The house was quiet by nine.
Nel had put Johnny to bed with the careful routine she clearly performed every night, blanket tucked at the corners, glass of water on the small table beside him, curtains drawn against the Sydney night.
She had smoothed his hair back from his forehead and said goodnight in the soft voice of someone who meant it completely, and then she had turned off the light and closed the door.
Johnny lay in the dark and waited.
He listened to the house settle. Sebastian moving through the downstairs rooms, doing whatever Sebastian did at the end of the day.
Hector in his study, the low murmur of a phone call, then silence. A door closing somewhere. Then nothing but the distant sound of the city doing what cities do at night and the small sounds of a large house breathing.
When he was sure everyone was asleep, he sat up.
"Spiral," he said quietly.
We are here, Spiral said. It sounded different tonight. Quieter. More careful with its energy, the way you speak carefully when you are aware of how little you have left.
"You are getting weaker," Johnny said.
Yes. No softening it. We told you the crossing would cost more than we had. We did not exaggerate.
"How long do we have?"
Tonight, Spiral said. Perhaps tomorrow morning at the latest. After that, we will not be able to hold consciousness. We will go into slumber, and we will not surface until your Spiral energy has grown enough to wake us.
Johnny was quiet for a moment.
Outside the window, a car moved along the road below the hill, its headlights briefly washing across the ceiling before fading away.
"Then let's not waste tonight," he said. "Tell me everything."
The power we gave you, Spiral began, is called Spiral energy.
In its most fundamental nature, it is the force of evolution. Of life pushing forward. Of a will refusing to stop.
"What does that mean practically?" Johnny asked. He had learned a long time ago that beautiful descriptions were less useful than specific information.
It means that everything you already are, it makes more, Spiral said.
Your strength, your speed, your perception, your endurance. The Spiral energy flows through you and amplifies what it finds. The stronger your will, the more it gives you.
"And the limit?"
We do not know, Spiral said simply. We have never had a host who was able to reach his limit.
Some hosts were young, others were older. Unfinished. Their will was still becoming something.
Yours already is something. What that means is that we genuinely cannot predict.
Johnny thought about that.
"What else can it do beyond amplifying?"
That is where your imagination becomes the limit rather than the power itself, Spiral said. We have seen hosts use Spiral energy in ways we did not anticipate, because they thought of possibilities we had not considered.
What you can conceive of doing with it, with enough development, you will likely be able to do.
There is one particular affinity we noticed in you during the crossing, Spiral continued. Your memories contain a deep instinct for technologies. For understanding how things connect and work. Machines. Processes. The logic underneath complex things.
"Logistics," Johnny said.
Yes. We believe your Spiral energy will develop a strong connection to technology. To machines. You will likely be able to interface with them in ways that go beyond normal parameters. But that will come with time and practice.
"How do I practice without you here to guide me?"
You already know how, Spiral said. The same way you learned everything else in your life. By doing it. By failing. By paying attention to what the failure tells you and trying again.
Johnny looked at his small hands in the dark.
"You said there was something else," he said. "Something that followed us."
The quality of Spiral's presence changed. Not fear exactly. Something more like the careful attention of someone reporting a real danger without embellishment.
Yes, it said. When we bonded in the void, something else was present. We felt it as we crossed. An energy that is the opposite of everything we are.
"Opposite how?"
We are the force of evolution. Of life moving forward. Of will creating possibility. Spiral paused. What followed us is the force opposite ours, a force of restraint. Of will being broken down rather than built up. It is called the Anti-Spiral energy, and it is our oldest enemy, and it has been fighting us across dimensions for longer than your civilization has existed.
Johnny was quiet.
"It is here," he said. "In this world."
Yes. We felt it; it seemed to have found a host before we lost the sensitivity to track it. Someone in this city. Someone with enough anger and ambition and emptiness to carry it.
"What will it do?"
It will grow, Spiral said.
Slowly at first. Its host will not understand what they are carrying or what they want. They will think the power is theirs. They will use it for their own purposes and believe themselves to be in control. Another pause. They will not be in control. The Anti-Spiral does not share. It consumes. By the time its host understands that, it will be too late for them.
"And what does it want with me specifically?"
To stop us, Spiral said simply. We are its opposite and its enemy. While you exist and grow, the possibility of its defeat exists. It will not ignore that.
Johnny thought about a man somewhere in Sydney going to sleep tonight, not knowing that something red had found him in an alley and decided he was useful.
"I will be ready," he said.
We know, Spiral said. That is not the part we worry about.
"What is the part you worry about?"
Spiral was quiet for a long moment.
When it spoke again, its voice was different. Quieter. More personal. Less like a cosmic force and more like something that had spent enough time inside a person to care what happened to them.
You carry things alone, it said. You have always carried things alone. Your whole life, in both worlds, you have been the one who holds things together for others without anyone holding things together for you. You sent money home every month. You worked your shifts. You managed. You adapted. You never asked for help because you had decided somewhere along the way that asking was not something you did.
Johnny said nothing.
That will not work here, Spiral said gently but directly. The things you will face in this world are too large for one person to carry alone. You have a grandfather who loves you and does not know how to say it easily.
You have Nel, who would do anything for you. You will find others. Let them in. Not all the way, not immediately, but let them in.
The Spiral energy grows strongest when it is not isolated, because isolation brings loneliness, it continued. It is the force of life moving forward. Remember that.
Johnny looked at the ceiling.
He thought about his mother in Luanda, about the way she never let him see her break because she had decided that was protecting him, and about the ways it had also kept her alone inside her own strength.
"I hear you," he said.
Good. A pause. There is one more thing.
"Say it."
You were not chosen because you were the most powerful candidate we found, Spiral said. They did not choose you because of any outstanding characteristic that obviously distinguishes you from everyone else. Your ordinary qualities led to your selection. Because of the consistency. Because half of everything you gave away without being asked. You found things in life worth caring about, despite the hardships you faced.
Do not forget that when the power grows, the world starts treating you differently. The person you were before is the reason any of this works. Do not leave him behind.
Johnny was very still.
Something had tightened in his chest, and he was not going to name it or examine it too closely right now.
"I won't," he said.
We know, Spiral said.
And then, in a more silent tone:
We will come back. When you are ready. When you have grown enough to hold us properly. We will feel it, and we will wake, and we will be here.
"I know," Johnny said.
Goodbye, Johnny.
"Goodbye, Spiral."
The green light behind his eyes faded slowly, like an ember going dark. Not extinguished. Just banked down so deep it was almost impossible to feel. Almost.
He lay back on the pillow and stared at the ceiling in the dark.
The house was quiet around him. The city hummed its distant hum. Somewhere downstairs, a clock marked the hour with a single soft tone.
Johnny breathed.
He was alone in a way he had not been since the void. No voice behind his left ear. No presence in his chest. Just him, in a small body in a large house in Sydney, with a grandfather asleep down the hall and a villain somewhere in the city and a power he was going to have to learn entirely by himself.
He thought about what Spiral had said. About carrying things alone. About letting people in.
He thought about Hector's eyes, noticing something different about him, and said nothing about it.
He thought about Nel smoothing his hair back with the automatic ease of someone who had decided he was worth caring for before he had done anything to earn it.
He thought about his mother in his old world, who was probably asleep right now, who had dreamed about the quarry and told him something was waiting there and had been right, who would never know where her son had gone or that he was somewhere safe and loved and not alone.
He hoped she was alright.
He hoped she knew, somehow, the way mothers sometimes knew things, that he was okay and not dead but got a chance to live.
He breathed in. He breathed out.
Calm settled through him like water finding its level.
He had work to do. A grandfather to protect. A power to grow. A villain to eventually face. An enemy that had followed him across the space between worlds and was already moving in the dark.
He was four years old and twenty-three years old, and he was alone, and he was not afraid.
Tomorrow he would begin.
Tonight, he let himself rest.
In a part of Sydney that the guidebooks did not cover, in a room above a bar that smelled of cigarettes and old decisions, a man named Rex sat on a bare mattress and looked at his hands.
They were glowing faintly red.
He had woken up like this. He did not remember going to sleep. The last thing he remembered was the alley, the cold air, the cigarette burning down between his fingers, and then something entering him like a current running through water.
He felt extraordinary.
He felt like he could put his fist through the wall, and the wall would apologize.
He did not know what had happened to him. He did not know what he was carrying. He did not know that somewhere across the city, a four-year-old boy had just said goodbye to the thing that was its oldest enemy.
He only knew the power.
And he was already thinking about what to do with it.