Chapter 13: The Pull of the Golden Watch
Kairo was woken by movement, along with a few little sounds, sounds he did his best to ignore.
Not the bad kind this time. Not the hot, sharp kind that came with his usual dreams, headaches, and the feeling that the whole universe had decided to stare at him until he broke. No, this was softer than that. A body lifting him. Hands under him. . . . New hands.
His first instinct, and currently one of his favorite instincts in this life, was to try to go right back to sleep anyway.
If he kept his eyes closed hard enough, maybe whoever had picked him up would get the message. Maybe they would understand that he was busy. Maybe they would gently put him back down, leave him with his tiger, and let him return to sleep, Hopfully the part of sleep that didn't involve clocks, strange houses, and the sense that far too many important people were becoming interested in him for reasons he deeply disliked.
Instead, the new person holding him adjusted their grip. . .
and it felt very Different . . . That was the first thing he noticed properly. Not wrong or even painful, Just different.
Anika usually held him like she already knew what he was about to do before he did it. His grandfather held him like he was made of a fragile fabric, one that would tear very easily if not handled properly. This hold was more careful than confident, but not nervous. Whoever it was had picked him up like he mattered, which Kairo supposed was a decent start. Still new, though. New enough that he had to check.
He cracked open one eye.
And then the other.
The face above him was not one he knew.
Young.
Red hair.
Sharp blue eyes.
Very, very awake in a way that didn't seem legal this early in the morning, her smile kinda made him cranky too, he had a feeling this young lady was a morning person, and he had very little patience for her foul kind . . .
Kairo blinked slowly at her, still caught halfway between falling back into deep sleep and slow observation. His mind, that strange little engine that never seemed to fully belong inside the body of a baby, tried to sort her out at once. He took in the freckles. the long red hir. The quick expression. The posture that said she could move fast if she had to. Then she spoke, and for one brief, shining moment, Kairo's still-foggy brain forgot its caution.
Because she was spectacularly, unmistakably, almost aggressively British.
"Oh, hello there," the girl said softly, adjusting him in her arms with careful little movements. "You're heavier than you look, mate. That's not a complaint, by the way. Just an observation."
Kairo let out a happy little noise before he could stop himself. It happened by reflex, and he hated that. He was not trying to be charmed. He was not trying to approve of this random red-haired intruder.
But the accent was doing things to the atmosphere, in that strange way, something that only people with accents could do.
Beryl noticed the little sound and brightened immediately.
"Oh, good, we're on speaking terms already."
Kairo stopped smiling at once and stared at her.
Properly stared.
His grey-silver eyes fixed on hers with a stillness that would have looked odd on anyone older and frankly a little unsettling on a baby who should probably have been more interested in chewing his own sleeve. He took her in more carefully now that the first surprise had worn off.
British people in DC.
Right. Think.
His sleepy little mind dragged up fragments of names and half-remembered impressions. Some demons. a few magic users. Some weird international hero groups. Some Bat-related people. A couple of villains, too, because of course the British made those as well. Something about old clubs and old costumes and old money and old problems. He searched her face again.
Nope.
Nothing exact.
But she felt familiar in the way people from stories sometimes did. Like she belonged to a world adjacent to the one he had somehow fallen into, and those kinds of thoughts always made his brain hurt . .
Beryl, for her part, had discovered something the second she picked Kairo up.
She liked holding him.
That was slightly inconvenient, because she'd only held, what, two babies before? Maybe three if one counted her cousin's child, who had climbed up on her back and immediately sneezed on her and then fallen asleep on her shoulder like he paid rent there. She had expected this part to feel awkward. Or at least highly procedural. You pick up baby, you support head, you try not to drop baby, everyone claps because the teenager has managed not to disgrace herself.
Instead, Kairo fit into her arms with a soft, surprising weight that made him feel more real than in any way all the stories had not. He was warm and just a little chubby in the way healthy babies ought to be, with that excellent baby softness around the cheeks and hands that made the whole species much easier to forgive for all the screaming and public vomiting.
She turned her head toward Anika, who was moving around the nursery gathering a few of Kairo's things with the efficiency of someone who could pack for this child many times before.
"He's got to be happy," Beryl said, her voice light and gentle enough not to startle him. "Babies this chubby are always happy. I'm fairly sure that's science."
Anika snorted without looking up.
"Oh, absolutely. That's why he runs this house like a tiny emperor. Pure extra chubby joy."
"Extra Chubby!!" he said in his head, then Kairo made a sharp series of baby noises at both of them at once. Not random ones, either.
He put actual feeling into those sounds. The message, as far as he was concerned, was very clear: I heard that and I will remember that. Your mockery has been noted for future judgment.
Both girls laughed.
Anika turned then, one arm full of tiny clothes and blankets, and pointed at him like he was proving her case. "See? I'm telling you, he understands more than he should."
Beryl looked back down at him.
He was still staring.
No, not staring. Inspecting and That was somehow weirder.
Anika came closer, lowering her voice a little as if sharing gossip, though Kairo had every intention of hearing all of it. "His grandmother, and one of Dr. Wakati's friends from college, a doctor who works with children and babies, did a few tests a while back. Nothing too invasive, because they didn't want to go poking at someone this little and making things worse. But they both said the same thing more or less. His mind's... active. More active than it should be. Like there's more going on in there than anyone can quite explain."
Beryl's blue eyes flicked back to Kairo's.
His gaze never left her face. She didn't laugh this time.
Something in her expression softened instead, and because she was Beryl Hutchinson and her brain had a bad habit of opening all its doors at once, his look sent her tumbling into her own thoughts.
So this was him.
This was Kairo.
The little center of all this mess.
The baby half the universe seemed to be sniffing around without quite understanding why. The child tied to impossible time events, to a grieving old genius, to secrets heavy enough to bend the air in a room. And here he was in her arms, very real and very small and watching her like he was trying to read her from the inside out.
He didn't feel dangerous, or at least not yet, no, not dangerous, and That was the odd part.
He felt important, yes. Strange, yes. But not dangerous in the usual sense. More like... if someone had handed her a music box and told her it could one day split the sky open if wound wrong. Not a weapon. Not yet. Just something powerful enough that people would be stupid around it. and Stupid leads to cruelty, then cruelty to greed. Protective too, maybe, but the bad kind of protective, the kind that tried to own what it feared.
She did not like that thought.
Her arms tightened around him very slightly before she could stop herself.
Kairo waited a few moments for her to finish spiraling in silence.
Then, because he was still tired and because she had been making that exact same thoughtful face for too long, he lifted one of his soft little hands and smacked her gently on the cheek.
Not hard or anything but Just enough.
Beryl blinked and made an offended little face at him.
Kairo laughed immediately. There it was again, that bright baby laugh, unplanned and impossible to take back once it escaped.
Anika grinned.
"Oh, he likes you."
"Did he just hit me?"
"He did."
"And your response to that is joy?"
"He usually reserves that sort of thing for people he finds interesting."
Beryl put a hand over her heart. "What an honor."
Kairo had already moved on.
Now his hands were stretched toward Anika, opening and closing with determined little grabby motions as he leaned in her direction. Beryl took that to mean what most sane people would take it to mean.
"He wants his big sister," she said.
Anika smiled, set the pile of little clothes and blanket rolls into Beryl's free arms, and took Kairo back with all the confidence of someone who had been reclaimed many times before. He settled against her immediately, still eyeing Beryl over Anika's shoulder like she had passed some first test but not all of them.
"All right," Anika said, swaying slightly as she adjusted him. "Proper introduction, then. Kairo, this is Beryl. She's one of the new helpers. She's quick, she's funny, and if she annoys you too much, you may glare at her but only in moderation."
Beryl placed a hand to her chest again and gave him a solemn little nod.
"Pleasure," she said. "I hope we'll have a productive professional relationship."
Kairo, still deeply committed to the bit, gave her the tiniest, slowest little head dip a baby could reasonably manage.
Beryl gasped.
"He nodded at me."
"He does that," Anika said, as if this was not one of the stranger things a person could casually say before the sun fully rose into the sky.
Kairo then immediately abandoned all dignity and made a determined grab for Anika's necklace, because shiny things existed to be tested with the mouth and that was that.
Anika caught his wrist without looking.
"Oh no," she said. "Absolutely not. We've played this game too many times."
Kairo made a deeply put-upon sound. The sort of tired little grunt that belonged in the chest of an old man lowering himself into a chair, not in the body of a baby being denied jewelry to chew on.
Beryl laughed so hard she had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep it quiet.
"That noise came out of him?"
"Yes."
"That's incredible."
"No, it's threatening. There's a difference."
Beryl honestly didn't know how to respond to that, so she didn't.
Still talking, the two girls made their way out of the nursery. Beryl carried the stack of Kairo's things now, a little awkwardly but with determination, while Anika held the boy securely against her shoulder and kept one eye on his hands in case he decided the nearest curtain tassel looked edible.
They moved down the hall and toward the staircase, their voices low and easy now, already slipping toward familiarity. Beryl asked small questions. Anika answered most of them. The mansion woke around them in slow stages. Somewhere downstairs a tray clinked. A servant murmured. The old house made its usual thinking noises, ya know, the one a house makes, i don't need to explain it.
And then Kairo felt it.
A pull.
Not hard.
Not even frightening, but just a small, certain pull toward something . . .
Like someone had tied a thread around one of his fingers and given it one gentle tug in a direction he was supposed to understand, if someone could understand a direction.
He stiffened.
Anika felt it immediately. "What is it?"
Kairo twisted in her arms, looking not at her or at Beryl but down the hall toward the first floor corridor that led away from the main staircase. He made a sound and leaned his entire little body that way.
Beryl glanced over. "Does he want something?"
"He wants a lot of things," Anika muttered. "The question is which one."
Kairo leaned again, harder this time, wriggling with surprising determination for someone who had been half asleep ten minutes ago. He pointed badly, because baby arms were not built for elegance, but the intention was clear enough.
There.
That way.
Now.
Anika frowned and followed where he seemed to be directing her.
At the far end of the corridor stood a set of doors she was almost certain had not looked like that yesterday.
She slowed.
"Beryl," she said quietly.
Beryl looked up from the little stack she was carrying and nearly stopped dead.
"Oh."
The doors were huge.
Not by normal standards. By mansion standards.
Tall double doors with dark polished wood and glass inlays shaped like stars, the sort that caught the morning light, or any light for that matter, and broke it into little soft colors across the floor. They looked old and new at the same time. Beautiful in a way that made the back of the neck prickle.
"That's not normal, is it?" Beryl asked.
"No."
Kairo wriggled harder.
Not panicked. Excited.
Urgent.
Anika had to tighten her grip on him before he launched himself sideways out of her arms in the general direction of the impossible doors. "All right, all right, I'm going," she muttered. "Goodness."
As if hearing her thoughts from the other side, the doors opened.
Madame Xanadu stood there, already dressed and composed, looking as though she had expected them at this exact second and had simply been waiting for them to catch up to fate.
"Do come in," she said warmly.
Anika hesitated only long enough to exchange one look with Beryl, then stepped through.
And immediately stopped.
Because it was not a room.
Not really.
It was a house.
A full, impossible stretch of interior space hidden where one bedroom had any right to be. A corridor ran ahead of them lined with paintings, lamps, alcoves, and carpets so rich-looking Beryl's shoes almost apologized. The air smelled faintly of cardamom, old books, candlewax, and things that had crossed oceans. The ceiling overhead rose high enough to make Beryl tilt her head back just to check it was still attached to anything sensible. Fun fact: it was not.
"This is absurd," she whispered.
"Yes," said Madame Xanadu pleasantly. "It is."
She led them down the hallway with quiet confidence, as if walking guests through impossible architecture before breakfast was one of the more ordinary parts of her routine.
At the end of the corridor sat a large room centered around a long table.
Dr. Wakati was already there, seated with a cup of tea in hand, looking about as calm as a man could while drinking tea inside an impossible house located inside his own mansion. He looked up when they entered and gave his grandson a small, soft smile.
That was enough.
Kairo twisted at once, reaching for him immediately with both hands.
Anika shifted to pass him over, but Madame Xanadu lifted one elegant hand.
"Not yet," she said.
Anika paused.
Kairo made an outraged sound.
Madame Xanadu gestured toward the table. "Set him there, if you would."
Beryl, who had stopped trying to understand anything five minutes ago, blinked fast. "On the table?"
Madame Xanadu looked at her. "Yes."
Beryl looked at the table. Then at the baby. Then at the Good doctor.
Anika did the same, but she at least had the sense to wait for permission from the one person in the room whose opinion mattered most.
Dr. Wakati met her eyes and nodded once.
"It's all right."
So Anika stepped forward and gently sat Kairo on the center of the table.
He wobbled a little, caught himself, and then immediately became very interested in everything at once.
The table was large, smooth, and polished enough to reflect blurred little pieces of him back at himself. Chairs circled it. Tea steamed. Light moved strangely in this room, his eyes could tell for whatever reason, warmer than outside too, though he could still feel the shape of the morning somewhere beyond the walls. He was still vaguely offended about not being handed to his grandfather, but curiosity was beginning to win.
Beryl sat down with all the visible restraint of a person trying not to ask seventeen questions in the first ten seconds. . . It lasted about three breaths.
"So," she said, "what exactly are we doing?"
Madame Xanadu folded her hands and regarded Kairo carefully.
"You are," she said, "going to practice patience."
Beryl opened her mouth.
Closed it.
Opened it again. "And after that?"
"Then," said Xanadu, "we begin helping him understand that he is not like other children."
Dr. Wakati set down his tea.
"He is too young to understand very much."
"Of course," Xanadu said. "From the information you gave me from our long talk, I gather he might be more awake than most children his age, or at least human children, but still not too young to notice patterns. Not too young to feel cause and effect. And most importantly, he is not too young to begin learning that when strange things happen around him, they are not always happening to him. Sometimes they are happening through him."
Beryl absorbed that in silence.
Anika looked down at Kairo, who was now distracted by the grain of the wood beneath his hand.
Madame Xanadu reached into the folds of her sleeve and brought out a pocket watch.
It was beautiful.
Pure gold, or near enough to make no difference. Heavy-looking. Old-looking. The sort of object that carried not just value but attention. Light seemed to rest differently on it than on other things. As if the watch did not merely reflect the room, She placed it in the center of the table.
Immediately Kairo felt the thread in the air pull again.
There.
That.
His attention locked onto the watch so fully that the rest of the room went soft around the edges.
In the foggy little world of his baby body, he could not have explained why it mattered. He did not know what the object was. He did not know what it meant. He only knew that it was somehow important??? maybe. Like the same kind of pull his dreams sometimes had.
He leaned toward it, grabbed it with both hands, nearly tipped sideways under the weight, recovered with some effort, and then, because there was still a baby brain involved no matter how weird his soul happened to be, immediately shoved part of it into his mouth.
The room went quiet. Madame Xanadu stared unbothered.
Beryl made a choking noise she had to cover with her hand.
Anika bit down hard on her own smile.
Dr. Wakati, to his credit, only sighed the sigh of a man who had already surrendered to the great universal truth of infancy.
"Well," he said mildly, "babies do put things in their mouths for several reasons. Exploration, most commonly. Texture, taste, shape. They gather information that way. It can also be soothing, especially with teething. Sensory development. Curiosity. One mustn't take it personally."
Kairo, still drooling on an object older and more magical than he could understand, looked up at him as if to say exactly.
Madame Xanadu watched him a moment longer, then laughed softly.
"That," she admitted, "was not my intended first result."
Beryl finally let herself laugh too. "No offense, Madame, but I think the watch has been thoroughly profiled."
Xanadu smiled and leaned forward slightly, her eyes on Kairo.
"This is where we begin," she said. "Not with fear or with grand declarations. Not with telling a child he is cursed or chosen or burdened by destiny before he even knows what a morning is. We begin with attention."
She looked up at the others now, explaining as much to them as to the baby who was still trying to determine whether gold tasted better than Anika's silver-plated necklace.
"He is drawn to certain objects, sounds, rhythms, and disturbances," she said. "Time calls to itself. If he feels that call and starts learning, even dimly, that his feelings have meaning, then later we may build language around it. I do not need him to understand magic today. I need him to begin noticing that when the world changes strangely around him, there is a pattern beneath it."
Dr. Wakati nodded slowly. "And your method?"
"Simple things first," said Xanadu. "Objects with temporal resonance. Reactions to sound. Awareness exercises. Gentle repetition. We watch him. We let him choose where his attention goes. We see whether he only responds, or whether he influences in return."
Beryl raised a hand slightly, unable to help herself. "When you say influences in return, do you mean little baby things like 'chooses the shiny watch,' or bigger things like 'accidentally erases Tuesday'?"
Madame Xanadu gave her a level look.
"For now, I mean whatever he reveals."
"That was not reassuring."
The Madame gave her a simple shrug, "It was honest."
Beryl sat back. "Fair enough."
Anika looked between them all, then back at Kairo, who had finally decided the watch was not especially edible and was now patting it with both hands like he expected it to answer him.
"And this helps him realize he's special?"
Madame Xanadu's expression gentled.
"No," she said. "This helps him realize the world is answering him. Children know they are special long before adults teach them doubt. The trick is helping him discover that his instincts are real without letting fear make him ashamed of them."
She rested one hand lightly against the table.
"Power wakes in pieces. If guided poorly, it becomes secrecy, guilt, and hunger. If guided well, it may become discipline. Trust. Restraint. Wonder. I would rather he meet himself through wonder first."
Dr. Wakati looked at his grandson, at the small, intent face bent over the watch, and for a brief moment the old man's expression became painfully soft.
"Yes," he said quietly. "So would I."
Kairo, still lost in the glow of the thing beneath his hands, tapped the watch once more and frowned in the serious, slightly offended way babies did when objects refused to behave on command.
The adults watched him.
Madame Xanadu folded her hands.
"Good," she said. "Then in the next session, we begin properly."
And there the morning held, all of them gathered around one small child, one golden watch, and the first fragile edge of a truth Kairo did not yet know how to name.