Pale yellow light from Arcadia-6 reflected off the window of the black car carrying Ryu. The city looked like a spread of dark crystal towers, blue light pulsing along the edges of each structure. The electric engine hummed softly, steady and almost without vibration. Ryu sat in the middle seat, silent. He did not speak. He did not fidget. He simply watched the see-through glass that framed a world that suddenly felt far away from him.
The bespectacled woman who had picked him up sat in the front. She had not introduced herself, and Ryu had not asked. It was as if both of them had wordlessly agreed that names did not matter on the way to Vasena.
The car shifted into the left lane. A second later, the roadway itself began to sink. Ryu saw a pattern of blue lasers sweep along the underside of the vehicle. A low frequency tremor hung in the air, like one machine whispering to another. The ramp descended further, and when the angle finally leveled out, all outside light vanished.
They emerged into a massive underground chamber that did not resemble any human facility Ryu had seen. There were no shadows. There was no single visible source of light. The space was white gray, glowing from its own surfaces.
A black gate, five stories high, stood ahead like a relic wall from an older world. Two layers. No, three. Each one wrapped in faint white lines that pulsed like veins.
Four guards stood before the gate. They were not ordinary guard personnel. Their armor was matte black that refused to reflect light. Their helmets had no visible face, only a thin purple line across the visor like a synthetic pupil. They did not stand like people. Their posture was too balanced, too precise, too symmetrical.
The car slowed and stopped. One guard stepped forward without a sound.
His visor glowed blue. "Visitor identification."
The woman lifted a transparent card. A vertical beam rose from it, reading the data in an instant.
The gate responded.
A deep mechanical growl rolled through the chamber. The first layer slid sideways.
The second folded inward in a spiral pattern.
The third sank slowly, like a giant lift.
Cold air rushed out, the kind of chill that felt like it came from a place no light had touched in a very long time.
Small drones emerged from rails along the walls. They circled the car, projecting soft blue beams across Ryu's face. A brief, almost inaudible click rippled through the air. No normal person should have noticed it.
Ryu did.
The frequency was wrong. Not a standard security scan. Something else. The woman glanced back at him. "Do not move."
Ryu did not answer. He only sharpened his hearing.
There was a pause. Two seconds.
As if the drone was trying to synchronize with a signal that did not fit any of its usual patterns.
It trembled slightly. Then the indicator strip along its body shifted from blue to a muted violet. The change was so faint that no untrained eye would have seen it.
Ryu saw it clearly.
The guard gave a short nod. "Access granted."
The last layer of the gate opened onto a very long passage. Silent. White. Clean. Shadowless. The corridor looked like a secret the world had chosen to forget.
The car rolled forward again.
"Do not talk to anyone unless we authorize it," the woman said.
"Why?" Ryu asked quietly.
"You are in a place that judges you by what is in your head, not by what comes out of your mouth."
Ryu fell silent again.
A transparent tube lift rose at the end of the corridor. The car stopped in front of it. The woman got out first, tapped a small metal panel, and the lift door slid open.
"We are going to the medical level."
Ryu stepped inside. The lift rose without a sound, cutting through several floors in a matter of seconds. There were no floor numbers. No building map. Only ascent.
The lift decelerated and stopped.
The doors opened to an entirely different world.
Vasena Pre-Medical Unit
The room was wide, layered with opaque white glass partitions. The floor reflected a thin sheen of light. Medical drones floated slowly over each cubicle. Children in white uniforms waited in line, their faces tense. There were more than fifty of them in this single unit, this single zone.
Ryu watched them. This was only the outer layer. If his estimate was right, the entire Vasena complex might hold more than a thousand gifted children drawn from across the Dominion of Astryx.
"This way."
The woman pushed open a cubicle panel. It slid aside automatically. Ryu entered a small room lit by a soft blue glow.
A metal table.
A scanning chair.
A holographic panel hovering beside it.
The woman picked up a tablet.
"Name."
"Ryu."
"Full name."
He hesitated for a moment. "Ryu Alverion."
She tapped the screen. New data populated the air. Father: Dr. Arthen Alverion (Deceased) Cause: Classified (Red Protocol)
Ryu's breath hitched, just for an instant.
He knew his father had been killed.
But a Red Protocol status suggested something far beyond a simple homicide.
The woman tried to scroll further down.
The panel refused. Mother: Access Locked (Redlock-7) Status: Not Available Note: Unauthorized for Level Grey Users
Her fingers froze.
She shut the panel quickly, as if afraid someone would catch her looking at something she should not.
"Why is it locked?" Ryu asked.
She did not meet his eyes.
"Your family records are in a category I am not allowed to open." Ryu held his thoughts in place. His mother… even her photo was censored.
Even her name erased.
Just the word "Mother," stripped of identity.
Something pressed against his chest.
It did not hurt.
It felt more like a memory that had always been incomplete.
The woman cleared her throat and changed the subject.
"Sit on the scanning chair."
Ryu sat.
The holographic panel powered up. A soft machine whir stretched through the room.
Blue light swept across his head. Then something went wrong. Lines of red code flickered into view.
NEURO-LINK INTERRUPTION DETECTED
SOURCE: UNKNOWN
ECHO PATTERN SIGNATURE FOUND
The woman flinched.
"What is this?"
Ryu felt a chill at the base of his skull. As if someone was holding his memories from the inside. The panel vibrated faintly.
The medical drone above them dropped lower, angling its sensors toward him, as if trying to pin down an elusive signal.
"There is a return feed," the woman whispered. "But there is only one subject."
Ryu stared at the display. His brain wave graph pulsed across the air.
Two patterns appeared. Not identical,
but moving together. Like two minds sharing a single body. The woman swallowed.
"I need to call a specialist."
Ryu lifted his head slightly. "Is there a problem?" "The machine is picking up an echo signal that is not from your physiology," she said.
Ryu said nothing. Fear did not quite reach him. Only a familiar cold. Like the night his father died. The panel flashed again.
Blue characters replaced red.
ECHO RESONANCE SYNCING…
0.4%
0.8%
1.2%
The woman cut the system manually.
The drone rose back toward the ceiling.
"I have to report this." She pressed the door control. "Awaiting Dr. Elara," chimed a calm voice. The name made Ryu look up.
The cubicle door opened with a soft hiss. Ryu watched as someone stepped inside. Not a uniformed medic, not a guard, but a woman whose presence seemed to narrow the room.
Her build was lean. Her movements unhurried. Dark brown hair was tied neatly away from her face. Her eyes were green, sharp yet gentle, like someone who had done hard things and chosen not to broadcast them.
Her ID card read:
Dr. Elara Mine – Specialist Division (Medical & Biotech) Access Level: White Prime
The highest medical clearance in Vasena.
The woman beside Ryu straightened instantly.
"Doctor."
Elara gave a brief nod. "You may leave."
The attendant stepped out quickly. The door slid shut and locked itself.
Elara walked to the holographic panel and examined Ryu's data without speaking. Her fingers moved through the air, dragging and resizing portions of the waveform display.
Ryu watched her. She was not nervous.
She was not rushed. She was not surprised.
Only wary. "Elara Mine," Ryu said softly.
She did not look at him. "Patients do not usually address me first."
"I want to know who is evaluating me."
Elara closed the graph and finally turned, a small smile touching her lips. "All right. Let us be honest with each other."
She pulled a chair over and sat directly in front of him. Close enough that he could see the fine strain lines at the corner of her eyes, yet her posture stayed entirely professional.
"First," she said, "I am not only here to check your health. I am here to decide whether you are safe for this facility."
"And?" Ryu asked. Elara tapped a sensor on the desk. The monitor brought up the overlapping brain waves again.
"There is something in your head that no child your age should have," she said.
Ryu watched the smooth motion of the graph. "That second wave is not fully mine."
"Correct." Elara leaned in slightly. "And it is not possession, not a mental disorder, not a trauma artifact. It is more precise than that."
She zoomed in. The first wave was stable.
The second was fractured, incomplete, yet tracking the first like a shadow at the wrong frequency.
"Elara," Ryu asked, "is there someone, or something, inside my head?" She did not answer right away.
Instead, she saved the waveform into a separate, heavily locked folder.
"I will explain it as simply as I can," she said.
She turned her chair fully toward him.
"This facility has a system called Echo Mind. Have you heard of it?"
"A little," Ryu replied.
"Echo Mind is a high-level consciousness mapping system. It captures residual mental resonance from a given space. It is not supposed to be dangerous. It is not supposed to interact with human minds directly."
Ryu held his breath. "Supposed to," he repeated. Elara continued.
"When you entered pre-medical intake, the sensors detected an anomaly. That anomaly did not originate from your body. It came from…"
She paused, eyes fixed on him.
"..an Echo Mind frequency used on your father." Ryu's body went still.
The chair.
The air.
The dense blue light.
Everything felt suspended.
"The signal did not disperse," Elara said quietly. "It clung to something. And you happen to be a compatible anchor."
Ryu could not decide which thought to hold first. He simply let the information circle in his mind like debris in water.
Elara rose and walked slowly around the room.
"Normally, residual Echo Mind signals degrade in seconds," she said. "In your case, the signal is attempting to re-synchronize."
"Something is trying to get into my head?" Ryu asked.
"No." Elara stopped next to him. "Something is trying to reconnect to its original source. And for some reason, you are being treated as the door."
Cold brushed his skin from the inside. It was not exactly fear. It felt like fragments of data knocking for entry. "So that frequency is not coming from outside?"
"No." Elara's gaze hardened. "It is coming from inside the Vasena system itself."
"From a place I have not even entered," Ryu murmured.
"Exactly."
She tapped a wall control. A three dimensional diagram flared to life above them, a giant cube representing the facility's inner grid.
In the center of the cube was a small red chamber.
Echo Mind Core - Access Restricted (Black Level)
Ryu narrowed his eyes.
Elara watched him.
"And before you ask, I do not have clearance to enter that room either." His expression shifted slightly. "If the highest level doctor cannot go in, then who can?"
Elara did not respond.
Some answers were bound above her rank, and above what any child, anomaly or not, should hear. But Ryu was not a typical child.
The medical drone descended again, scanning him from crown to shoulder.
The room temperature dropped by a small, noticeable degree.
The panel chimed.
RESCAN INITIATED
ANALYZING PATTERN…
UNSTABLE
UNSTABLE
UNSTABLE
Elara frowned.
"This is the first time I have seen a child with dual wave resonance like this."
Ryu glanced up at the drone. "Is it dangerous?"
"Not to you," Elara said, with no hesitation. "To us."
Ryu did not move, but his pupils tightened.
Footsteps echoed faintly in the outer corridor. Several gifted children walked past.
Suddenly, the hallway rang with commotion.
"He passed out!"
"Get a stretcher!"
"What happened?"
Elara opened a transparent wall panel and looked out. A boy around sixteen lay on the floor just outside, in a white uniform. His breathing was ragged. Two staff members knelt at his side.
"Cause?" one asked.
The boy forced himself to speak, shaking.
"He… he came in… Ryu Alverion… he walked past…"
His face was chalk white, as if all blood had drained away. The staff looked confused. "Why did you react like this?"
The boy began to cry.
"There was… pressure… from him. Like the whole hallway went dark…"
Elara closed the panel. Her eyes thinned.
She turned back to Ryu. "This is not your fault," she said. "Your talent does not fit any normal scale."
Ryu said nothing.
But he did feel something. A faint tapping inside his skull. Not a voice. Not a word.
Just friction, like fingers drawing back a thin curtain. Elara turned sharply.
"Ryu?"
He pressed his fingertips to his temple.
"There is… a light pressure." Elara stepped closer and placed two fingers at the back of his head.
"Stay calm. Do not fight it."
"I am not fighting it."
The wave drew nearer. It was as if only two centimeters separated him from that "something." Elara checked the monitor.
Ryu's waveform spiked.
"Stop," she ordered.
The drone shut down its scan. Ryu exhaled and closed his eyes. The pressure faded, reluctantly. Elara watched the graph flatten and vanish from the display.
"This must not happen again," she said. Her tone had shifted, harder now. "We have to move you to Level Two mental quarantine before that signal integrates further."
Ryu opened his eyes.
"Is that a solution?"
Elara shook her head.
"No. It buys us time. That is all. Before something, or someone, attempts a full reconnect."
Ryu looked down at the blue floor. "In that case," he asked quietly, "when will I hear its voice?" Elara froze for the shortest moment.
"..I hope you never do," she said. The examination ended. Ryu was directed toward a small waiting area. Just before he left, Elara called out.
"Ryu."
He glanced back. "I know you lost your father," she said. She hesitated, as if weighing what could be said. "And your mother… she is not gone." Ryu held her gaze. Elara continued, more softly.
"She disappeared for reasons much larger than you realize."
He did not reply.
His mind filed the words away, slowly turning them over. "If you ever hear something," Elara said, "or if someone begins speaking in your head…" She stepped closer, until her voice dropped to almost a whisper.
"..do not answer."
Ryu nodded once.
Elara returned the nod with a heavy look, as if she already knew that her warning would not be enough. When the cubicle door closed behind him and Ryu walked into the main corridor, the sensation returned.
A breath, brushing the inside of his thoughts.
Faint.
Thin.
Like knuckles tapping glass from the wrong side.
tap… tap… tap…
Ryu stopped. He looked at the silent white wall beside him. The corridor was empty.
No one in sight. But the vibration was there.
Deep in his mind, not a sound, not a word,
but a pull, delicate and unmistakable,
as if something was trying to say:
"I am here."
Ryu closed his eyes. He did not respond.
The pull grew stronger. As he stepped out into the wider hall, a wall display pulsed and changed, updating its data in real time.
ANOMALY PATTERN DETECTED
CLASSIFICATION: UNKNOWN (TEMPORARY CODE: D-SHADOW)
SUBJECT: RYU ALVERION
The system added a line of automatic assessment.
"SECOND ENTITY STILL ATTEMPTING TO PENETRATE."