The weight was something of concern. Not the physical kind—though that was there too, pressing into his chest, into his limbs—but something heavier, denser. As if the room itself had decided he would not rise yet. As if the world had laid a hand on his sternum and said: Stay.The bed was unfamiliar. Too clean. Too precise. Its surface adjusted subtly beneath him, responding to micro-movements he hadn’t consciously made. The air carried a sterile chill, threaded with a faint metallic tang that scraped at the back of his throat.Hospital.No, worse. Somewhere the system touched openly.He tried to sit up.Pain flared—not sharp, but comprehensive. A full-body objection. His muscles locked, his spine protested, and the bed reacted instantly, lowering its incline by a fraction, tightening support bands along his sides.A soft chime sounded. “Motion discouraged.”The voice was not human. Not fully synthetic either. It carried no inflection, yet it wasn’t flat. Like something imitating neut

Caelan noticed the silence.Hospitals were never truly quiet. Even at dawn, there was always something humming, machines breathing for bodies that could no longer remember how, soft footsteps of nurses counting lives by habit, the distant chime of monitors reminding the world that time still moved in measured intervals. But Lyra’s room felt different. Not peaceful but suspended.The monitor beside her bed glowed with obedient green lines. Heart rate: stable. Oxygen saturation: optimal. Neurological activity: within acceptable parameters. The system had flagged the recovery as a success hours ago, its verdict delivered with the same cold finality it used to mark executions.SUBJECT STATUS: STABILIZED.PROCEDURE: COMPLETE.OUTCOME: SURVIVAL CONFIRMED.Survival.Caelan sat beside the bed, his hand wrapped around Lyra’s fingers, afraid to let go. The bed itself seemed to resist him, as if the moment he released her, something fundamental would snap back into place and take her with it. He

The first attempt came quietly.No alarms. No warnings. Just a subtle shift in the room, like pressure changing before a storm.Caelan felt it before the system spoke. A thinning of the air. A tension that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with intent.Lyra was awake, sitting cross-legged on the hospital bed, tracing invisible patterns on the blanket with her finger. She had been doing that more often lately. Thinking without words.SYSTEM NOTICE:EVALUATION PHASE INITIATED.SUBJECT LYRA ASHBORNE: POTENTIAL ACCELERATION CANDIDATE.Caelan stood up slowly. “No.”The word was calm. Final.There was a pause. Not silence—calculation.RESPONSE:ACCELERATION WOULD INCREASE SURVIVABILITY METRICS ACROSS MULTIPLE SCENARIOS.RISK ACCEPTABLE.“She’s not a scenario,” Caelan said. “She’s my daughter.”Lyra looked up at him then. Not startled. Curious.“Dad,” she said, “it’s asking questions again.”He moved closer to her bed, placing himself between her and the unseen presence that h

The room hummed with an almost imperceptible vibration, the kind of low-frequency pressure that Caelan had learned to notice long before it became audible. The monitors by Lyra’s bed flickered, not malfunctioning, but alive, scanning, mapping every pulse, every breath, every micro-movement with a precision that was almost invasive.Caelan stood beside her, arms crossed, sensing the pattern before it manifested: the system was running the comparison.Not of her vitals. Not of her strength. Not of her survival probability. It was measuring her against everything it had ever processed—every child in its database, every variable, every deviation. And Lyra, as always, did not fit.SYSTEM NOTICE:SUBJECT LYRA ASHBORNE: COMPARISON INITIATED.REFERENCE DATA: INCOMPLETE.DEVIATION RATE: UNPRECEDENTED.Lyra’s eyes were open, serene. Calm. But the way her gaze followed the invisible threads weaving through the system’s calculation made Caelan’s chest tighten. She understood the stakes. Not abstr

Lyra sat on the edge of the bed, legs swinging, eyes fixed on the pale ceiling. The room was quiet, but the hum of the system pulsing faintly through the walls reminded Caelan that nothing here was truly still. Not her. Not him. Not the world beyond the hospital tower.“Dad,” she said softly. Her voice carried a weight beyond her years. “I need to know about her.”Caelan froze for the briefest moment. Not because he hadn’t prepared for this question, he had–but because no answer could convey the depth of what had been taken from him, from her, from their family.“Your mother,” he began carefully, “was… remarkable. Stronger than anyone the world knew. And clever enough that they feared her even in her absence.”Lyra’s eyes narrowed. “Then why… why isn’t she here?”Caelan swallowed, his throat tight. “Because she was taken from us. Not by chance. Not by fate. By people who wanted everything she stood for, and everything she protected removed from the world.”She absorbed that quietly, h