Lucy nodded once. “I am.”
Michael’s jaw tightened. “Right.” He stood abruptly, muttered something under his breath, and walked toward the gardens; shoulders tense.
Lucy watched him go, the humour draining from the room. “He seems… conflicted,” she said softly.
Barnaby sighed. “Yeah. He does. Let’s hope he opens up before things get worse. Otherwise, we’re flying blind with him.”
Lucy nodded, still staring out the window after Michael. “Then we’d better keep our eyes open.”
Chapter 13
As Michael left the room, his control slipped, and the truth he was avoiding pressed forward. His memories came flooding back.
The day the sky went dark, the air itself seemed to scream.
Flames rose where houses had been only moments before, walls collapsing into rivers of ash. The snow fell thick and slow, each flake turning red as it touched the ground.
Michael ran until his legs gave out, tripping over bodies he knew by name. He tried to call out to them, but his voice came out as a rasp that no one could hear over the roar of fire and the sharp crack of gunfire somewhere beyond the fields.
He watched his friends fall one after another, their small bodies jerking and twisting before going still.
His father’s screams tore through the chaos it and then he was silenced.
His mother reached for him. He still remembered the look in her eyes, they were wild, terrified and pleading. And then she fell too.
When the noise finally began to fade, the world felt hollow. They were lying only a few feet away from him, side by side. His mothers hand still stretched toward him, frozen in that final attempt to reach her son.
The wind carried the smell of burnt cloth and blood, heavy enough to choke him. The snow that had once been white now lay dark and wet, thick with red that gleamed like glass in the firelight.
Michael sank to his knees beside them. His hands were shaking so hard that when he pressed them to the ground, he left prints that filled instantly with blood. He didn’t notice the cold anymore. He didn’t even feel his own wounds—the long cut across his forehead that dripped into his eyes, the sting of smoke in his lungs. All he felt was the hollow weight of the silence that followed.
He sat there for what felt like hours, the last child left in a world that had torn itself apart.
When footsteps finally approached, he didn’t look up right away. He thought it might be his father coming back, or maybe the end itself come to finish what it had started. But it was a stranger, a man in a spotless coat, boots sinking into the red snow.
The man crouched beside him and spoke softly, like this was nothing unusual. “Found one.”
A hand settled on his shoulder. It was warm.
Michael didn’t move. He just kept staring at the field where his family lay. The snow fell thicker, the world growing quieter, until the man’s shadow was the only thing left beside him.
And then he was lifted from the ground, carried away from the only home he had ever known, leaving behind a land that bled in silence.
He was eight when they found him. The people who destroyed his life, called themselvesThe Lucent. Their uniforms were clean and very white. They promised warmth, food, and safety.
They also promised he would never be alone again.
He believed them.
That same day, they captured Gloriana. She’d tried to fight, but they dragged her one way and carried him another. Two halves of a story cut apart.
They treated them very differently. Gloriana was defiant, she shouted, she resisted, she terrified them. They locked her in the underground facility, under constant observation. When she wouldn’t cooperate, they increased the pain until she stopped moving altogether. Finally, she put herself into what they called a “self-sustaining coma.” She left her body behind to live in the astral field, where they couldn’t reach her.
Michael’s fate was quieter.
They placed him with a group of researchers who believed inconditioningrather than torture. The man who supervised himDoctor Shaw, smiled too much. He gave Michael new clothes, warm meals, and soft words that always came with a lesson attached.
“You’re special, Michael,” Shaw would say. “But what you are was made wrong. If you help us fix it, we can fix you too.”
