STEPHEN
My silver haze swirled around the room, the tendrils curling in my peripheral vision—a conscious choice. A tether. A reminder I wasn’t the only one to be exposed.
“What do you mean, you were the plan?” Emma’s voice faltered, caught between confusion and a sharper edge—anxiety, maybe—as her attention clung to James’s like an anchor.
“Emma.” I kept my tone steady, calm. “What I did—using a blue portal to visit the future—shouldn’t have been possible. I can hardly explain it myself.”
I paused and let the weight of those words settle. “Simply telling people what I saw wasn’t an option.”
Her brows pulled together. “Because you’d get into trouble?” she asked with a quiet innocence that made my chest ache.
I smiled, but there was sadness in it. “No. Because no one would believe me.”
She stilled. The sharp mind behind those eyes working faster than she let on. “Why not show them? Like you did me?”
I inclined my head. “Yes, if there had been enough time, that could have worked. But then…” I hesitated.
She caught on immediately. “Then you wouldn’t have had any control over how they tried to prevent the future. It would have been out of your hands.”
My smile deepened. Gods, she was quick. “As I’ve told you before, my dear, you have a keen mind.” I exhaled slowly. “Telling only James and Caden allowed me to handle things the way I saw fit.”
I rose to my feet and started pacing the room. "For thirteen years, I wanted the consensus yes, but I also wanted our world to reveal itself to humans. I wanted no longer to live in hiding. Until I realized what a massive mistake it would be. But by then, it was too late. Every path I took led to the same outcome. No matter what I did, no matter who opposed the consensus, the Great Exposure was inevitable. The LiaPrisms would be handed over. The Trackers would come to exist.”
I took in a deep breath, trying to steady my own nerves. That deadline was still looming and we were nowhere closer to avert it. “All I could do was try to slow it down.”
Emma took a breath, probably trying to steady herself. “So you saw the future. You found out humans will track our translation, use it to eradicate us. Then what?”
I glanced at James, still sitting stiff as an ox, with his jaw locked tight. Then at Caden, who, in contrast, looked bored out of his mind. My two boys. As different as night and day.
“Then I formed a two-part plan. One involving James. One involving Caden.”
I gave James the floor with a single nod before easing back into my seat.
He shifted in his seat, and reached for Emma’s hand, but she didn’t take it. A hesitation. A wall forming between them.
Our lies had already started creating a rift.
A rift that could not exist.
I watched James as he spoke, sounding strong despite the truth he was unraveling. He was careful, deliberate, but beneath the controlled exterior, I could see the burden he carried, the relentless pressure of everything he had done, and the things he had yet to confess.
“You have to understand, Emma,” he began, keeping his tone measured. “The future is complicated. It’s not like we could see it coming and make it stop. By the time Stephen figured out what was going to happen, it was already too late topreventa global reveal from happening.”
I resisted the urge to sigh. It had taken me years to piece together the events leading to the Great Exposure. Every thread I pulled unraveled another buried scheme, another quiet manipulation—each one only dragging us closer to the mess we would be tangled in.
James paused, gauging Emma’s reaction, looking for any sign she understood. I knew she wouldn’t—not yet. Not when she had been kept in the dark for so long.
“We thought if we could gather enough Resistants—people opposing the Great Exposure—we could delay the inevitable, buy ourselves some time. The goal was to hold off the consensus, to stop the Collectives from agreeing to expose our existence to the entire Human World. We figured we could keep things in check if we simply slowed the process down.”
I folded my arms, and watched Emma carefully. I had been through this conversation before, though never quite like this. Seeing it unfold through her eyes made it feel different. More personal.
Emma’s brain was already racing to form the questions I knew were coming. But James wasn’t nearly done.
“We started working quietly, reaching out to people who shared our concerns. We wanted to avoid a war between magi and humans, but also between magi and other magi.”
I nodded in agreement. It had always been the goal—to prevent an irreversible fracture between our worlds, but things rarely went according to plan.
James shot to his feet, then started pacing the room, the blunt edge of frustration bleeding into his words. “We never anticipated the rise of the Radicals.” He ran a hand through his hair, his movements restless, like he was trying to outrun his own thoughts. “Some of the Resistants we’d been talking to felt we were moving too cautiously, that we were too soft. They splintered off, gathered, organized—and somehow, fuck knows how, they got their hands on an Amplifier.”
