The world tilts. I’m on my side now, my vision tunneling until the only thing I can see is that distant, glowing violet light in Jorak’s eyes. He hasn't looked away. Not once. He’s watching me fail, watching me drown in the air of this room, and I can see the murder in his expression.
My lungs give another useless pull. Fever crawls over my skin. My palm slides against the glass, slick with sweat, searching for a surface that will never open.
Across the hall, Jorak slams his hand against his own barrier again.
The staff don't stop.
They note my reaction.
It finally clicks into place, cold and clean beneath the fever. Mercer isn't checking whether distance hurts us. He already knows it does.
He’s measuring exactly how much.
I slide farther down the glass, trying to breathe through the fever while Jorak watches from the other room with murder in his eyes.
Jorak
The first thing I notice isn't the light or the sound, but the cold. It's a clinical, recirculated chill that smells of ozone and industrial-grade disinfectant. My head throbs, a dull, rhythmic ache behind my eyes that speaks of heavy-duty sedatives. I try to move my arms, but they're heavy, pinned by reinforced magnetic restraints that hum with a low-frequency suppression field.
Memories flash back in jagged, ugly bursts. Hands. Too many hands on Asa. The sound of our bedroom door splintering under a breaching charge. I remember the roar of the Black Current in my veins, and then the sharp sting of a dart in my neck. I remember falling, watching Mercer’s retrieval team haul Asa out of the blankets, his face pale and terrified as the sedation took me under.
I open my eyes and the world stabilizes into a nightmare of glass and steel. I'm in a containment unit, the kind designed for high-output S-Class assets. Across a ten-foot gap of reinforcedflooring, another unit stands identical to mine. Inside it, Asa is slumped against the far wall, his knees pulled to his chest.
"Asa," I rasp. My throat is parched, tasting of chemical bitterness and the metallic grit of the suppression field. He doesn't move. He’s shivering, the kind of deep, systemic tremors that come from acute distance sickness.
A voice crackles over the intercom, smooth and devoid of any heat. "He cannot hear you, Jorak. The acoustic dampening is active until we establish the baseline for the separation threshold."
I look up at the observation gallery. Mercer Holt is there, a tablet held in one hand.
"Let him out," I say. I don't shout. I keep my voice low, a vibration that I can feel rattling the magnetic cuffs. "He’s an Omega. He’s F-Class on your own damn charts. He shouldn't be in a high-security containment wing."
"The charts were wrong, as we both know," Mercer replies, tapping the screen of his tablet. "He is a vital component of your stability, Jorak. We are simply quantifying the necessity of his presence. We need to know the exact distance and duration required before your output becomes unmanageable. It’s necessary data."
Across the glass, Asa finally lifts his head. His eyes are glassy, rimmed with the red of exhaustion and fever. He tries to stand, his fingers clawing at the smooth glass of his enclosure, but his legs give out halfway up. He slides back down, a smear of sweat and slick marking the surface. He isn't in heat, not yet, but the distress is forcing his body to overproduce. It smells like bruised vanilla and fear, even through the filters.
"He’s hurting, Mercer," I growl. The Black Current begins to lick at the edges of my consciousness, a dark, oily tide that wants to erase everything in the room. "He’s sick. Look at him."
"It is a controlled observation," Dr. Rue’s voice joins the intercom, sounding slightly more hesitant than Mercer’s but no less clinical. "We are monitoring his vitals, Jorak. The fever is a side effect of the severed bond. We need to see if his Anchor protocols can self-stabilize without physical contact."
Asa’s hand presses against the glass. He’s looking at me now, his lips moving silently. I can read them. It’s okay.The idiot.
"He isn't facility property," I say, the words landing like stones. "He’s not a node. He’s not a piece of equipment you get to stress-test until it snaps. Let him out of that box, or I will kill every person in this wing."
Mercer sighs. "Threats are the language of the unstable, Jorak. You are proving our point. Without the proper containment and pairing protocols, you are a liability to the city. We are merely formalizing the dependency."
I look back at Asa. He’s curled into a ball now, his forehead resting against the glass. He looks so cold. I can feel the distance sickness pulling at my own heart, a physical vacuum in my chest that only he can fill. Every second we are apart, the Black Current grows more jagged, more entropic. It isn't just power anymore; it’s a living scream for its other half.
"One last time," I say, and this time the air in my unit begins to hum. The lights overhead flicker, the frequency of the suppression field stuttering. "Let. Him. Out."
"Increase the sedative drip in unit one," Mercer commands, his voice sharpening. "We aren't finished with the baseline."
I stop arguing. I stop pretending I belong to the ESA. I don't just let the Black Current out; I aim it.
The magnetic restraints don't just unlock; they vaporize. A shockwave of entropic energy slams into the glass of my unit, the reinforced material spiderwebbing instantly before exploding outward in a shower of shards. I step out of the wreckage, myskin humming with a dark, violet light that eats the shadows of the room.
Alarms begin to wail, a frantic, discordant sound that barely registers. Guards are moving in the gallery, weapons being leveled, but I don't care.
I don't even use my hands for the door to his unit. I let the power flow through me, a focused beam of entropy that turns the lock mechanism into slag and shatters the hinges. The glass door falls forward, and I catch it with a burst of energy, tossing it aside like a piece of paper.
