Page 143 of GlitchBorn Heart

Not the way DreamNet drags you down like water. This is different. Violent. I yank her through the system as though she’s a puppet on a string and bring her to me. Ones and zeros scattering behind her.

The walls dissolve, neon corridors unfurling into a wide-open space. My senses blur. Her proximity ignites my blood, her magic wrapping around mine, fire to ice, control to emotion. The visual in front of us is spectacular, a blending of red, orange, gold, and magenta, swirling like coded DNA. I can’t break away. Her body pixelates, light responding without thought, then reforms.

She looks around, taking in the sight of our magic intermixing. A devilish grin slides across her full lips.

Thrill.

She turns to me, wrapping her arms around me with emotion so intense, I feel my own power respond. I shudder because it isn’t just the system that’s reacting. My own magic joins in, threads of firelight sparking, reaching toward her like magnets clamping together.

“Kael, what are you?” She cups my face in her hands, fingertips brushing where flesh and power blur.

For a moment, I tense, reveling in her touch, my eyes locking on hers. My lips curve, not in humor, but as a warning.

I’ve realized just how dangerous I can be.

“Not what I thought I was.” My voice comes out rough. “Not what Vikktor thinks I am. And maybe not what you think either.”

The digital walls around us quake, doors shuddering as if my very admission rewrites the grid. I feel my magic stir toward hers again, golden threads weaving amongst flames.

“The code. It’s gathering, following you. You’re bending it to your will, writing it as you need it,” she whispers. “That isn’t your intelligence, Kael. It’s...”

“Magic.” I say it like it’s a sickness, like I’d rather cut it out of myself than admit it.

For years, U21 magic had been something I thought of as a curse, dangerous, unpredictable, and a threat to order. My goal was always to contain, classify, or erase it before it consumed its host. A liability, an anomaly, not something that could live inside me. Especially not something that could answer when I called for it. Yet here it is, coiling through my veins, fusing with the system, awakening after being dormant all along.

My hand comes up, pressing over hers. “You were the spark, Taiyō. You ignited it, pulled it out of me.”

Yes, maybe that’s it. Maybe the magic is a mirror of her own.

I’m not gifted, just branded. For years, I’ve built my life on precision, on discipline, on the certainty that only control keeps the chaos at bay. Magic is chaos. Magic is untamable and burns anomalies from the inside out. Magic is the reason Vikktor puts them down and the reason Jett resists.

A sickness climbs up my throat. If I admit this, I become the very thing I’ve learned to despise. I’m the hunter not the hunted, I struggle to reconcile the logic.

Lyra watches me like she can see inside my thoughts; she probably can now. Her expression is worrisome, like she wants to name the thing I won’t. Her eyes catch the flicker of orange crawling across my tattoos, and for the first time in years I feel naked and exposed.

LINK’s voice fills the system, loud and boisterous.

CORRUPTION

DATA REPAIR INITIATED

ACCESS FILE: DR. KAEL RYUDON

Her tone wavers, still a machine...for now. A shadow slides in, a dark presence, like a curtain being pulled around us. She’s circling us.

Lyra feels it too. “Welcome to the shitshow.” She knows it all too well. “This is about the time I usually run like hell.”

I don’t flinch. I lean in until my forehead nearly brushes hers. “Let her come,” I growl. “I don’t kneel to LINK. I don’t kneel to Vikktor. I never have. I never will. The only one I kneel to is you...my queen.”

She turns back to me and kisses me with such force it knocks the breath from my lungs. The contact sets off a passion inside me. Not in the system, in me. Her soft, full lips press violently, the punishing kiss of a desperate woman trying to pull me into the deep with her.

My magic answers hers willingly. Threads of scorching light spark beneath my skin, reaching for her like they’ve always known where they belong. Fire kissing the sun. Heat recognizing heat. Power answering power.

Apart, we’re a force to be reckoned with, but together, we’re unstoppable.

She asked me what I am. I don’t have an answer. Not yet. But as her magic curls tighter around mine, I realize something irreversible has already happened.

Whatever I am...it woke up for her.