"Brother?"
The voice came from beyond the open doorway, almost swallowed by the rumble of the collapsing station. I knew that voice. I had heard it in our apartment, on the street, and whenever Nyelle was frightened but pretending she wasn’t. Yet the memory of the figure behind the barrier stopped me from moving toward it.
My mother stepped in front of me. "Don’t answer."
At the top of the stairs, the man in the white coat watched us without the slightest concern for the destruction around him. Dust drifted past his shoes, but his clothes remained spotless, as though the collapsing facility had decided he was the one thing it wouldn’t touch.
"You’re late," he said.
My mother’s face drained of color. "I thought you were dead."
He smiled faintly. "You thought many things."
His attention shifted to me, studying my face with unsettling familiarity. "Veyric. You’ve grown."
"Who are you?" I tightened my grip around the signal key. "And where is my sister?"
Something changed in his expression at the second question. It was barely noticeable, just a narrowing of his eyes and a glance toward the doorway behind him, but it told me I had touched something important.
"Which one?" he asked.
My mother’s fingers closed around my wrist.
I stared at him, remembering the false Nyelle behind the barrier and the System’s warning that her original location had been confirmed. Two voices had called me brother, and now this man was suggesting that even my question had more than one answer.
"Stop playing games," I said.
"I’m not. You simply haven’t understood the situation."
"Then explain it."
"No."
I almost laughed. Everyone in this place seemed determined to tell me how little I understood while refusing to explain anything that mattered. I pulled free of my mother’s grip and climbed the stairs, unwilling to trust either of them simply because one wore a white coat and the other had given birth to me.
Both had kept secrets. Neither had earned the right to make my decisions for me.
The man stepped aside and pointed into the room behind him. "She’s in the observation room."
Beyond the doorway, monitors displayed different views of the ruined city, its roads split open and silver veins spreading through the asphalt. One screen showed a small room with a metal door, where Nyelle sat on the floor with her knees drawn to her chest and one sleeve torn.
"Nyelle!" I shouted.
She lifted her head and looked directly toward the camera. The image flickered, but her expression remained clear enough to make my stomach tighten.
"Veyric, if you can hear me, don’t come down here."
The screen went black.
I turned on the man. "What did you do to her?"
"Nothing. Something was trying to reach her, so I kept her contained."
"You locked my sister in a room."
"To keep her alive."
"Then unlock the door."
"Not yet."
I grabbed the front of his coat, forcing him to meet my eyes. He didn’t struggle; instead, he glanced at the silver markings beneath my skin.
"You have your father’s temper," he remarked.
"You have three seconds to stop talking about my father."
His amusement disappeared. "Did the System explain those markings? Did your mother tell you why the structure responds to your hand?"
"Neither of you has explained enough."
"Then you’re in greater danger than you realize."
He reached toward a panel beside the monitors, and a sequence of symbols appeared across its surface.
[SUBJECT 02: ACCESS RESTRICTED.]
He pressed another symbol, but the message remained unchanged.
[AUTHORIZATION DENIED.]
I released his coat. "You said you could unlock it."
"I should be able to."
"That isn’t the same thing."
"No," he admitted. "It isn’t."
My mother entered the room, her gaze fixed on the warning. "You told me the second response was contained."
"It was. The system has changed."
A new diagram appeared on the central monitor, showing the station’s corridors and two circles beneath the facility. One was white, the other blue, and a thin silver line stretched between them as the white circle moved across the map.
"The two responses," the man explained. "The white circle is associated with your sister’s body. The blue circle is the original response, the source we never managed to identify."
My mother stepped backward. "No. The readings were inconsistent. That doesn’t prove—"
"It proves the structure is restoring a connection severed twenty-four years ago," he interrupted. "Until recently, the two responses remained separate. Now that distinction is disappearing."
I watched the silver line extend toward the blue marker. "What happens when they connect?"
He hesitated long enough to give me my answer.
"If the connection completes, the structure may stop recognizing your sister as an independent subject. Whatever has been suppressed could begin expressing itself through her."
The room seemed to shrink around me. Nyelle had survived the creatures, the ruined streets, and everything the apocalypse had thrown at us, only to become the target of a mystery that had followed our family since before either of us could remember.
"How do we stop it?"
"We need the original chamber. It was designed to distinguish the two signatures, so restoring its configuration might sever the connection without harming either subject."
"And if it fails?"
"Then we’ll find another way."
"That isn’t much of a plan."
"It’s the only honest answer I have."
My mother stared at him with open hatred. "You told us the chamber was safe. You promised the children would be protected."
"I believed it was safe."
"And when it opened, you left us there!"
Her voice cracked through the room, silencing even the distant groaning of the facility in my mind. The man lowered his eyes, and for the first time he looked less like an untouchable observer than someone who had spent years trying to justify a decision he could never undo.
"I tried to shut it down," he said quietly.
"But you left us."
He offered no defense.
The white circle began moving again, and the silver line stretched farther toward its blue counterpart. In my hand, the signal key pulsed with a faint blue light, matching the rhythm of the marker on the screen.
Then the System appeared.
[EXTERNAL RESPONSE DETECTED.]
[CONNECTION PATTERN: RECOGNIZED.]
"Recognized by what?" I whispered.
The message vanished before I could read anything else. When the man asked what I had seen, I told him it was nothing useful; the System had withheld too much for me to build a plan around a message I didn’t understand.
I raised the signal key toward the monitor.
"Veyric, what are you doing?" my mother demanded.
"Testing something."
The blue light brightened. On the map, the white circle stopped moving, and the silver line began retreating toward it, shortening a little at a time.
The man stared at the key. "Where did you get that?"
"My mother gave it to me."
"That’s impossible."
"People keep saying that. It hasn’t made anything less real."
I turned the key slightly, and the line shortened again. Then the display flashed red, the device burned against my palm, and blue light surged through its grooves, spreading across my fingers as the silver markings beneath my skin branched toward my wrist.
"Let go!" the man shouted.
Pain shot up my arm. I tried to release the key, but my fingers refused to cooperate until the surge abruptly stopped and the device clattered onto the floor.
The warning disappeared. For one brief second, the map showed two separate circles.
Then the white circle went dark.
The monitor displaying Nyelle’s room flickered back to life. Her chair lay overturned, the metal door stood open, and a dark trail crossed the floor toward another doorway.
The room was empty.
"No," the man whispered. "That wasn’t supposed to happen."
I seized his coat again. "Where is she?"
"The connection was interrupted. The structure may have transferred her response to another part of the facility."
He pointed at the map, where a new white circle had appeared far beneath the station. The blue circle was gone, and the signal key in my hand had lost its light.
"Can we reach her?" my mother asked.
"Yes." He paused, staring at the new marker. "But we may not be able to bring her back the same way she went in."
I picked up the key and turned toward the doorway. "Show me the way."
The man remained still. "Before we go, you need to understand something. The original response wasn’t trying to reach your sister."
My mother went pale.
He met my eyes. "It was trying to reach you."
A final message appeared before me.
[SUBJECT 01: CONNECTION ESTABLISHED.]
Then another line emerged beneath it.
[WELCOME BACK, ORIGINAL.]
I looked at my right hand. The silver markings had disappeared, replaced by a thin blue line running from my palm to my wrist, pulsing like a second heartbeat.
Somewhere beneath the station, something knocked three times.