Chapter XI: Spectrums
Morning came like punishment.
Nathaniel had barely closed his eyes when the alarm rattled through the flat, pulling him from a desk littered with beakers and notebooks. His head ached from hours of staring into light, scribbling calculations that dissolved into ink-blots.
The scar still throbbed, faint but insistent, as though mocking his attempts at reason.
He splashed water on his face, shoved his arms into a wrinkled shirt, and forced himself into the city's rhythm.
The Underground was its usual blur of shoulders and silence. Advertisements screamed from the walls. Someone coughed. A violinist sawed through a mournful tune by the escalators.
Nathaniel stood rigid, one hand clutching his satchel, every jolt of the train reminding him how fragile his body felt.
By the time he reached campus, Theo was already waving.
"Cross! You look like death reheated. Don't tell me you were studying all night again."
Nathaniel offered a thin smile. "Something like that."
Theo fell into step beside him, still talking. "Mate, you need balance. Books are great, but so's sleep. There's only so much a man can absorb before his brain liquefies."
If only it were just books, Nathaniel thought.
They filed into the lecture hall. Professor Harland was already pacing, chalk in hand, diagrams sprawling across the blackboard.
"Surveying," he announced, "isn't just about measuring distances. It's about understanding the land itself—its resistance, its angles, its light."
Nathaniel flinched at the word.
Harland's eyes swept the class, sharp as glass. "And some of you," he added, gaze lingering on Nathaniel, "might find that the elements have less patience than your professors."
A ripple of laughter. Nathaniel kept his face still.
Theo shot him a sideways glance.
The lecture unfurled in lines and formulas. Angles of elevation. Parallax. The mathematics of seeing. Nathaniel copied mechanically, his handwriting jagged from fatigue.
But the words drifted, tangled with the memory of last night's trials: the mirror flash, the ultraviolet sting, the scar's mocking pulse.
Light wasn't uniform. That much was clear. But what pattern lay beneath?
He barely registered Harland's call. "Mr. Cross! Perhaps you'd demonstrate the solution on the board?"
Nathaniel blinked, realizing the room was watching him.
Slowly, he rose, chalk trembling in his hand.
The problem sprawled in neat figures: Determine elevation given base line and measured angle.
He could solve this. He knew he could. But his mind kept circling back: angles, light, exposure. A line was just a form of illumination, wasn't it? A ray traced through space.
His hand moved. Numbers flowed. The equation balanced.
When he stepped back, the board glared with precision.
Harland studied it, lips pursed. Then he gave a single, reluctant nod.
"Correct."
Nathaniel exhaled, sitting quickly. His pulse still hammered, but the whispers faded.
Theo leaned close. "See? You're still sharp, even on no sleep." Then, lower: "But seriously, what's going on? You're not just tired."
Nathaniel stared at his notebook, unwilling to answer.
Theo sighed, letting it drop for now.
But suspicion had taken root.
The day blurred by in fragments—lecture, library, Theo's chatter, the endless shuffle of students. By evening, Nathaniel returned to his flat with a hunger that wasn't for food.
He stripped off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and began again.
Tonight, he built prisms.
He found an old triangular block of glass, once a childhood curiosity. With a desk lamp angled just right, he split its light into bands across the wall: violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red.
A spectrum.
He stared at it, heart pounding.
Which one of you burns me?
He angled the prism, let each band crawl across his scar.
Red. Nothing.
Orange. A twinge.
Yellow. A sting.
Green. Fainter.
Blue. Sharper.
Violet—
Agony.
The scar flared like a brand. He staggered back, clutching his chest, teeth clenched against a cry.
The violet beam lingered, thin as a knife-edge, but it had cut him deeper than flame.
Panting, he scribbled notes. Higher frequency, stronger reaction. UV confirmed. Light beyond visible spectrum is catalyst.
He sat back, sweat cooling on his skin.
Not just light. Not just heat. Something finer.
He remembered his high school teacher again, chalk dust rising in sunbeams: Every wavelength carries its own energy. Shorter waves, higher energy. Invisible, but potent.
Nathaniel pressed a hand to his scar. Invisible, but potent.
His experiments grew frantic.
He stacked lenses, layered colored filters from cheap plastic folders. He angled beams until his room looked like a mad painter's studio, walls striped with fractured rainbows.
Trial after trial. Violet burned most. Blue lingered sharp. Red faded almost harmlessly.
The scar is selective. It responds to certain wavelengths only.
Why?
He tested with flame again, holding a candle close. The heat licked his skin, painful but ordinary. The scar remained still.
Not heat.
He doused it, turned back to the prism.
Violet. Burn. Blue. Sting.
His notebook filled with frantic arrows and underlined words. Is it resonance? Absorption spectrum?
But no conclusion came.
At midnight, exhaustion pulled at his body, but his mind refused surrender.
He poured over his chemistry workbook, diagrams of emission lines and electron transitions staring back like cryptic codes. He remembered lab days gone wrong: spilling iodine across the bench, Theo laughing at his stained fingers, a teacher sighing at his obsessive notes.
Always, Nathaniel had wanted answers. Always, he had believed in the order beneath chaos.
But the scar was chaos made flesh.
And science could only circle it, never pierce its core.
Near two a.m., he knocked over a beaker. Glass shattered, water soaking notes, dripping into the carpet.
"Damn it—" He scrambled, salvaging pages, blotting ink that smeared into illegibility.
His hand brushed the prism. It rolled, caught the lamplight, and a violet shard speared his chest again.
The scar screamed.
Nathaniel collapsed to his knees, breath torn from him. Smoke curled faintly upward.
Through gritted teeth, he clawed the lamp aside, plunging the flat into dimness.
Darkness. Relief.
The pain receded, leaving him trembling, heart racing as though he'd run for miles.
He sat on the floor, surrounded by broken glass and damp paper, chest still smoldering.
The scar pulsed once, like a heartbeat not his own.
He whispered into the silence, voice shaking:
"You're alive, aren't you?"
The flat gave no answer. Only the ticking of the clock, the drip of water.
Nathaniel sat there until the edges of dawn, unable to rise, trapped between science and something far older, far stranger.
When morning came again, he staggered back to campus, eyes bloodshot, notes stuffed in his bag like contraband.
Theo met him with a frown. "Cross, you're burning out. Whatever you're chasing, it's chewing you up. You need to tell me what's going on."
Nathaniel opened his mouth—then closed it.
How could he explain? How could words encompass smoke, violet fire, a scar that reacted to light itself?
So he shook his head. "It's nothing."
Theo's eyes hardened. "It's not nothing. I'm your mate, Nathaniel. I notice things. You can't keep hiding forever."
Nathaniel turned away, heart heavy.
Because Theo was right.
But some truths burned too bright to share.
That night, back in the solitude of his flat, Nathaniel began again.
The spectrum waited.
And so did the scar.