The ringing wouldn’t stop.

  Not in my ears. In his.

  I reached up instinctively, but there was nothing—no hands, no body. I wasn’t really here. I was watching, but I was also inside him, seeing what he saw, feeling what he felt.

  Julian turned away from the study.

  I saw it from where I stood—his small frame moving without hesitation, without panic. But then I was him again, seeing through his eyes as he reached for the door, small fingers curling around the knob.

  He started to close it—

  too slow.

  A scream tore through the house. His mother shoved past him.

  I flinched. Julian didn’t.

  I saw it from my own eyes now—his mother knocking him aside like he wasn’t even there, barely noticing as she nearly sent him stumbling. She crashed through the doorway, into the study. The moment she saw, her legs gave out. She dropped against the doorframe, her hands clawing at it as a sound I didn’t know how to describe left her. Wailing. Not just grief—something deeper, something primal. Like a wounded animal that knew it was dying.

  She kept saying his father’s name. Over and over.

  It meant nothing. To me. To him.

  Julian didn’t register it. Didn’t react.

  Something tightened in my chest, pressing hard against my ribs, my lungs.

  Julian just watched her.

  Footsteps. Fast. Heavy.

  I turned.

  Roman.

  His brother. That name stuck.

  His breath came too fast, his pulse hammering loud enough that I swore I could hear it in my own ears. He shoved past me like I wasn’t even there, and for a second, I was him too—seeing through his eyes, feeling his stomach twist as he reached the study.

  The blood.

  The chair.

  The mouth still open in a final, silent word that never came.

  The world tipped.

  Roman staggered back, his shoulder slamming into the wall. His chest heaved, his hands shaking, his fingers digging into the peeling wallpaper.

  And then he vomited.

  The bitter taste hit the back of my throat, bile rising up like it belonged to me.

  No. No, no, no—

  I wrenched myself out of him, out of his body, gasping.

  But Julian was still there.

  Still watching.

  The world shuddered, shifting into focus.

  His mother was screaming.

  Roman was shaking, wiping his mouth, trying to steady himself, trying to breathe. His eyes darted up, locking onto Julian.

  And then something changed.

  His expression twisted, raw and horrified.

  "Why are you just standing there?! You don’t even care, do you, Freak?!"

  His voice was rough. Accusing.

  Julian didn’t answer.

  I watched him turn, watched him walk down the hall. And then I was yanked after him, the world tilting as I followed him into his room.

  The door shut.

  The house was still loud. Sirens in the distance. The murmurs of neighbors pressing against thin walls. The grief spilling out from down the hall.

  Julian sat at his desk.

  I wanted to scream at him. To shake him. To do something. But I couldn’t move. I could only watch.

  He had memorized thousands of equations by now. He could tell you how to fix a broken circuit board, how to calculate the escape velocity needed to leave Earth’s gravity. But he didn’t know what to do with this.

  With grief. With silence. With the hollow ache in his chest that he couldn’t solve like a math problem.

  So he ignored it.

  Instead, his fingers moved to the keyboard.

  His father’s credentials would expire soon.

  That thought settled like ice in the back of his mind. A cold, logical fact. His father was dead. His death would be logged in the system. The moment that happened, their home network access would be revoked. The privileges that came with his father’s employment—his security clearances, his unrestricted access to government databases, to archives, to deep space research—would be gone.

  Tomorrow, maybe. Or the day after.

  But not yet.

  Not tonight.

  Julian had been working on this for months—piecing together fragments, stolen data, tracing faint anomalies in the noise of deep space signals. The pieces were there—buried under layers of outdated security protocols, hidden in the neglected systems of long-abandoned telescopes, lost in the bureaucratic rot of Earth’s dying space programs.

  He had wanted to surprise his father with the discovery. He had imagined it a hundred different ways—watching his father’s tired, defeated eyes light up again, seeing that spark return, proving to him that it hadn’t all been for nothing. That the dream wasn’t dead.

  But he had also known what his father would say.

  The anger. The disappointment. “You hacked into restricted networks?” The fury that Julian had used his credentials, that he had risked everything, that he had broken the rules.

  It would have been a fight. His father would have yelled, told him he was reckless, told him this wasn’t how things were done.

  But now?

  Now, his father wouldn’t be mad.

  Wouldn’t be proud.

  Wouldn’t feel anything ever again.

  The house was still thick with the scent of blood and gunpowder. His mother’s sobs still echoed from the other room, raw and empty. But Julian didn’t turn his head. He didn’t look away from the screen.

  He had been close.

  But tonight, there was no more time.

  Tonight, he had to know.

  The question had burned in him for as long as he could remember, a dream as bright as his fathers.

  Not just are we alone?—that was too simple, too na?ve.

  The real question—the one that twisted in his ribs, that kept him awake at night—was who else is out there?

  And what would they think of us?

  His fingers flew across the keys, inputting sequences, bypassing firewalls. NASA’s systems were old, neglected, their security riddled with blind spots. They hadn’t mattered in decades. No one was watching them.

  But he was.

  And for the first time, he wasn’t just running calculations or theorizing probabilities.

  He was searching.

  The screen flickered, data scrolling in rapid succession, numbers bleeding into graphs, timestamps aligning into something coherent. The information unraveled before him, lines of code giving way to raw transmissions—silent whispers from the abyss, signals cast across impossible distances.

  Then, an image.

  Not just flickering lights or gas formations misread as artificial structures. Not just gravitational distortions playing tricks on weak instruments.

  Actual movement.

  Actual technology.

  Proof.

  Julian stared.

  His small fingers tightened around the keyboard until his knuckles turned white.

  They’re out there.

  And we are nothing to them.

  The thought rooted itself deep inside him, wrapping around something raw—something that had always been there.

  "This was where it began," Altis murmured. "Before he became the man history remembers. Before he stopped reaching and started taking."

  Humanity was weak.

  But he could make them ready. Not as they were now—fragile, fearful, clinging to dying empires and broken ideals. They needed to be something else. Something greater. Something designed to survive.

  A new type of human.

  He didn’t know what it would take—not yet. But if humanity had any future among the stars, it would be his humanity. The one he would create.

  They weren’t ready. Not for the stars. Not for anything. They fought over scraps on a dying world, tearing each other apart for power that meant nothing in the vastness of space.

  But he would be ready.

  "Back then, he still believed humanity could be lifted up," Altis continued, voice steady. "That knowledge, discipline, and strength could reshape them. That the future could be guided, not forced."

  His whole life had been spent in the shadow of a man who was supposed to be brilliant. A scientist—one of the last true minds in a world that didn’t care. But knowledge alone had never been enough.

  NASA had been gutted, space privatized, its future sold to men who saw the stars as a playground for their own egos. His father had fought to stay in the field, to be part of something greater. But no one wanted him. No one needed him.

  And in the end, he had been just another casualty.

  Not by accident. Not by illness.

  By choice.

  Julian still remembered the smell of gunpowder. The smear of blood on peeling wallpaper. His mother’s hands clawing at his father’s body like she could somehow put the pieces back together.

  His father had been a man of knowledge. Of theories. Of discovery.

  And he had been weak.

  He had let them take everything—his work, his dignity, his will to live. He had let them win.

  Julian would not.

  Because space was still out there. The dream wasn’t dead.

  It would live on.

  Not through governments or corporations or men too small-minded to see what lay beyond their own reflections.

  Through him.

  Because he wasn’t weak.

  He wasn’t afraid.

  The universe didn’t belong to the ones who had stolen his father’s work. It didn’t belong to the billionaires choking the last breath out of a dying Earth. It didn’t belong to the nation-states clinging to their crumbling power, pretending democracy still meant something while oligarchs pulled every string. It didn’t belong to the dictators who ruled with iron fists, nor to the corporations who did the same with a handshake and a contract.

  Empires rose and fell, always built on greed, always devouring themselves from the inside. The American Empire had been no different. It had prided itself on liberty, on progress, on the promise of a future greater than the past. And yet, in the end, it had rotted away like all the others. Its freedom sold to the highest bidder. Its wealth hoarded. Its people left to wither, told to be grateful for the scraps they were given.

  Humanity had never been ready for the stars.

  But Julian was.

  And if humanity couldn’t reach them on its own, then he would make sure it did.

  "He thought he was saving them," Altis said quietly. "That if he could just make them stronger, they could stand among the stars as equals."

  He had dreamed, once, of joining them—of finding something greater, of proving that humanity belonged out there. That they could be more.

  "But the world had other plans," Altis murmured.

  Not yet. Not here.

  "He still wanted to lift them up," Altis continued. "But someday, he would realize that lifting wasn’t enough. Someday, he would decide they had to be remade."

  Because this world didn’t matter.

  The slums, the corruption, the endless cycle of war and failure—none of it mattered.

  Only the future.

  Only the stars.

  And beyond them—whatever came next.

  Julian’s fingers twitched, his focus returning to the screen.

  The signal was still there, waiting.

  His mind was already light-years away.

  I could see it now.

  His dream.

  Then, he turned his head, and my eyes followed—out his small window, past the smog and city lights, past the flashing red and blue of sirens.

  To the stars.

  And this child—this child was not done.

  He was just getting started.

  The room flickered, the memory shifting at the edges, beginning to dissolve.

  Then, a voice beside me. Steady. Measured.

  "That was the moment you could have been saved."

  I turned.

  Altis stood where he always did, hands folded behind his back, watching. His gaze wasn’t sharp or demanding, but patient, expectant—like he was waiting for me to put the pieces together on my own.

  I swallowed hard, my throat dry.

  "It wasn’t his father’s death that defined him," Altis continued. "That was just a spark. But this—" he gestured to the screen, to the signal blinking against the darkness "—this was the moment he became something else."

  The memory wavered, the shadows at the edges flickering.

  "This was the moment he chose what kind of man he would become," Altis said.

  I knew he was right. I felt it in my chest, pressing against my ribs like something solid.

  "He could have mourned. He could have let himself feel. But instead, he buried it. He turned grief into drive. And once he learned to do that, he never stopped."

  The air thickened, pressing inward like a weight, the remnants of memory twisting into something darker.

  "His mind was vast. Beyond genius, beyond calculation. Even as a child, he could see the patterns in the world others couldn’t. He could solve problems no one had even realized existed."

  Julian sat hunched over his desk, his gaze fixed on the screen—unmoving, unblinking.

  His ice-blue eyes. Deep, piercing. Not completely empty. Not as cold as before.

  But there was something else in them now. A spark. A certainty. A revelation. He wasn’t thinking about Earth anymore.

  Altis exhaled. "This was the night he found the truth." His voice was quiet, but heavy. "And the night he decided that humanity, as it was, would never be enough."

  I clenched my fists.

  Altis’ gaze never left me.

  "This, Sol. This is where it truly began."

  The memory cracked like glass, dissolving into darkness.

  Smaller now. Claustrophobic. The middle-class house was gone, replaced by something barely holding itself together. Water stains bled through the ceiling, the wallpaper peeling in long, curling strips. The floor creaked under every step.

  Julian sat at a rickety desk shoved against the corner, hunched over a stack of salvaged textbooks and yellowed notebooks. A single lamp flickered beside him, casting long, jagged shadows. The air was heavy, stale, suffocating.

  The front door slammed. Julian didn’t flinch.

  I turned, already knowing what I’d see.

  His mother.

  She stumbled inside, heels clicking unevenly, the strap of one broken, the hem of her cheap dress torn. Her lipstick smudged, hair tangled. Behind her, a man followed, laughing, breath thick with alcohol and sweat.

  Not the first time. Not the last.

  Julian kept working.

  The man’s laugh was slow, drawn out. "Kid still awake?"

  His mother waved him off. "He won’t bother us."

  The bedroom door closed.

  The walls felt closer now. The air pressed in. The sounds of the apartment—creaking bedsprings, muffled voices—pushed against Julian’s world, but he never lifted his head.

  His fingers twitched around his pen.

  I moved closer, looking over his shoulder.

  Blueprints. Equations. Notes written in cramped, tiny letters, filling every inch of space. Half the pages smudged from being rewritten over and over.

  This wasn’t schoolwork.

  School had ended the day they lost their home.

  His brother was gone most nights now, running with the gang that had swallowed him whole. His mother—she worked the only job left for women like her.

  And Julian—

  He was here.

  Alone.

  His world had shrunk to the size of this tiny, rotting apartment. To stolen books and secondhand knowledge—physics, biology, theoretical sciences—all things he had devoured in the brief window before Wikipedia was nuked by corporations desperate to monopolize knowledge. The damn charter schools had swallowed the public ones whole, free education buried beneath paywalls and corporate-owned curriculums. Finding a school district at all was rare now, unless you were in the top ten percent. And the one percent? They had never needed schools to begin with.

  He liked equations. They had answers. Right or wrong. No hesitation, no fear, no grief—just logic. The world outside was chaos, people driven by things that made no sense. Pain, regret, love.

  The only thing he had ever felt was rage. And a dream.

  My stomach dropped—if it existed in this place at all.

  Altis's voice was steady, unwavering. "Your father was never like other men. He was never concerned with wealth, with power for power’s sake. The oligarchs fought over the scraps of a dying world, but Julian—" he exhaled, almost in admiration, almost in sorrow, "—he only ever had one goal."

  The dream wavered, shifting as if the memory itself knew the weight of what came next.

  "Humanity’s conquest of the stars."

  A future far beyond the streets he was born into, far beyond the suffocating power of the wealthy who hoarded knowledge like a dragon’s gold. They thought they controlled everything. They thought they had already won. But they were shortsighted, their ambitions small. They fought over scraps, over land, over wealth.

  They couldn’t see the real prize.

  The stars.

  Altis was quiet for a moment, watching as Julian continued to scribble equations, the dim light of his lamp flickering in the cracked windowpane. "He would have been a goddamn hero, if only he had learned to love the people he wanted to save."

  But numbers never let him down. A formula, once solved, stayed solved.

  And despite the odds, he was learning anyway.

  Not for a test. Not for a grade.

  For something else.

  His pen pressed too hard, the tip nearly tearing through the paper. The cold anger inside him had been growing for years. Now, it had settled—hard, icy, unshakable.

  Altis exhaled beside me, his voice quiet. "He was always a man of progress, even with a world falling apart around him. Before his lab, he had his room. His workshop."

  Julian’s grip on his pen tightened. He didn’t look up. Didn’t cry. Didn’t scream. Just kept writing.

  The memory shifted again.

  The same apartment, but worse. The walls sagged under years of neglect, the ceiling stained with water damage, the floor warped where leaks had seeped into the wood. Mold crept along the edges of the room, clinging to the corners like rot. The kitchen sink was full of dishes, crusted with things too old to name. The air was stale, thick with sickness and cigarette smoke, the sour stench of unwashed clothes and cheap liquor woven into everything.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Julian stood in the middle of it. Taller now. Bonier. His frame was all sharp edges, his clothes hanging loose on him like they had been meant for someone else—someone bigger, someone healthier. Across the small table, his mother coughed into her sleeve, the sound rattling low in her chest. She was getting worse, but not bad enough yet. She had made dinner, a sad thing of rice and cheap broth, something she used to dress up with seasoning when she could afford it. She was trying. And Julian, for some reason, let himself sit across from her. Not because he was hungry. Because she wanted him to.

  The moment didn’t last.

  BANG. BANG. BANG.

  The front door shook.

  His mother flinched. Julian didn’t. He didn’t need to check who it was. The rhythm of the knocks, the impatient weight behind them—Roman. Another handout. Another excuse.

  The door rattled again.

  “Open up! Julian, open the fucking door!”

  His mother set down her spoon, a quiet sigh escaping her. Not even fear—just resignation. “He’s your brother.” Her voice was soft, frayed at the edges. “Let him in.”

  Julian wiped his mouth, swallowed. The broth was flavorless. Hollow. Like her words. Like the feeling in his chest. He rose to his feet, moving slow, deliberate. If he didn’t, she would get up herself. He wasn’t doing this for Roman. He was doing it so she wouldn’t.

  The lock clicked. The door swung open.

  Roman stumbled inside, reeking of sweat, stale smoke, and whatever he had shot up with this time. His pupils were blown, his face damp, panic etched deep into his features. No. Not panic. Fear. And behind him—

  The sound hit first.

  Sirens. Loud. Close. Too close. Then flashing red and blue, slamming against the walls of the hallway like a heartbeat, pounding in his skull.

  Cops.

  Julian exhaled, slow. The fucking junkie.

  "You led them here?" His voice barely rose, barely carried over the sirens.

  Roman didn’t answer. Just staggered inside, slamming the door behind him. His hands were shaking. "I—Julian, man, listen—"

  Julian was already stepping back. Already realizing there was no getting out of this. Already angry.

  Not scared. Never scared.

  Just done.

  Then—

  The front door exploded inward. A boot to the center. Splinters in the air. Then shouting. Then force.

  The first hit sent Roman sprawling.

  The second slammed Julian into the wall.

  The impact barely registered before a fist buried into his gut, knocking the air from his lungs. He heard his mother screaming.

  She tried to run to them.

  A cop caught her wrist, shoved her back. "Stay where you are, whore."

  Julian saw the slap before it landed. A brutal backhand across her face. She gasped, stumbled, hit the floor hard.

  Something cracked inside him.

  Not fear. Not even the usual anger.

  Only calculation.

  Roman was still struggling—and that’s what made it worse.

  One of the officers drove a knee into Roman’s ribs, pinning him. Another caught Julian’s jaw, slamming his head back against the plaster.

  He barely felt it.

  "Fucking scum," one of the cops sneered.

  Julian stayed quiet. Expression blank.

  Roman wasn’t. He was shouting, cursing, flailing like a rat caught in a trap. Like he didn’t already know how this worked.

  It wasn’t a fight. It was a beating.

  And it wouldn’t stop until they got bored.

  Julian barely felt the next hit. The next. The next.

  The shouting faded. The pain blurred into nothing. His ribs burned, his lip was split, but inside—cold.

  "He learned young that suffering didn’t matter," Altis murmured. "Pain was just information. A warning system. Irrelevant."

  "As long as his bones weren’t broken, as long as he could still move, he could keep going."

  So he waited.

  Because they would get bored eventually. They always did.

  Roman kept shouting, kicking, struggling. He managed to land a hit—a wild, unfocused punch that barely clipped the officer’s side.

  That was all it took.

  They turned on him.

  Boots. Fists. The sound of breath being knocked from his lungs, of something breaking, of a choked, ragged gasp.

  Julian watched.

  His ribs ached. His face burned.

  And he watched.

  "The laws weren’t real," Altis whispered. "The idea of justice was a lie told by men who had never been on the receiving end of a boot."

  "Julian already knew that. The beatings came the same, whether it was his brother or the cops. The only difference was the uniform."

  His mother groaned from the floor, clutching her face, dazed.

  Julian’s breath came steady. Even.

  He had read about justice. He knew the statistics, the legal codes, the supposed protections written into law. None of it mattered.

  Words on a page weren’t shields.

  Theories didn’t stop fists.

  The people who wrote those laws weren’t here.

  Weren’t watching his brother bleed into the floor.

  And for the first time—not a revelation, but a confirmation of what he had always known—knowledge alone wasn’t enough.

  "Force shaped the world."

  "Force determined who lived and who didn’t."

  "A solution without power was just an idea."

  Roman choked, spitting blood onto the floor, his body curling in on itself.

  Julian stared at him. His thoughts were cold. Quiet.

  This was the end of it.

  He had spent years waiting for Roman to prove him wrong. To get clean. To fight back. To be something other than dead weight dragging them down.

  But he never had.

  And Julian had run out of patience.

  The cops didn’t kill him that night.

  They got bored first. Dragged him out the door, threw him into the back of a cruiser, muttering about "repeat offenders" and "wastes of space."

  They didn’t even look at Julian. Didn’t care.

  And that told him everything he needed to know.

  "Roman was nothing to them," Altis murmured. "A statistic. A case file barely worth the ink to print his name."

  There was no justice. No fairness.

  The world didn’t care.

  So why should he?

  The anger inside him wasn’t the same as before. It wasn’t sharp or sudden. It didn’t burn. It settled, cold and measured, turning over in his mind like a problem waiting to be solved.

  "The world itself was in his way."

  "And Roman?"

  "The first obstacle."

  Dinner was forgotten. The rice sat cold, untouched. The broth had soaked into the wood of the table where it had spilled, but Julian didn’t care.

  He walked his mother to bed in silence, her steps slow, fragile. She clung to his arm, her fingers too thin, bones pressing against skin. The cops had knocked her down, backhanded her when she begged them to stop. Julian had seen the moment her head hit the floor, the way she slumped before Roman’s frantic shouts had drawn their attention away. She was still shaken, moving sluggishly, muttering under her breath that Roman hadn’t meant it, that it wasn’t his fault.

  Julian’s jaw clenched. His lip still bled, the sting familiar.

  She sat on the edge of the mattress, hands curled in her lap, eyes distant. He had told her a dozen times—stop letting Roman in. Stop giving him money. Stop forgiving him. But she never listened.

  She loved him all the same.

  Julian pulled the thin blanket over her shoulders, watched her close her eyes. She was exhausted, drained in every possible way. But he could still hear it in her voice, even as she drifted—He’s still your brother, Julian.

  His fingers curled into fists.

  Not anymore.

  Julian turned and left the room.

  Roman was locked up. But not for long. A few days, a week at most—if that. He always found his way back. Always came knocking. Always had another excuse.

  Julian wouldn’t wait for it this time.

  It was easy to find his stash.

  Julian had done it before, taken what little he could to keep it out of his hands. Flushed it, thrown it out, hidden it. It had never mattered. Roman always got more.

  Not this time.

  Julian took the small bag, pinched a bit of the powder between his fingers. Too much, and it would be obvious. Too little, and it wouldn’t work. He needed just enough.

  A little chemistry. That was all.

  He mixed it carefully, rolling the powder in his palm, crushing it finer. He barely thought about what he was doing. Barely felt the movement of his hands.

  His thoughts were already past this.

  Already beyond Roman.

  He resealed the bag. Put it back where he found it. And when Roman came home, whenever that was, whenever the cycle started again—

  It would end.

  For good.

  A few days passed.

  The apartment stayed quiet, too quiet. No knocks at the door. No frantic shouts in the hall. No Roman.

  Julian barely thought about it. He went about his days the same as always—working on what little he could in their crumbling home, reading what books he had left, listening to his mother cough in the next room.

  Then, one morning, he woke to the sound.

  A sob.

  Low, raw, breaking in the middle.

  It was the same sound he had heard years ago, the same wail that had torn through the house the night his father died. A sound too deep for grief alone—something worse, something primal.

  Julian rolled over, pulled the thin blanket over his head, and went back to sleep.

  "All the ideas in the world," Altis murmured, almost like he was speaking to himself, "mean nothing without the power to enforce them."

  The memory shifted.

  Years bled away.

  The apartment was smaller now. Darker. The walls sagged, heavy with rot, the smell of mildew and sickness clinging to every surface. The heat had been shut off long ago, leaving only layers of old blankets to ward off the cold.

  Julian sat beside the thinning mattress, his mother buried beneath a pile of fabric, her body barely more than a fragile outline beneath it. She hadn’t moved in days. Her breath rattled, weak and uneven, struggling to fill her lungs.

  She was dying.

  And it wasn’t just fate. It wasn’t bad luck. It was the system.

  The medicine that could have saved her existed. But it was locked behind paywalls, guarded by corporations that saw lives as nothing more than numbers on a spreadsheet. The price of survival wasn’t measured in effort or will—it was measured in wealth, in access, in privilege.

  And she had none of it.

  She had burned herself down to nothing for the sake of a life that had never given anything back. For years, she had worked herself raw, selling away every part of herself to keep food on the table, to keep them alive.

  But it had never been enough.

  Julian’s fingers curled around the bottle in his pocket.

  The medicine.

  The pills inside could have saved her. He had spent months gathering the money—hacking ATMs, skimming crypto wallets, siphoning just enough from corporate accounts to stay under the radar. Every transaction was planned, every withdrawal timed to avoid detection.

  He had been careful. He had done everything right. Every single thing.

  He had planned, stolen, calculated every move to make sure he wouldn’t get caught. He had spent weeks ensuring it would work. He had gone further than he ever had before.

  And still, he was too late.

  She was already gone. Had been for years.

  The hollowed-out thing lying in that bed wasn’t his mother—just the remnants of her, wasting away in a room where the walls pressed in, where the world had already decided she wasn’t worth saving.

  Julian exhaled, his grip tightening around the bottle until the plastic cracked. A waste.

  The sound of her breathing stuttered, caught. Then, silence.

  Julian stared. Waited. No movement. No final gasp. Nothing.

  He let out a slow breath, setting the bottle on the nightstand. And then, he stood.

  There was nothing left here. Nothing left for him. No more obstacles. No more ties.

  The world had taken everything. His father. His brother. His mother. Now, there was nothing left to lose.

  The air thickened. The scent of sickness and dust faded, replaced by something sharper. Oil. Metal. A different kind of decay.

  The dream shifted.

  And Julian walked forward.

  Alone.

  But not powerless.

  A garage—but not the kind filled with broken-down cars or scrap parts. This was a lab, hidden behind steel walls reinforced by old-world tech. The hum of an overworked generator filled the space, casting flickering light over shelves stacked with tools, ancient processors, and data slates covered in layers of dust.

  One of the few places not protected by cops or corporate soldiers.

  Most labs like this were locked down—either under strict government surveillance or owned by the corporations that had long since swallowed what was left of the scientific world. But this one? This was different.

  It belonged to a man who had once been important. A professor, one of the last real ones, now retired. Not because he wanted to be. Because there was no place left for men like him. His research had been stripped from him, his funding cut, his work deemed unprofitable. So he had disappeared, taking what he could, setting up this last refuge for himself.

  Julian hadn’t come for him.

  He had come for the lab.

  The kind of equipment that could only be found in a state-of-the-art facility—medical-grade processors, precision tools, the neural interfaces that weren’t sold to the public.

  He needed them.

  And he was willing to take them.

  Julian moved through it, older now—late teens, lean from hunger, but his focus never strayed. He ignored the valuables: a locked safe in the corner, stacks of precious metals half-buried beneath old blueprints, even canned food lined up neatly on a shelf. Things most thieves would take first.

  But Julian barely glanced at them.

  His fingers skimmed over them, moving past wealth and survival, past anything that could ease the ache in his stomach or the weight of the street-worn clothes hanging off his frame.

  Instead, he reached for something else.

  The stolen data slates weren’t random. The blueprints weren’t just theory. They were plans—layered with scribbled annotations, refinements, corrections—a puzzle he had been assembling for months, maybe years.

  And on the workbench in front of him, half-hidden by discarded tools and gutted electronics, was the prototype.

  A neural implant.

  The casing was crude, salvaged from whatever he could scavenge. But the design? The design was something else.

  Not stolen. Not borrowed.

  His.

  It wasn’t complete. He had gotten as far as he could on his own, but he needed something more—something he couldn’t pull from old textbooks or piece together from secondhand junk.

  That’s why he was here.

  Not for money. Not for food.

  For a way up.

  "That was when I saw it."

  I turned.

  Altis stood there, his hands folded behind his back, watching the scene unfold with something like quiet recognition. His face was calm, his expression unreadable.

  "I could have seen a desperate kid. A street rat breaking in to steal whatever he could carry. That’s what anyone else would have seen."

  His eyes flicked to Julian, hunched over stolen equipment, fully absorbed in his work, hands steady as he adjusted the prototype.

  "But that wasn’t what I saw."

  A voice cut through the quiet.

  "You’re not here for money, are you?"

  Julian didn’t flinch like most thieves would. He didn’t bolt. Didn’t panic. Just exhaled, setting the prototype down before turning toward the voice.

  Altis stepped forward from the shadows, his eyes sweeping over the room. Not at the mess. Not at the safe that hadn’t been touched, the stack of canned food left undisturbed.

  But at the workbench.

  At the open schematics. The prototype.

  At Julian’s hands, still smudged with solder and grease.

  His eyes narrowed slightly. He didn’t speak right away. Just stepped closer, studying the components with the kind of scrutiny that only came from real expertise.

  "Jesus," he muttered under his breath.

  Julian didn’t move.

  Altis reached out, carefully flipping one of the sketches over, scanning the handwritten equations. The logic was solid. More than solid.

  "You designed this?"

  Julian’s fingers twitched. "It’s not done."

  Altis let out a short breath, shaking his head. Not in disbelief, not in doubt.

  In something close to admiration.

  "Where the hell did you learn to do this? What school did you go to? And how old are you?"

  Julian hesitated. He didn’t like answering questions, didn’t like explaining himself. But this man wasn’t some idiot off the street. He wasn’t gawking or dismissing it as some half-baked experiment.

  He understood.

  Julian met his gaze. "Went to school for a few years when I was a kid. Taught myself after that. I’m fifteen."

  Altis let out a slow breath.

  He had spent years mentoring brilliant minds. Kids with prestigious backgrounds, top-tier educations, access to the best labs in the world. And yet, here was this half-starved boy, pulling off something that half of them wouldn’t have been capable of with all the resources in the world.

  And he did it alone.

  He reached out, tapping a finger against the prototype. "You know what’s wrong with it?"

  Julian frowned slightly.

  Altis smirked. "You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t."

  Julian’s lips pressed together, but he nodded. "Processing power isn’t enough. The interface works, but it can’t keep up with real-time input. Neural feedback loops burn out too fast."

  Altis didn’t react right away. Just stared at him for a long moment. Then—he laughed.

  Not mockingly. Not cruelly.

  Just quiet. Almost amused.

  Julian narrowed his eyes. "What’s so funny?"

  Altis shook his head. "You." He gestured at the workbench. "You know exactly what’s wrong with it. You just don’t have the right parts to fix it."

  He reached into a nearby drawer, pulling out a sleek, polished microchip the size of a fingernail.

  "This is what you’re missing," he said, holding it up. "Your interface is solid, but you don’t have the processing power. You need a neural lattice, something with adaptive pathways."

  Julian stared at it. He knew exactly what it was. He had been looking for something like it for months.

  Altis watched his expression shift, the calculation happening behind those sharp, ice-blue eyes.

  Then he smirked.

  "Sit down," he said, sliding the microchip across the table. "If you’re going to build this, you might as well do it right."

  Julian hesitated.

  No one had ever offered to help him before. No one had ever wanted him to learn. He had taken knowledge for himself because no one else would give it to him.

  But here was a man—one of the smartest men alive, one of the last real scientists—offering it freely. Not as charity. Not out of pity.

  But because he saw him.

  Julian sat.

  And he understood something then.

  Power wasn’t always taken. Sometimes, it was given.

  I watched, the weight of it settling in my chest.

  For the first time, someone had noticed.

  For the first time, someone had looked at Julian and seen something other than a street rat, a lost cause, a problem to be ignored or beaten down.

  Altis had no way of knowing what he was about to unleash.

  He only saw potential.

  The mind of a boy whose intelligence had no equal.

  A mind that would change everything.

  Altis offered more than a place to stay. He made promises—that together, they could change the world. That with Julian’s mind and his own knowledge and connections, the few he still had, they could build something better.

  For a moment—just a moment—Julian let himself believe it.

  That it could save him.

  It wouldn’t last.

  The illusion cracked, piece by piece, over the years. At first, he tried. He built. He learned. He reached for something greater than himself, something beyond the hunger that had gnawed at him since childhood. With Altis at his side, he believed—almost—that intelligence, that doing things the right way, could shape the world.

  That ideas could outweigh power.

  But the world didn’t run on equations.

  Laws weren’t written in logic.

  Humanity was not a machine waiting to be fixed.

  He watched his projects stall under corporate greed. Watched politicians smile and shake his hand, promising change with one breath and signing away futures with the next. Watched as the ideas he poured his life into—clean energy, planetary expansion, spacefaring technology—were either stolen or buried, left to rot under the weight of bureaucracy and corruption.

  And then, for the first time, he fell in love.

  She was nothing like the world he had grown up in. Altis’ niece—born into wealth, into privilege, yet untouched by the corruption that came with it. She used her family’s fortune to feed the poor, to lobby politicians, to fight for change in ways Julian had long stopped believing in.

  She was kind. Sweet. And most of all, she made Julian love her.

  For a time, she softened the edges of his mind, made him believe that maybe the world wasn’t beyond saving. That maybe, with her, he could be something more than what life had shaped him into.

  And when their son was born, Julian almost forgot the monster the world had been trying to make of him.

  Almost.

  Because even with all the medical advancements in the world, even with everything he knew, he couldn’t save her.

  She died in childbirth.

  And all that was left was Leo.

  The boy had piercing blue eyes like his father… my brother.

  The memory shifted again.

  Julian’s hands hovered over his son, steady, precise. The neural implant was just the beginning. A foundation. Over the years, it became more—dozens of enhancements, cellular reinforcements, muscle augmentation, reaction time sharpened beyond anything human.

  Lion wasn’t born in that hospital room. He was born in Julian’s lab, piece by piece, year by year. And by the time he was ten, he was something else entirely. The first of his kind. A prototype for a future Julian was still shaping.

  "But not enough," Altis murmured. "Lion was a hammer, not an heir. Strong, loyal, the first true superhuman—but he was still limited. A weapon could enforce an empire, but it could never rule one. Lion would lead armies, but he would never be Julian’s equal."

  The memory seemed to speed up, years slipping past in flashes—Lion growing stronger, faster, deadlier. But as his son became everything Julian had engineered him to be, Julian himself had already moved on.

  Altis had grown older, though not as much as he should have. His life stretched unnaturally long, extended by Julian’s designs, but his patience was wearing thin. Julian’s crusade against the corporations was going nowhere. The system wasn’t breaking. He needed something more.

  A catalyst.

  So he turned to revolutionaries, to the last remnants of a lost America—patriots clinging to an empire that had died long before they were born. They wanted to tear it all down, and Julian let them believe he was their ally. He gave them weapons, technology, a strategy. A means to fight back.

  And still, it wasn’t enough.

  Julian wasn’t just building an army—he was building something far greater. A new species. The enhancements had started with Lion, but they wouldn’t end there. The implants, the bio-mechanical augments, the neural upgrades—the foundations of the next step in human evolution were already in motion. The prototypes worked. The failures had been refined. The first generation of augmented soldiers was nearly complete.

  And that was when they turned on him.

  His wife’s family—the ones who had once smiled at him at their wedding, who had held his son, who had used his mind, his work, his brilliance to keep their corporation afloat—turned him in.

  They had tolerated him when he was just a man of ideas, a scientist too lost in his own genius to be a threat. But this? This was too much. The whispers started first. Then the accusations. Words like tyrant, dictator, abomination. They said he was trying to play God. That he had gone too far.

  They feared what he had become.

  And so, they cut him out. Erased him.

  "He trusted them."

  Altis’ voice whispered through the dark, cold and sharp as a knife against bone. "For all his intelligence, for all his calculations—he didn’t see it coming. Because he loved her. Because, despite everything, he still believed in something as small and human as family."

  That was his failure. Not underestimating them. Not trusting them. Loving them.

  His wife, his son, Altis—his biggest mistakes were always human ones. Attachment. Hope. The belief that he could shape the future without first burning away the past.

  The weakness wasn’t in them. It was in him.

  That had to change. He had to change. He had already begun cutting away the things that made him vulnerable. But it wasn’t enough.

  He had to cut out the last thing holding him back.

  The human part.

  I swallowed hard, the weight of it pressing into my ribs.

  "It was the only mistake he never forgave himself for. He underestimated love. He would never make that mistake again."

  The arrests were swift. A quiet deal struck in back rooms with the right people, the right officials. Julian and Altis were taken in the dead of night. No trial. No warning. Dragged away to rot in a black site that didn’t officially exist.

  Seven years.

  Seven years in darkness. Stripped of his research, his technology—his son. Seven years watching lesser men pick apart his work, calling him a monster while they stole from his brilliance. Seven years of interrogations, of being moved from black site to black site, of men with hollow eyes demanding answers he would never give.

  Because they weren’t the only ones hunting.

  Outside those walls, his hammer was waiting.

  Altis’ voice broke through the memory, steady, measured.

  “He was just a boy when they took Julian. Still growing into himself, still waiting for the implants to fully take hold. But they didn’t give him the time.”

  His tone was almost reverent, but beneath it ran something colder. “They hunted him like an animal, sent kill squads after him, tried to end him before he became what they feared. But every time they came for him, it ended the same—blood, bodies, and death.”

  Altis exhaled. “He was more than just a warrior. He was a strategist, a leader—just as brilliant as his father. He finished what Julian started, reforging the suit, perfecting the rail gun, uniting the underworld beneath him. By the time they realized what he had become, it was too late.”

  His gaze met mine, heavy, unshakable. “They called him a criminal. A warlord. But those titles were too small for what he became.”

  Altis exhaled, his voice lowering, as if speaking something undeniable, something greater than myth. “He was more than the legends whispered in the dark. More than the fear that gripped men before they even saw his face. He was the first of his kind—the first superhuman.”

  They kept Julian moving, thinking it would keep him hidden. They were wrong.

  They made one mistake.

  They kept him alive for his genius. Kept him working on their projects, thinking they could contain him, thinking they could control him.

  But that tech—their tech—was the very thing that sealed their fate.

  Because it allowed Julian to send a single signal.

  Just once, for a single second, before the guards beat him down.

  And that was all it took.

  The first explosion rocked the walls.

  The alarms shrieked into the night.

  The screaming started.

  Julian didn’t even flinch.

  He only smiled.

  Because his son had come for him.

  I stood frozen, my breath caught in my throat. The memory wouldn’t let me look away.

  The heat of the fires spread through the corridors, thick smoke curling into the air, choking what was left of the men still trapped inside. The alarms blared, overlapping with the stuttering bursts of gunfire, the panicked shouts of officers barking orders—orders that didn’t matter.

  None of it mattered.

  Because he was here.

  I turned—and there he was.

  Lion.

  He moved like something out of a nightmare, cutting through smoke and flame, stepping over the bodies piling in his wake. Nearly eight feet tall in that suit, his silhouette was a monstrous blend of steel and cybernetics, his golden hair damp with sweat, his armor streaked red.

  The guards were firing everything they had. Nothing stopped him.

  He dodged bullets like he saw them before they were fired, his movements too fast, too precise—inhuman. A lucky shotgun blast hit him square in the chest. The kinetic plating absorbed it with a ripple of light. A high-caliber round pinged off his shoulder. A rocket struck the wall just behind him, the explosion shaking the corridor—too slow, too late.

  Lion was already closing the distance.

  One of the officers staggered back, slamming a fresh clip into his rifle, screaming something into his comms—Lion caught him mid-step.

  The man had half a second to react before Lion grabbed him by the head and squeezed.

  Bone shattered. Blood sprayed. The body hit the ground, twitching.

  Another guard was still reloading when Lion’s railgun fired.

  The round punched through his torso like paper, tearing a hole the size of a fist through his spine. He collapsed mid-scream, body jerking once before going still.

  I couldn’t move.

  I wanted to run, to shut my eyes and make it all disappear.

  But I couldn’t.

  I was watching history unfold.

  The moment the world learned what a Voss was.

  Lion’s laughter rang through the prison halls, deep and thrumming in my bones.

  Not a soldier. Not a man.

  A god among insects.

  He kept moving, smashing skulls with his fists, tearing through bodies like they were nothing. His shoulder-mounted rocket launchers erased a police helicopter in a single blast. His railgun fired again, turning an armored SWAT truck into twisted metal. A swarm of drones converged, only to drop uselessly from the air as his EMP pulse took them all out in an instant.

  Nothing could stop him.

  A guard stumbled back, hands raised, his lips trembling.

  “Please—”

  Lion grabbed him by the throat.

  The man’s legs kicked wildly, his fingers clawing at the gauntlet wrapped around his neck. His body convulsed, struggling, his face darkening.

  Lion cocked his head. Amused.

  Then, slowly, he squeezed.

  Cartilage cracked. The man’s windpipe collapsed. He spasmed, mouth gaping, desperate for a breath that would never come.

  Lion let him drop.

  The officer hit the floor in a heap.

  My stomach twisted.

  This wasn’t war. This wasn’t battle. This was slaughter.

  And I knew—I knew—he wasn’t finished.

  Through the thick smoke, through the flashing red lights and the bodies left in pieces on the floor, I saw him—my father.

  Waiting. Watching.

  Julian stood inside his cell, hands clasped behind his back, unshaken.

  The door was already open. He could have stepped out. He could have run.

  But he didn’t. Not yet.

  Lion’s footsteps echoed as he approached. Slow. Heavy. Measured.

  He stopped just short of the cell, the towering bulk of his armor casting a long shadow across the bloodstained floor. His breath came in slow, controlled exhales, steam venting from the suit.

  The silence stretched.

  Then, at last, Julian stepped forward.

  He regarded his son the way a king might look upon a conquering general.

  Not with love.

  With recognition.

  Lion dropped to one knee.

  Blood still dripped from his gauntlets. The suit whined softly as the servos adjusted, the plating shifting as he bowed before his creator.

  My breath hitched.

  Julian reached out, his fingers brushing over Lion’s ruined face, streaked with gore.

  Then, gently—he lifted his chin.

  "Do you remember what I told you, Leo?"

  Lion’s breath came slow and steady, blood dripping from his gauntlets. The sounds of dying men still echoed down the hall, but he barely heard them. His focus was only on him.

  "That the strong decide what is right."

  Julian nodded. The barest hint of approval.

  "And what are you?"

  Leo lifted his head. His icy-blue eyes burned—sharp, focused. Not yet corrupted by Phoenix.

  "I am the strong."

  Julian’s fingers brushed his jaw, a touch almost reverent. Then, his hand slid to the back of his son's head, gripping just firmly enough that there was no mistaking the weight of what came next.

  "Leo is the name your mother gave you." His voice was quiet, but absolute. "That boy died with her."

  The words settled like iron, final and cold.

  "From this day forward, you are Lion."

  He released him.

  "And a Lion bows only to a Voss."

  That was the truth of it. Lion was his greatest creation, his strongest soldier—but he would never be his heir. There was still too much of the old world in him, too much of his mother’s blood. He wasn’t the future. He was the hammer to forge it.

  The words struck deeper than any blow, deeper than the scars that marred his skin. Lion lowered his head—not in submission, but in recognition.

  Only two would ever command his loyalty.

  Only two would ever see him kneel.

  Julian.

  And one day, me.

  Julian exhaled, satisfaction flickering behind cold, calculating eyes.

  "Stand, my son."

  Lion obeyed.

  Something inside me shattered.

  This was it. The true beginning.

  Julian Voss had spent his whole life clawing toward this moment. Toward power. Toward dominion. Toward the inevitable rise of an empire.

  And now—now, he had everything he needed.

  A weapon. Not an heir. Not even a Voss. Just a hammer.

  The world would never be the same again.

  This was the moment he was reborn.

  Not a man. Not a father. Not a scientist or a leader.

  A force. A will made manifest.

  No more Julian Voss, the boy who had dreams. No more Julian Voss, the man who had loved.

  Only Julian Voss, the architect of the future.

  I wanted to wake up. I needed to wake up.

  But the memory wasn’t done.

  The firelight flickered. The ground shifted beneath me.

  And when I opened my eyes—I was standing in the tallest tower in the world.

  Voss Corp. Headquarters.

  The birth of an empire.

  My father’s empire.

  And I was about to watch how it all began.

  The sky outside the tower stretched endless and dark, the stars distant, indifferent.

  Julian had once dreamed of reaching them. Of proving that humanity belonged among them.

  That dream was dead.

  They were real.

  And they were ahead of humanity.

  Unacceptable.

  Julian had always known Earth was a dying world. But this? This was something else. If there were civilizations beyond the solar system, then humanity wasn’t just at risk of extinction.

  It was at risk of irrelevance.

  That could not be allowed.

  If humans reached the stars, it wouldn’t be as explorers. It wouldn’t be as equals.

  It would be as conquerors.

  His humanity. His species. Not the weak, warring fools tearing each other apart over the last remnants of a broken Earth—but something stronger. Something prepared.

  “This was when he turned inward,” Altis murmured beside me, his voice distant. “Before he could take the stars, he had to take Earth. The weak would have to fall. The old world would have to burn. He would remake humanity—whether they wanted it or not.”

  Julian turned away from the stars, looking down at the world below. The sprawling cities, the broken systems, the rot that had consumed civilization.

  His first battlefield.

  The foundation of something greater.

  He would forge them into something worthy of survival. And when the day came, when he finally stood among the stars—

  They would not find a child reaching for their hands.

  They would find a ruler.

  And they would kneel.

  I swallowed hard, my pulse hammering in my ears. The weight of the vision, of the memories, pressed into my ribs like something solid, something inescapable.

  I turned to Altis, the question catching in my throat before I could stop it.

  "Why are you showing me this?" My voice came out hoarse, unsteady. "How do you know all of this?"

  Altis didn’t look at me. His gaze was still fixed on the city below, where Julian stood, a shadow against the light, watching a world already breaking apart.

  I swallowed, my throat tight. "You’re not really Altis, are you?"

  The air around me shifted, growing heavier, colder. The thing beside me—because that was all I could call it now—finally turned. And when it did, I felt my stomach drop.

  It smiled.

  Not a kind smile. Not even a cruel one.

  Something else. Something vast.

  Then it laughed, soft and quiet, like a secret being told just to me.

  "Oh, Sol," it whispered, voice curling around me like smoke. "There is still so much more to see."

  The world fractured.