Dr. Emil Hamilton arrived at apartment 4C on a Friday evening at 6:15 PM carrying a leather satchel, a thermos of coffee he had clearly not offered to share with anyone, and the specific energy of a man who had seen enough strange things in his career that a request to examine an unidentified alien device on a teenager's wrist barely registered as unusual.
He was short, somewhere in his mid-sixties, white beard kept close, thick-framed glasses that suggested he had been wearing thick-framed glasses since before they were fashionable and had simply outlasted the cycle twice. Grey cardigan over a blue shirt. He carried himself with the unhurried confidence of someone who had spent forty years being the smartest person in rooms full of people who hadn't noticed.
Silas opened the door. Hamilton looked at him. Then at his left wrist. Then back at his face.
he said. "You're younger than I expected,"
Silas said. "You're older than I expected,"
Hamilton's mouth did something that wasn't quite a smile but was clearly its first cousin.
"Fair. May I come in?"
Silas stepped back. Held the door. Watched Hamilton cross the threshold and take in the apartment in about three seconds the way people did when their job had trained them to read rooms the tidy kitchen, the cleared table, the two good chairs, Denise at the counter with her arms folded.
'He's clocking everything. That's fine. Let him look.'
....
Hamilton sat, opened his satchel, and pulled out a scanner. Put on examination gloves. Held out one hand, palm up, waiting. Silas sat across from him and rested his left arm on the table.
Hamilton asked, eyes still on the device. "How long has it been attached?"
"Five days."
"Any pain?"
"Nope."
"Warmth?"
"Yeah. It changes."
"Changes how?"
Silas kept his face neutral.
"Just varies. Depends on what's going on, I think."
Hamilton raised the scanner. The Omnitrix pulsed once firm and green, like a heartbeat that had just noticed something. The scanner's display flickered. Hamilton adjusted the frequency. Ran it again. The display went blank.
Not off. Blank. A clean flat nothing where data should have been.
Hamilton said. He tried another setting. Blank. Another. Blank. He set the scanner down, reached into his satchel, and pulled out a second device older, different build, different principles. "Hm,"
Blank.
The Omnitrix pulsed its slow green pulse throughout. Patient. Completely unbothered.
Silas said. "It's not letting you read it,"
Hamilton said, with the precision of a man for whom the distinction genuinely mattered.
"It's not blocking the scan,"
He looked up. "There's no interference signal. No counter-emission. It simply isn't participating. My equipment doesn't register it as shielded. It registers it as absent."
"You knew this would happen."
Silas gave a small shrug.
"Kind of figured. I mean it's not from here. Your stuff is from here, right?"
Hamilton looked at him for a moment. Then, quietly, almost to himself:
He looked back at the Omnitrix with the expression of a man who had just been handed a problem he wasn't going to be able to put down. "Thirty-one years. Fourteen confirmed extraterrestrial sources. Not one of them ever returned a completely blank reading."
"Whoever built this did not want it examined by anyone who hadn't been cleared, somehow."
'Yeah. That tracks.'
Silas said nothing. He watched Hamilton remove his gloves and set them neatly beside the blank scanner, and waited to see what the man would do with getting nothing.
Hamilton did not push harder. He folded his hands and looked at Silas directly.
"You're not surprised by any of this."
"I mean a little? It's still weird. But no, not not surprised surprised."
"How long have you been sitting with it?"
"Five days."
"Five days is a long time to sit with something like this quietly."
Silas said. "My mom's good at quiet,"
"So am I."
From the counter, Denise said nothing. But Silas caught the very small shift in her posture that meant she approved.
....
Hamilton said. "Tell me what it does,"
Silas kept it short. "Uh pulses. Stays warm. Attached itself."
"That's pretty much what I can say for sure right now."
"Patricia said you described it as activating."
A beat.
"It's reacted to some stuff. I'm still figuring out what that means."
"Reacted how?"
Silas looked at him. Half a second. Just long enough to be a choice.
"The warmth spikes. The pulse changes. Something happened at school Thursday I dealt with it. Nobody saw anything."
"What happened?"
"I'd rather not get into that yet."
Hamilton held his gaze. Didn't push. Wrote something on his tablet.
he said. Still not accusatory. Just noting. "You're being careful with me,"
Silas said. "I mean yeah,"
"No offence. I just I don't know you yet. And this thing is on my wrist, not yours. So."
Hamilton said. "No offence taken,"
"That's actually the correct response. I'd be more concerned if you weren't."
'Okay. He gets it. He's not going to make this difficult.'
Silas said. "When I know you better I'll tell you more,"
"That's that's where I'm at right now."
"Understood. Tell me what you're comfortable with tonight."
Silas thought about it. What Hamilton could already see. What was already out there.
What giving him would cost nothing and what giving him would cost something.
He paused. "It attached itself the second I touched it. Band just sealed. No gap, no clasp, nothing. I've tried getting it off. It's not happening."
"Before it bonded it did something I don't know, it felt like being scanned. Like something was looking at me from inside my wrist for about a second. And then it just locked on."
Hamilton said. "It evaluated you before committing,"
"That's what it felt like, yeah."
He made a note. "Which means it has selection criteria. It chose you specifically."
"Do you have any sense of what those criteria might be?"
"Not really. I was just walking through the park."
Hamilton said. "That's either very simple or very complicated,"
Silas said. "Yeah,"
"Tell me about it."
Hamilton almost smiled at that. He leaned back and tapped his stylus against the edge of his tablet.
"The pulse rhythm. At rest have you timed it?"
"Four seconds between beats."
He made another note. "That's close to a resting adolescent heart rate."
"Worth keeping in mind."
'It's syncing to my heartbeat. He just figured that out from two data points. Noted.'
....
They went back and forth for another twenty minutes. Hamilton asked clean questions. Silas answered the ones he chose and let the others land and settle without picking them up. It was, he thought, the most controlled conversation he'd ever had with an adult who wasn't his mother and the strange part was that Hamilton seemed to appreciate the control rather than resent it. He didn't try to pry. He didn't reframe questions to get around the ones Silas had deflected. He just moved to the next thing and made his notes and let the silence sit where it needed to.
'He's done this before. Not with this specifically but he's been in rooms where he had to earn information rather than demand it. He knows how to wait.'
That told Silas more about Hamilton than anything he'd said out loud. He filed it.
At the end of it Hamilton packed his equipment away. Denise set a cup of tea beside him without being asked. Silas watched Hamilton accept it without surprise and thought: she's decided. That's what the tea means.
Hamilton said, both hands around the mug. "Here's where I am,"
"I came with equipment and got nothing. What I have is a device that's invisible to every instrument I own, a pulse that may be syncing with its host, and a kid who is more careful than most adults I've worked with. That's interesting but it's not data yet."
Denise asked. "So what do we do?"
"Weekly visits. Here. I'll bring different equipment, keep trying. More importantly I want to hear what the device does over time. Not everything whatever Silas is comfortable sharing, when he's comfortable sharing it. Slow is fine. Accurate is better than fast."
Denise said. Flat. Not a question. "Off the record,"
"Completely. If this device had shown up in S.T.A.R. Labs' monitoring system the conversation would already be out of your hands. You were right to go around it."
she said. "Cadmus,"
"Among others. Yes."
His mother held Hamilton's gaze. Something passed between them the specific recognition of two people who had both seen enough institutional failure to have stopped being surprised by it. Then she nodded. Once. Done.
Hamilton finished his tea, stood, gathered his things. At the door he looked back at Silas.
"One question. Just between us."
Silas said. "Depends on the question,"
Hamilton almost smiled again.
"Has it done anything yet that scared you?"
Silas thought about the bathroom in Centennial Park. The chemistry lab. Nine minutes as a seven-foot volcanic body while Devon knocked on the door.
he said. "Yeah,"
Hamilton said. "Good,"
"Scared means you're paying attention. Keep paying attention."
He left. Denise closed the door and stood with her hand on the latch for a moment.
she said. "I like him,"
Silas said. "He got absolutely nothing and he's already figuring out how to come back and get more,"
"That's kind of why I like him too."
"Homework."
"Mom. It's Friday."
"Sunday evening it is. Don't stay up late."
She went to her room. Silas listened to her door click shut.
....
9:44 PM. Her light was off under the door. She had a 6 AM shift and was out before ten without exception.
Silas sat at his desk and turned the dial slowly. One through ten. The silhouettes cycling through the faceplate's green glow. He'd been careful with Hamilton right call, he was sure of it. But careful had a ceiling.
'You have ten forms. You've used one. By accident. In a school bathroom. For nine minutes. That's not understanding what this is that's surviving it.'
He stopped at position four. XLR8. Narrow build, low center of gravity, built for one thing. He'd activated it once at home and immediately clipped his dresser at what felt like forty miles an hour in eight feet of space and killed the transformation before anything broke.
'Need room. Real room. No walls.'
The old freight yard six blocks east. Decommissioned two years ago. Half a mile of open concrete between the loading bays. He'd walked past it a hundred times knew the chain-link fence had a loose section on the south side where the post had rusted through at the base, knew the nearest streetlight was out, knew the overnight security was a single camera mounted on the north building that pointed at the main gate and nowhere else. He knew these things the way you knew things about your neighborhood when you'd grown up in it. He hadn't known until tonight that he'd been filing them away for a reason.
He opened his notebook and wrote: *XLR8 freight yard one full duration document everything.*
Looked at it. Picked up his hoodie. Laced his shoes.
'Sorry, Mom.'
He went out the window.