Chicago."
The title made his blood run cold: Is This The "Angel of the Anomaly"? Leaked Cafe Footage Shows Unexplained Events.
He forced himself to watch. The footage was shaky, nauseatingly authentic. It captured everything: his tense posture, the other patrons, and then, the moment his control snapped. The lightbulb's sickly, pulsating glow. The impossible steam hissing from the coffee cup. In the bottom right corner of the footage, a small, semi-transparent watermark pulsed faintly: @ZoeUnfiltered.
Of course. The internet always gave a name to the person holding the camera. Now, the leak had a name, too.
Zoe's own whispered commentary was audible, a hushed, breathless track of discovery. "…look at the coffee," her voice said, laced with awe and fear. "Oh my god, it's boiling… It's him. It has to be him."
He scanned the comments. Trolls crying "fake," believers arguing with them, and then, the ones that made the knot in his stomach tighten: messages directed at the creator. "@ZoeUnfiltered where was this??" another read, "@ZoeUnfiltered do you have more footage?? MAJOR news outlet here, DM me." She wasn't just a girl with a phone anymore. She was a source. A witness. A domino that had just been tipped over.
Then, the one sound he was dreading more than anything else echoed in his suit. The sharp, triple-beep of his encrypted comms line. General Madsen.
He accepted the call. The General's stern, mustached face appeared in a shimmering hologram. His expression was one of cold, controlled fury, the look of a man whose prized, multi-trillion-dollar weapon had just been used to stir a latte.
"General," Leo said.
"Don't you 'General' me, son," Madsen's voice was dangerously quiet. "The Skynet protocol flagged the video nineteen minutes ago. The algorithm that watches for you found you on a student blog run by a girl named Zoe Martel."
Leo said nothing. They already had her name.
"Let me see if I understand this correctly," Madsen continued, his voice dripping with acid sarcasm. "I send you to the best shrink on the planet to get your head on straight. And the first thing you do is go out and perform party tricks for some journalism major with a phone?"
"It was an assignment," Leo said, the words feeling weak and pathetic. "From the doctor."
"An assignment?" Madsen barked, a flash of his usual anger finally breaking through. "Did she assign you to break the laws of thermodynamics in public? Did she tell you to become the star of a new conspiracy theory? I approved that therapy as a containment measure, Leo. Not as an excuse for public field trips!"
"I was just doing what I was told," Leo repeated, hearing the childish defensiveness in his own voice. He was a pawn between two impossible forces: Madsen's demand for absolute control, and Aris's demand for absolute vulnerability.
"Well, you're getting new orders now," Madsen said, his tone shifting back to ice. "This experiment is over. You are on lockdown. You are not to leave your designated residence for any reason other than your scheduled sessions. You will not so much as order a pizza without clearing it through my office first. Is that understood?"
"Yes, General."
"And you will continue your sessions with Dr. Thorne. Shutting it down now would raise too many questions. But from now on, I want full reports. I want to know everything you talk about, every technique she uses. Your therapy is now a matter of national security oversight."
"That's… confidential," Leo argued weakly.
"Nothing about you is confidential, son," Madsen stated flatly. "You lost that privilege ten years ago in a cloud of dust. End of discussion. Clean up your act."
The hologram vanished.
Leo floated in the silence, the Earth turning placidly below him. Trapped. A prisoner. A spy. His one sliver of hope, the one place he might be able to heal, had been corrupted into just another tool of his containment.
The silence of space, once a comfort, now felt mocking. It was a vast, empty cage. He clenched his fists, his knuckles white inside his gloves. The feeling of utter, absolute helplessness was a pressure he could no longer contain.
A scream, raw and guttural, tore from his throat.
It was a sound of pure, undiluted anguish, trapped within the confines of his own helmet. It was the shriek of a god with no one to pray to, a man with no one to talk to. In the silent vacuum of space, where no sound can travel, he was the only being in the universe who could hear it.
He screamed until his throat was raw and his lungs burned. Then he stopped. He was left panting, his breath fogging the inside of his faceplate. The silence rushed back in, heavier and more profound than before. He had punctured it with his own pain, and all it had done was prove how truly and utterly alone he was.
Now, he had to go back down. Back to his cage. Back to the woman he was now ordered to betray.