The wipers were losing the war against the rain. It wasn't falling; it was just arriving, heavy and sudden, turning the highway into a blur of wet asphalt and red taillights.
Thud-squeak. Thud-squeak.
Inside the sedan, the climate control read sixty-eight, but the Masked Man was sweating under the collar. He gripped the wheel. Leather on leather. He didn't squeeze—that would be a tell—but the tension was there, coiled in the tendons of his wrist. He held the speedometer at exactly sixty-five. Speeding was amateur. Speeding made you a variable, and variables got you caught.
He was a ghost in the machine. A shadow moving through the arteries of a sleeping city.
To his right, the passenger seat was empty. Except for the box.
Just a Pelican case. Black plastic. Scratched latches. It looked boring.
But it felt like a hole in the world…
He couldn't see anything on the sensors, but his body knew. A phantom heat radiated from the plastic, an itch buried deep in the meat of his right shoulder, nagging at him. It was the feeling of standing too close to a high-voltage line.
Nineteen.
The number rolled around in his head, heavy and dull.
Nineteen attempts. Nineteen nightmares dragged out of wet-work labs and black-site basements over the last six months. Most of them had been biological sludge—failed gods that melted as soon as they touched fresh air. He'd burned them. Flushed the data.
Three were left.
One was the boy. Subject 17. A walking nuclear reactor currently abandoned to a handler who probably didn't know what she was holding. A bad play, but a neccessary one.
The other two were in the box.
His fingers twitched on the wheel. He didn't look at the case. He didn't have to. The inventory was burned into the back of his eyelids.
Subject 3. The Crown.
A circle of dark metal. To anyone else, it looked like museum junk. But he'd heard it. A low, vibrating hum that bypassed the ears and rattled the fillings in his teeth. It wasn't just metal; it was thousands of microscopic scales, fused shut.
The dossier said it was armor. Said it would unlock and flow over the skin like mercury, a second skin that bullets couldn't touch.
Put me on, the silence seemed to whisper. I don't break.
He shifted in his seat, the leather creaking. A shield you can't take off isn't armor. It's a coffin.
And next to it, Subject 8. The Stone.
A jagged, broken slab of rock. Blacker than the night outside. The geometry on it was wrong—looking at the angles too long made his eyes water, like trying to focus on a heat mirage. It was split down the middle.
The translators—poor bastards—called it a receiver. If you found the other half, the frequency would open a door.
To what?
Gods. Monsters. Things with too many eyes and enough energy to wipe a continent clean off the map.
He signaled right, merging onto the dark backroad that led to the safehouse. The trees closed in overhead, a tunnel of dripping leaves. The cabin was miles away, a tiny bubble of order in a chaotic night.
The world was changing. He could feel it in the steering wheel.
Ten years ago, a bad day was a dirty bomb or a coup. Physics had rules. Gravity was a law.
Now? Boys flew. Shadows bit back. The rules were melting.
He stared into the high beams, cutting through the dark. The age of men was over. The age of Titans was crashing through the front door.
If he didn't get ready—if he didn't hoard the monsters and study the magic—humanity was just going to be wet cardboard in a hurricane.
"Chaos is inefficient," he muttered to the windshield. It sounded weak, even to him.
The metal in the box hummed. A single, vibrating note. mocking him.
He kept driving, a small man in a small car, trying to build a dam against a rising ocean.
Four Light-Years Away. Five Years Ago.
It started with a pulse in the center of a fire.
Deep inside the crushing weight of a dying red sun, the pod disintegrated.
He didn't wake up gently. There was no dream, no slow rise to consciousness. Just the violence of suddenly being. One second, the velvet nothingness of a thousand-year sleep; the next, his eyes snapped open and he inhaled the sun.
The radiation didn't burn. It rushed into his starved cells like water hitting dry earth.
He pushed.
It wasn't a swim; it was an eruption. A ripple of force shattered the solar plasma, and he tore through the surface of the star, a black comet screaming out into the freezing void.
He didn't stop to look at the stars. He stopped because his heart broke.
Floating there, suspended in the absolute zero, the silence of space pressing against his eardrums, he looked for home.
Two planets.
They should have been blue. They should have been green, noisy with the radio-hum of a trillion lives.
They were grey.
The first was a skeleton. Stripped of air, cold as a tombstone. The second was worse—cracked open like an egg, its planetary guts spilling out into a ring of tragic debris.
No.
The thought wasn't a word. It was a physical weight, heavier than the star burning behind him.
He moved.
He didn't fly; he blurred. He became a streak of desperate grief, tearing across the millions of miles between the sun and the graveyard.
Impact.
He hit the surface of the first world hard enough to crack the tectonic plates. Dust hadn't even settled before he was moving, running through the ruins of cities that had been dead for centuries. He ripped open bunkers with bare hands, punched through mountains, searching for heat. A heartbeat. A breath.
Nothing. Just cold stone and vacuum.
He launched himself again, a black arrow piercing the thin atmosphere, flying to the second planet—the broken one. He wove through floating mountains of rock, his eyes burning with a terrifying, irrational hope. There had to be a record. A message.
He found it drifting in the shadow of a shattered moon. A data-vault, flickering with the last dregs of a dying battery.
He ripped the door off. Inside, no one. Just the cold, and a single crystal hovering in the zero-G.
He grabbed it. The crystal vibrated against his glove, warm and fragile.
A hologram sputtered into existence.
A woman. Her eyes were dark, just like his, but wet. Behind her, the walls were shaking. The sky was falling.
She spoke. There was no sound in the vacuum, but the data stream hit his mind directly.
"…Valen."
The name hit him like a fist.
Valen.
It wasn't just a name. In the old tongue, it was a prayer. To name a child Valen was to say he was the sum of them all. The whole species, distilled into one boy.
"My beautiful son," she wept. The image distorted, static cutting across her face. "We were too slow. The hate… it moved faster than the science."
He floated in the debris field, watching his mother die five hundred years ago.
"You were meant to be the shield," she whispered, her voice fading as the power failed. "But we ran out of time. Sleep. Be the good we couldn't be."
The hologram fractured. The light died. The crystal went cold in his hand.
Valen didn't move. The strongest being in the galaxy, floating in the graveyard of the world that named him. He was a sword drawn after the war was lost. A cure found after the patient was already dead.
He closed his hand. The dead crystal turned to dust.
The silence was absolute. It pressed in on his eyes, his ears, his skin. He was the last drop of water in an infinite desert.
Why?
He closed his eyes, ready to drift back into the star and sleep until the protons decayed.
But then… A touch.
Not a sound—sound can't cross the dark. It was a vibration. A scratch on the record of the universe.
He turned his back on the ruins. He focused. He tuned his senses, pushing past the cosmic radiation, past the static of pulsars, reaching out across the terrifying, infinite black.
And there it was.
A Bleed.
Faint. Drifting from four light-years away. A messy, chaotic tangle of noise. Radio waves. TV broadcasts. Cell data. Leaking out into the universe like smoke from a distant fire.
He didn't know what the signals meant. He didn't know who sent them.
But he knew the physics: Where there is a noise, there is a throat.
Valen opened his eyes. The tears didn't dry, but the despair hardened into something cold and sharp.
He wasn't alone. Somewhere in the dark, another world was awake.
He straightened his body in the void, the cape of his suit drifting like ink against the stars. He looked at the tiny, distant speck of light.
I am coming.
He bent gravity around him like a bowstring. Space warped. With a shockwave that pulverized the nearby asteroids into gravel, he launched himself.
He wasn't mourning anymore. He was a bullet, tearing through the dark, aimed at the only other heart beating in the sky.