"Careful, Veyron—walking's dangerous when you can't even push yourself back up."
Kade didn't stop. Three more steps to the eastern stairwell, then he'd be out. Last day at Valendris Academy, and Marcus Trell still couldn't resist.
"I'm talking to you, you grey-eyed freak."
Kade's jaw tightened. The "grey-eyed" part—that always landed. Most Awakened had eyes that shifted color based on their abilities. Fire wielders got amber flecks. Lightning users developed violet rings. Even the weakest E-ranks showed something.
Kade's eyes stayed flat grey. Colorless. Like dirty water.
He stopped walking but didn't turn around. "Marcus. You know what's pathetic? You'll graduate today, get your C-rank deployment, and in five years you'll be exactly where you are now. Middle-tier. Forgettable. But you'll still tell yourself you're special because at least you're not me."
The hallway went quiet.
"The fuck did you just—"
"I'm saying you need me more than I need you." Kade turned now, meeting Marcus's eyes. "Without someone to look down on, you're just... average."
Marcus's hands ignited with purple lightning, but his face had gone pale. The truth had hit harder than any insult.
"You smug little—" The lightning built between his palms, crackling wild. Not controlled. Angry.
Kade watched it come. He always watched it come. Some part of him—the same broken part that made him talk back when he should run—needed to see it. Needed to feel the impact. Needed proof that he could take it and still stand up.
The bolt hit like a hammer to the chest.
His body lifted, weightless for a moment, then the stone wall punched the air from his lungs. He felt something crack—rib, probably—and tasted copper.
"Someone's fighting!" A girl's voice, eager with gossip-hunger.
Students materialized like scavengers. Kade knew the pattern by heart. Someone would check on him—usually one of the healer-track students who hadn't learned yet that altruism had social costs.
Today it was Serra Vohn. She got three steps toward him before recognition hit.
"Oh. It's Veyron."
She stopped. Turned. Walked back to her friends without another word.
Kade stayed on the ground an extra moment, catching his breath, checking the damage. The rib was bruised, not broken. He'd had worse.
"You know he does it on purpose, right?" One of Serra's friends, loud enough to carry. "Says things to make people hit him. It's fucked up."
"Attention-seeking," another agreed. "My psych elective teacher says it's textbook self-destructive behavior."
They weren't wrong. Kade pulled himself up, retrieved his bag, and left through the side exit while they were still diagnosing him.
***
The apartment was smaller than some people's closets. One room in a government housing block where they stored the war orphans who'd Awakened too weak to matter and too young to abandon completely.
Kade had eight hours before mandatory deployment. Tomorrow morning, he'd report to Outpost Seven—a glorified watchtower on the edge of a destabilized Rift zone. F-ranks got assigned as "early warning systems," which was military-speak for "expendable sensors that scream when something's coming."
Life expectancy at Outpost Seven: four months.
He should sleep. Pack. Eat something.
Instead, he opened the desk drawer and pulled out the tablet.
Sixteen years old, and he'd spent the last six trying to open this thing. One hundred and seventy-three failed attempts. He'd documented each one in a notebook—methodical, obsessive, increasingly desperate.
The tablet had been his mother's. The government agent who'd delivered it said she'd filed paperwork specifically requesting it go to Kade if she died. Not sold. Not repossessed. Given to him.
Which meant it mattered.
Which meant he was failing her by not figuring it out.
Tonight's attempt: Rift residue. He'd scraped it off his boots after a training exercise near a minor tear. The stuff was essentially crystallized dimensional energy—corrosive to normal matter, reactive to Awakened abilities.
He spread the grey-black paste across the tablet's surface and waited.
Nothing.
He wiped it off. The tablet remained perfect. Unmarked. Indestructible.
"Why would you leave me something I can't use?" Kade asked the empty room. "Was this a test? Was I supposed to figure something out? Because I'm—"
His voice cracked. He swallowed it down.
"I'm trying."
The wall screen flickered on—automatic evening broadcast.
"—increased Rift activity in sectors seven through twelve. All Awakened personnel should report—"
Kade muted it. He'd heard enough.
He started to rewrap the tablet when exhaustion made his hands clumsy. The oilcloth slipped. He grabbed for it, misjudged, and his palm scraped hard across the tablet's edge.
Blood welled immediately—a clean slice across his lifeline.
He cursed, reaching for a rag, but the drop fell first.
Landed directly on the circular symbol.
The tablet screamed.
Not sound—sensation. A vibration that went through his bones, his teeth, his skull. The symbol blazed silver-white, so bright he had to look away, but the light followed him, filled his vision, poured into his eyes like liquid mercury.
The tablet tore itself from his hands and rose, unfolding in geometries that shouldn't exist—panels within panels, angles that hurt to perceive.
Text erupted across his vision, not on the tablet but inside his mind:
[VEYRON BLOODLINE CONFIRMED]
[NEURAL PATTERN RECOGNIZED]
[SIX PRIOR GENERATIONS DECEASED]
[PRIMARY INHERITOR DEFAULTED TO: KADE VEYRON]
"What are you—" His voice sounded distant, wrong.
[WARNING: SUBJECT CURRENT CAPACITY INSUFFICIENT]
[AWAKENED RANK: F]
[SURVIVAL PROBABILITY: 34%]
[PROCEED WITH INTEGRATION?]
"Wait—"
[GENETIC SAFEGUARDS DETECTED]
[MATERNAL OVERRIDE ENGAGED]
[INTEGRATION FORCED]
The tablet exploded into light.
Kade felt it enter him—not through his skin but through something deeper. Every cell in his body caught fire. His nervous system became a wire carrying too much current. He tried to scream but his throat had stopped working.
Memories that weren't his slammed through his consciousness:
His mother, younger, wearing a technician's coat, assembling the tablet with hands that shook. "If the war takes us, this has to be enough. He'll need every advantage—"
His father's voice, rough with urgency: "You're asking him to carry something that killed your entire family line—"
"It didn't kill them. They weren't *ready*. But I've made changes. Limiters. Safeguards. If he activates it young enough, if his neural pathways are still plastic—"
"You're gambling with our son's life—"
"I'm giving him a *chance*."
The memory shattered. Reality came back in pieces:
Pain. Incredible, all-consuming pain.
Light pouring from his skin in silver fractals.
The tablet dissolving, flowing into his chest like water into sand.
Words appearing in his vision:
[PRIME SYSTEM INTEGRATION: 47% COMPLETE]
[SUBJECT VITAL SIGNS: CRITICAL]
[ENGAGING SURVIVAL PROTOCOLS]
[CONSCIOUSNESS PRESERVATION: PARTIAL]
[ESTIMATED TIME TO COMPLETION: 11 HOURS]
Kade's vision went dark.
His last conscious thought wasn't fear or confusion.
It was relief.
At least if he died here, he wouldn't have to go to Outpost Seven.
***
When Kade's body finally stopped convulsing, when the light faded to a soft pulse beneath his skin, a final message appeared:
[INTEGRATION COMPLETE]
[PRIME SYSTEM ACTIVE]
[PREVIOUS RANK: F]
[CURRENT RANK: (ERROR - RECALIBRATION REQUIRED) ]
[ABILITIES UNLOCKED: 1 OF 47]
[WARNING: SYSTEM CONTAINS RESTRICTED PROTOCOLS]
[WARNING: DETECTION RISK SEVERE]
[RECOMMENDATION: CONCEAL ALL MANIFESTATIONS UNTIL RANK STABILIZATION]
The words hung there, then faded.
In the silence, Kade's chest rose and fell with shallow breaths. The tablet was gone, consumed, integrated into something that no longer fit within the world's ranking system.
Outside, the city glowed under distant Rift-light—tears in reality that pulsed like wounds in the sky.
Somewhere in a military command center, an officer checked deployment rosters.
Kade Veyron. F-rank. Outpost Seven. Expected survival: four months.
They had no idea what they were sending into the dark.
Neither did Kade.
Not yet.