When Aaron opened his eyes he was in the hospital.
Moon was sitting next to him. Arms crossed. Not sleeping. Just waiting.
"How long," Aaron said.
"Fourteen hours."
He sat up. His shoulder immediately had something to say about that.
"The others," he said.
"Crane. Two broken ribs, fractured shoulder. Marcus lost feeling in his left arm." She paused. "They don't know yet if it's coming back. Dain still hasn't woken up."
Aaron looked at the wall.
"They'll make it," Moon said. Not soft. Just stating it.
"Tell me what happened in there," she said.
So he told her. The chamber. The figures and how they moved. How nothing the group did made enough difference. How he walked between them because they couldn't see him. How the aura dropped everyone at once like gravity had made a personal decision about each of them.
When the stones should have come next he just didn't go there.
"Everyone went down from the aura," Aaron said. "All of them. I was the only one still standing." He looked at his hands. "And then something flashed and I blacked out. Woke up here."
Moon looked at him.
"You were the only one conscious."
"Yeah."
"And you don't know how you all got back."
"No."
She didn't push it. But she didn't let it go either. He could see that clearly.
"The Director," Aaron said. "Is he—"
"Fine."
"He was losing when I last saw him."
"He's fine." Something crossed her face fast. "Two of the three outside are gone. One escaped." She held up a hand before he could say anything. "We're handling it."
"Moon—"
"We're handling it Aaron."
She stood. Looked at him one last time.
"Rest," she said. "Order."
She left.
Aaron sat there for about thirty seconds.
Then got up.
Theren was asleep on the couch outside his room.
Work jacket still on. Shoes still on. Phone on his chest rising and falling with his breathing. The way someone falls asleep when they swear they're just closing their eyes for one second.
Aaron stood there looking at him.
Theren opened his eyes. One second of confusion. Then he saw Aaron and was up fast and had him by the back of the head before Aaron finished blinking.
Aaron held on back.
They stayed like that for a moment that didn't need anything in it.
Theren pulled back and looked at his face. Both hands on Aaron's shoulders. Same thing he always did. Scraped knee or portal disaster. Same routine every time.
"What happened," Theren said. "Tell me."
"Portal pulled us in. Ruins on the other side. Figures. Lot of them." Aaron sat down next to him. "Frozen at first. Then not."
"The others."
"Deep unconscious. Most of them." Aaron looked at his hands. "We didn't lose anyone. They're still here."
Theren let out a long breath.
"The healers here are the best," he said. "Don't worry about them. They'll pull everyone through." He said it the way he said things he'd had to believe before and been right about. Then he looked at Aaron. "You came back."
"Yeah."
"How."
Aaron thought about the screen. The options. The flash. The Director's face in that last second before everything went white and the ground came up.
"Don't fully know," he said.
Theren looked at him for a long moment. Then nodded once and pulled him back in and Aaron's shoulder was on fire and he said absolutely nothing about it.
He found a bathroom down the hall and locked the door and pulled up his screen alone.
[Status: NULL]
[Rank: UNREGISTERED]
[Class: ———]
Same. Always the same.
But underneath.
Aaron stared.
[Strength: 41]
[Agility: 38]
[Defense: 45]
[Unknown Barrier: ACTIVE]
His heart was going faster than it should.
For context. A freshly ranked F-awakener sat around eighteen across the board on a good day. Aaron was null. Aaron had no rank, no class, no anything.
Aaron was sitting at forty one.
*What*, he thought. Just that one word sitting in his brain not moving.
The stone. The energy pouring up his arm. That hollow place going full all at once in a way that had felt like coming home to somewhere he'd never been.
His screen flickered.
[UNKNOWN BARRIER — ACTIVE]
[ORIGIN — UNKNOWN]
[CLASSIFICATION — IMPOSSIBLE]
He stared at that last word.
*Impossible.*
The same word that had shown up on everyone's screens in the ruins when the wall cracked open. The same word the system had used when it couldn't put Aaron in a box.
He almost walked back out and told Theren everything. The stones. The screen. What unknown actually did. What was sitting in his chest right now that hadn't been there yesterday.
Theren who had slept on a couch in his work jacket for fourteen hours.
He put the screen away.
Not yet.
He walked the ward slowly on the way back.
Crane's room. He didn't go in.
Marcus's room. He stopped outside longer than he meant to. Through the gap he could see Marcus's left arm lying flat with sensors across it and Marcus staring at the ceiling with an expression Aaron had genuinely never seen on him before. Not anger. Not the thing Marcus usually had going on behind his eyes.
Just someone sitting with something they hadn't figured out how to carry yet.
Aaron kept walking.
Dain's room.
Still out. Monitors slow and steady. A woman in the chair next to the bed with her hand wrapped around Dain's and her head down and she wasn't sleeping. Just holding on.
Aaron stood in the doorway for a moment.
Then walked back to his room. Sat on the bed. Pulled the screen up one last time just to look at it.
[Status: NULL]
The numbers underneath didn't agree.
He was still staring at that when the screen flickered hard. The kind of flicker that felt physical. Like something hit it from the outside.
Then it came through.
[EMERGENCY ALERT — ALL REGISTERED AWAKENERS]
[THIRD OPENING — CONFIRMED]
[ESTIMATED ARRIVAL — 72 HOURS]
[THREAT CLASSIFICATION — EXTINCTION LEVEL EVENT]
Aaron read it twice.
Then a third time.
So this is it then.
Seventy two hours.
Extinction level.
He sat there in the quiet hospital. Monitors beeping down the hall. His uncle asleep on a couch outside. Everyone who'd gone through that portal with him barely holding on in rooms he'd just walked past.
The one figure that escaped still out there somewhere.
Seventy two hours.
He thought about the map he'd built for three weeks in his room while everyone else was training. The data that didn't make sense until it did. The portal patterns all pointing at the Academy like they had a specific address.
He thought about the stone in his hand and what came out of it.
He thought about option three.
*Unknown.*
His screen flickered one more time.
[UNKNOWN ENTITY — STILL ACTIVE]
[LOCATION — UNKNOWN]
[WARNING — IT KNOWS WHERE YOU ARE]
Aaron looked at that last line for a long time.
Put the screen down on the bed next to him.
Lay back.
Stared at the ceiling.
*Okay*, he thought.
*Okay then.*