MY TEAM WILL NEVER BETRAY ME AGAIN

CHAPTER 9: BOND LINK

The revelation sent James back into the Academy's restricted archives with a new, sharper urgency, digging through records that hadn't been accessed in years, cross-referencing ability classifications until his eyes burned and the terminal's cold light became the only thing he could focus on, the rest of the world narrowing down to rows of decades-old text.

He found what he was looking for buried in a decommissioned file, tagged with a classification code that hadn't been used in decades, the kind of designation that had clearly been retired rather than simply forgotten. Bond Link had appeared in Academy records before — not under a support classification, not filed alongside coordination or communication abilities the way it had been categorized for James, but under something else entirely.

Unknown Class.

The file was sparse, heavily redacted, but the fragments that remained painted a picture that made James's chest tighten with a mixture of vindication and dread. A previous ability holder, decades earlier, had displayed the exact same progression James was now living through — a quiet, unremarkable support ability that revealed a far more dangerous true nature once enough bonds had been formed. That holder had connected multiple individuals into a single network before their records simply stopped, cut off mid-file with no explanation for what happened next, the final entry trailing into blank pages that no one had ever filled in.

One phrase recurred throughout the fragmented documentation, appearing again and again in different contexts, clearly central to whatever had transpired, underlined in more than one place as if someone reading it long ago had wanted to make sure it wasn't missed.

Potential Network.

James sat back from the terminal, the pieces finally arranging themselves into a shape he understood, even if he didn't like what it revealed. Bond Link was never designed to make a team more cohesive. That was simply its most visible, least threatening symptom. Its true function was to transform its holder into the center of an expanding web of potential — a living hub through which growth, ability, and development could be gathered, redirected, and ultimately controlled, a design that made him wonder, uncomfortably, who exactly had built it and for what purpose.

The more people connected to that hub, the larger and more dangerous the network became.

James closed the file with hands that felt suddenly heavier than before, understanding now the true weight of what he'd built with Mia, Noah, Lena, and Ethan — and understanding, with a chill that settled deep into his bones, exactly why someone might have been watching, waiting, perhaps even engineering the exact chain of betrayal that led him here.

Desperate for more, he searched deeper into the archive, past the primary classification file, into an addendum listing former network members — students who had once been connected to the earlier Bond Link holder decades before. Name after name scrolled past, and James felt an inexplicable dread build with each one, because every single name on that list had, according to the Academy's own records, simply vanished from history afterward. No graduation records. No transfer notices. No trace beyond the initial enrollment entry, as if the Academy itself had quietly agreed to forget them.

Erased, all of them, as thoroughly as if they had never existed at all.

Then, near the bottom of a heavily damaged final page, one entry remained intact enough to read clearly, the text sharper and cleaner than anything else on the page, as if it had been preserved on purpose.

James Carter.

His own name, staring back at him from a document filed decades before he was born.

The registration date beneath it swam in his vision as he read it once, then again, refusing at first to let the number mean what it obviously meant.

Seventeen years before James was born.

He sat in the empty archive room until the automated lights dimmed around him, some energy-saving protocol deciding he'd been still too long to still be present. He thought of his parents, ordinary and unremarkable in every way he'd ever known them to be, and wondered which one of them might have carried a secret this large without ever once letting it show. He thought of every strange, unexplained coincidence that had led him here — the betrayal, the awakening, the exact shape of an ability that seemed built specifically for him before he had ever existed to receive it — and understood, with a certainty that settled cold and absolute in his chest, that nothing about his story had ever truly started the day his old team threw him away.