Garma.
Not like a baby.
Like something more.
I kneel beside him, touch his back as he dozes, and say, “You’re not supposed to understand this yet, but I know you do.”
He shifts. Doesn’t open his eyes.
“You’re part of something big, baby. Bigger than Rhavadaz. Bigger than me. Bigger than whatever tech gave you that voice in the dark.”
I press my forehead against his chest.
“If he’s alive… if Naull made it out… I’ll find him.”
And as if in response, the monitor flashes again.
A new line.
LAT: 51.754816
LONG: -1.254367
Oxford.
Someone—or something—is closing in.
I tell myself it’s a glitch.
Just a system burp, a corrupted codec, a hiccup from a tired baby monitor running too long on cheap firmware.
So I do what I always do—what I was trained to do. I run diagnostics.
The interface hums under my fingers. Code scrolls down the holo-pane, green against black, steady heartbeat-lines of logic. My eyes follow the cascade. Memory allocation stable. Frequency spread normalized. Signal deviation… minimal.
For about two seconds.
Then the pattern shifts.
A tremor in the carrier band.
The hairs at the back of my neck rise before the instruments even tell me why.
Because it’s not random noise.
It’s a pattern.
It’s asignature.
I expand the waveform and slow it down. Beneath the surface hum, faint and layered, is a low oscillation I know like my own pulse—the Whisper?Core.
My stomach turns to glass.
The Whisper?Core was Naull’s project. His theory. His curse. It was the thing that made the Meld possible on Rhavadaz. It wasn’t supposed to exist anywhere else. Certainly not in my baby’s nursery monitor in a university flat in bloody Oxford.
“Impossible,” I whisper, but the air catches the word and throws it back at me.
Behind me, Garma laughs. A soft, gurgly sound that bubbles out of his chest like carbonated water. He’s sitting up in his crib—again—something he shouldn’t be able to do at eight months old.
