POV: Aria Velar
They found him half-buried in dust beneath a crumbling ridge, more dead than alive.
At first, Aria thought he was just another stray, another failed escapee trying to outrun the desert. But when her scanner flickered strangely, she paused. His vitals were irregular. Not dying, something else. Something… shifting.
She knelt beside him as her squad fanned out, rifles raised.
"Another drifter?" Sergeant Rhun asked.
"No," she said quietly. "He's not like the others."
The boy's eyes flickered open. He looked up at her, blinking through blood and ash. He didn't flinch when he saw the crest on her armor.
"Are you here to take me back?" he rasped.
His voice was dry and cracked, but calm. Too calm.
Aria stared at him.
"No," she said after a moment. "But I should."
His lips curled in a faint, bitter smile. "Then why aren't you?"
She didn't answer. Not then. Not while her scanner was still flashing something it shouldn't.
They brought him to Outpost Varin, one of House Velar's hidden stations near the Riftspire border. Quiet. Isolated. A place meant for recovering soldiers or hiding secrets.
He didn't talk much. He watched everything.
When he spoke, he was sharp. But there was a distance in him, like his body was here, but his mind was still somewhere dark. Aria had seen it before in soldiers pulled from lost battles.
But Kael wasn't a soldier.
Not yet.
Later that night, when her squad was asleep and Kael was being treated in the med-bay, Aria opened the scan log again.
The results weren't just strange. They were scrubbed.
Every time she tried to analyze his gene signature, it looped.
By who, she didn't know. Not GenCore. Not the Ascendancy.
No, this was deeper. Like someone had built a wall around the truth.
But for one brief moment, she'd seen something.
A mark.
A spiral.
Not a logo. Not tech. A gene signature, something organic, imprinted into the boy's DNA like a memory passed down from another world.
She leaned back, tense.
There was no record of any Spiral genome in the military's private database. Which meant this wasn't an accident.
Someone had created him.
And someone didn't want anyone else to know.
She checked on him before sleep.
Kael was awake, staring at the ceiling. His chest was bandaged, his arm freshly sealed from a wound.
"Thanks," he said without looking at her.
"For what?"
"For not asking the wrong questions."
She raised an eyebrow. "What would the wrong questions be?"
He turned toward her. "The ones you already know you won't like the answers to."
Aria studied him in the low light. There was a quiet intelligence in him. No arrogance. Just awareness. Whatever had happened to him at GenCore… it had changed him.
And not just on the outside.
"Kael," she said quietly, "I don't know what you're running from. But if GenCore is scared of you, I'd rather you be under my watch than theirs."
He didn't answer. But his eyes softened, just slightly.
Aria left the med-bay and stepped onto the cold balcony overlooking the canyon. She pulled her cloak tighter as the wind picked up.
"There's something buried inside that boy," she thought.
"And I'm not sure if it's a miracle… or a weapon."
Either way, she was going to find out.
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End of Chapter 5 of volume 2