The moment passed, but Mirena couldn't shake it.
She adjusted her grip on Kael, shifting his weight higher on her hip, and glanced one last time toward the comms tower. No sign of the man. No reason to worry yet.
Kael's gaze had already moved on. Now he stared at the merchant stalls, but not with a child's wonder. His eyes flicked from crate to crate, studying the markings and color codes printed on each surface like he was cataloging them.
Mirena tried to breathe through it. Focus on the normal. The simple.
She stepped forward, nodded to the copper-skinned trader, and offered her wrist scanner.
"Package for the Virek crew," he said, tapping his datapad. "Tool-grade plasteel, repurposed mag bearings, and... what's this? One case of Redhill adhesive?"
"Special request," Mirena said.
"Didn't figure your boys were into high-torque fabrication."
"They're not. That's for me."
The trader chuckled. "Should've figured. Here, please take it. Watch your back with that casing; the crate's not sealed tight."
As Mirena reached out to accept it, Kael squirmed in her arms again, not impatient, but alert.
"Down?" she asked softly.
He looked up at her with wide, silent eyes.
Mirena hesitated, then crouched and set him gently on his feet. He toddled forward with surprising control, navigating around scattered parts and loose wiring as if he had memorized the floor plan.
She watched closely, instinct half-tensed.
Kael stopped at the edge of a workbench, where an old vendor was hunched over a disassembled battery core. The man grunted, his greased-up gloves fumbling to extract the inner casing without triggering the safety coil.
"Damn thing's jammed again," the vendor muttered. "If I had a third hand, I'd hey!"
Kael had reached up and placed one hand on the edge of the table, then with the other, pointed directly at the release seam on the core's side, barely visible under a thin lip of scorched polyplate.
The man frowned. "What're you…?"
Kael tapped it with a single finger.
The seam clicked. The casing hissed and popped open with a neat whump, releasing the inner coil in a clean slide.
The vendor stared.
Mirena's heart skipped.
Kael stepped back, calm, and looked up at the man, waiting.
The vendor looked at the coil, then at the kid.
Then back again.
"How in the void...?" he muttered.
Kael just blinked once, then turned and walked back to Mirena, who was already crouching.
She scooped him up without a word.
"You train him?" the man called after her.
Mirena didn't answer.
They moved quickly back through the plaza, the weight of eyes following them. Not everyone had seen. But someone had. And that was enough.
She passed Vessa, who had just come from the power junction with a coil over her shoulder. "Everything alright?" Vessa asked, reading her face.
Mirena just murmured, "Time to go."
Vessa didn't question it.
Behind them, the vendor was still staring at the battery core.
That night, Mirena told herself it had been nothing. A coincidence. The coil was probably loose already. The casing is faulty. Kael just touched it at the right moment.
That's all.
But when she checked on him before bed, he was lying on his side in the glow of a spare interface pad, one that hadn't held a charge in weeks.
He wasn't playing.
He was watching the dead screen.
Waiting for it to wake.....
Later that evening
The outer door groaned shut with a blast of grit and cold.
Mirena looked up from the worktable, her hands still deep in the half-dismantled circulator unit. The air inside the home was stale, tinged with the scent of oxidized iron and burnt coolant, standard for a day after a drop off. But the storm that walked in with Arik was different.
He stood on the threshold for a few long seconds, coat still zipped to the neck, a delicate shimmer of red dust clinging to the seams. His face was unreadable. Stern, quiet, eyes dark beneath his brow.
"Something wrong?" she asked, even though she already knew.
Arik didn't answer. He turned and sealed the hatch behind him with a little more force than usual, the latches hissing tighter than necessary.
Kael, in the corner near the heat vent, didn't flinch. He was building again his favorite new pastime. This time, he had stacked four repurposed gear coils into a perfectly balanced vertical line, using small scrap magnets to hold the frame in place.
When Arik finally spoke, it was low and sharp.
"What happened at the plaza?"
Mirena's shoulders tensed. "You saw?"
"I saw him. And I heard what the vendor said."
"It wasn't what it looked like."
"It looked like our two-year-old opened a military-sealed battery coil that a grown man couldn't dislodge. That's exactly what it looked like."
Mirena stood from the bench, slowly wiping her hands. "It was just timing. He touched it at the right moment."
"Don't," Arik cut in. "Don't lie. Not to me."
Mirena went still.
Arik stepped forward, voice still low but tight with pressure. "I've stood back. I've watched. I've tried to believe that maybe he's just smart. Gifted. Whatever word makes it sound innocent. But I saw that vendor's face. I heard what he said to the next trader over. They're talking."
She swallowed. "It's just words."
"Words travel."
He looked over at Kael, who was now leaning over his stack, adjusting a hinge with exacting precision and not hearing or reacting. But Arik wasn't sure anymore.
"I've seen the way he looks at me," Arik said quietly. "The way he looks at everything. Like he's waiting for us to catch up."
Mirena's voice dropped to a whisper. "I know."
Arik turned back to her. His eyes had that old miner steel in them now, the kind that only showed when the roof of a tunnel started to crack.
"I asked one of the guild guards if he recognized the design of the capsule," he said.
Her blood ran cold.
"You what?"
"I didn't say it was ours. I just asked."
"And?"
"He went quiet. Said it sounded like something from a restricted zone. Black Archive material. Tech that was supposed to be lost. Or buried."
Mirena's breath caught. "You told him about the child?"
"No," Arik snapped. "I'm not stupid."
He stepped closer, voice rough now. "But Mirena, we can't keep pretending. He's not a normal kid. He's not even just smart. He's either engineered or trained. Or something older. And people are starting to notice."
Mirena's eyes welled, but her jaw locked.
"I don't care what he is," she whispered. "He's ours."
Arik didn't speak.
Kael made a soft noise, not a cry, but a tone. A sound like two low syllables strung together. Both parents froze.
He had never done that before.
Kael stood slowly, walked to the edge of the room, and placed his small hand on the wall, right on top of the buried electrical conduit that had shorted out two days earlier.
The power blinked once. Then steadied.
Mirena and Arik stared.
The boy looked back over his shoulder at them and smiled, small and gentle, like a question had been answered.
Then he sat back down and resumed stacking coils.