The darkness inside the VTOL was absolute, a swallowing void broken only by the dull, red glow of standby lights and the violent, rhythmic thrum of the engines that vibrated up through the deck plates and into Kyon's bones. He was strapped into a rigid, cold seat, his wrists locked into restraints on the armrests. The two armored soldiers who had put him there sat opposite him, their featureless helmets reflecting the crimson light, their silence more intimidating than any threat.
He tried to speak once. "My grandma... she'll be—"
One of the helmets tilted a fraction of an inch. The message was clear: Silence.
So he sat. And he felt. The adrenaline that had carried him through the stop-time event and the subsequent shock of his capture had drained away, leaving a hollow, aching shell. The headache was a persistent, drilling presence behind his eyes, a deep, throbbing reminder of the impossible thing he had done. His nose had stopped bleeding, but a dried, itchy crust remained under his nostrils. He could still smell the coppery tang mixed with the faint, acrid scent of his own vomit on his shirt.
What did I do?
The question looped in his mind, a frantic, terrified mantra. He hadn't just moved fast. He had stopped everything. The dust, the sound, the light, the people... he had paused the universe itself. The sheer, blasphemous scale of it made him feel nauseous all over again. It felt less like a power and more like a diagnosis. A terminal one.
Colonel Rostova's words echoed in the silence. "The feedback is a bitch, isn't it?" She knew. She knew exactly what he was, what he could do, and what it cost him. That knowledge, held so casually in her wintery gaze, was more frightening than the Breaker had been. The Breaker was a force of nature, a storm. Rostova was a surgeon, and he was the tumor she was preparing to excise.
The flight felt like it lasted both an instant and an eternity. There was no window to mark their progress, no change in the engine's pitch to suggest ascent or descent. It was a timeless journey in a metal coffin, ferrying him away from everything he had ever known.
A sudden shift in gravity pressed him down into his seat. They were descending. Rapidly. A few minutes later, with a series of heavy, mechanical clunks and a final, jarring thud, the VTOL landed. The engine whine began to die down, replaced by a new, deeper hum of facility life-support.
The ramp hissed open, revealing not the open sky, but a sterile, grey hangar bay, illuminated by harsh, white lights. The two soldiers unstrapped him, their grips firm on his biceps as they guided him down the ramp. The air was cool, filtered, and smelled of ozone and metal. It was the smell of a place that had no outside.
Rostova was waiting, still holding her tablet, as if she had been standing there the entire flight. "This way," she said, turning on her heel without waiting for a response.
They marched him through a labyrinth of identical, grey corridors. There were no windows, no signs, no decorations. Only numbered doors and the occasional silent, armored guard stationed at intersections. The silence was profound, broken only by the echo of their footsteps and the relentless, low hum.
They stopped at a door marked 7-INT-A. Rostova placed her hand on a scanner, and the door slid open with a soft hiss.
The room beyond was small, circular, and utterly featureless save for a single, metal chair bolted to the floor in the center. The walls, floor, and ceiling were a seamless, matte-white material that seemed to absorb the light from the single, recessed fixture in the ceiling.
"Sit," Rostova said.
The soldiers guided him to the chair and released him. They stepped back, taking positions by the door, which slid shut, sealing him in with the Colonel.
"Where am I?" Kyon asked, his voice small in the dead space.
"A place of assessment," Rostova replied, circling him slowly, her eyes scanning him like a piece of machinery. "The Global Human Defense Initiative, Western Command. You are now a part of it, whether you like it or not."
"I didn't enlist."
"Nobody does," she said, stopping in front of him. "The world is not a comic book, Kyon. There is no enrollment office for people who can shatter reality. There is only conscription. Your life, as you knew it, is over. Your grandmother has been notified that you have been recruited into a highly classified federal youth program for gifted individuals. She will receive a generous monthly stipend. You will not see or speak to her for the duration of your service."
The cold, clinical way she said it stole the breath from his lungs. "You can't do that."
"We can. We have. We do it every day." She held up her tablet. "Your power is tentatively classified as S-Rank. Do you know what that means?"
"It means I can stop time," he said, a flicker of defiance returning.
"No," she corrected, her voice sharp. "It means you are a strategic-level asset. On par with a rogue nuclear submarine or a viral apocalypse. An S-Rank is a walking extinction event. The Breaker back in Oakland was a B-Rank, and he nearly leveled a city block. Your potential, unchecked, could unmake a continent."
Kyon stared at her, the weight of her words crushing the last of his defiance. He hadn't felt like a god in that alley. He'd felt like a scared kid with a terrible, leaking battery in his head. The idea that anyone saw him as… that… was terrifying.
"What do you want from me?" he whispered.
"Control," she said simply. "We need to teach you to control it. To weaponize it. And to withstand the feedback." She tapped her tablet. "Your physiological readouts from the incident show massive synaptic stress, temporal lobe hemorrhage, and cellular degradation. You used your power for what, five minutes of subjective time? And it nearly broke you. What do you think will happen when we ask you to hold a temporal stasis for an hour? Or rewind a building collapse?"
"I can't do that," he said, the headache pulsing anew at the mere thought.
"You will. Or you will die trying. The only other alternative is we terminate you now, as an unacceptable existential risk." She said it with the same tone one might use to discuss the weather. "The war does not have room for maybes."
The door hissed open again. A man in a white lab coat entered, holding a small, metallic case.
"This is Dr. Aris," Rostova said. "He is going to begin your baseline conditioning."
Dr. Aris gave a thin, humorless smile. He didn't look at Kyon's face, but at his temples, his wrists, as if looking for access panels. He opened the case, revealing a syringe filled with a shimmering, silver fluid.
"What is that?" Kyon asked, his heart starting to hammer again.
"A stabilizer compound," Dr. Aris said, his voice a dry rustle. "It will help fortify your neural pathways against temporal feedback. It will also allow us to monitor your biometrics remotely."
Before Kyon could protest, the doctor swabbed his neck and pressed the syringe against his skin. There was a cold pinch, followed by a spreading warmth that traveled up into his skull. The throbbing in his head dulled almost instantly, replaced by a strange, artificial clarity. The fear was still there, but it was muted, distant, as if he were watching it on a screen.
"See?" Rostova said, watching his reaction closely. "We're already helping you."
But as the cool clarity settled in, a deeper cold took root in Kyon's soul. The headache was gone, but the memory of the cost remained. This wasn't help. This was a leash. And he had just felt it click into place.
"The processing is complete," Rostova said, turning to leave. "Your training begins tomorrow, Asset. Get some rest. You're going to need it."
The door slid shut, leaving him alone in the white room. The silence was a physical weight. He looked at his hands, turning them over. They looked the same, but he felt different. Cleaned out. Hollowed. The artificial calm provided by the injection was a lie, and he knew it, a thin sheet of ice over a lake of pure terror.
He didn't know how long he sat there. Time felt slippery. It could have been ten minutes or two hours. Eventually, the door hissed open again. The two soldiers returned.
"On your feet."
They marched him back into the maze of grey corridors, descending several levels in a humming elevator that offered no floor numbers. The air grew colder. They finally stopped at a door that was indistinguishable from all the others except for its designation: SUBJ-77 / CELL 12.
One of the soldiers pressed his hand to a scanner. The door slid open to reveal a room that was barely more than a closet. A narrow cot was bolted to one wall, a stainless-steel toilet and sink to the other. There was no window. The only light was a dim, recessed panel in the ceiling.
"Inside," the soldier said, his voice distorted by his helmet's modulator.
Kyon stepped over the threshold. The door hissed shut behind him, the locking mechanism engaging with a sound of heavy, final bolts. He was alone.
He sat on the edge of the cot, the thin mattress offering no comfort. The artificial clarity from the injection was starting to wear off, and the headache was returning, a dull throb at the base of his skull. He put his head in his hands, his elbows on his knees, and tried to breathe.
This isn't happening. This is a dream. A bad trip.
But the cold of the room, the sterile smell, the unyielding reality of the metal door—it was all too real. He thought of his grandmother. What had they told her? A "youth program"? She was sharp. She wouldn't buy that for a second. She'd be sick with worry. The thought of her sitting in their apartment, waiting for a call that would never come, was a physical pain in his chest.
He lay back on the cot, staring at the blank, grey ceiling. He tried to access the feeling, the slippage he'd felt in the community center. He concentrated, trying to will the world to slow, to stop. Nothing happened. It was like trying to flex a muscle he'd never known he had, a phantom limb of the soul. The only result was a sharp spike of pain behind his eyes that made him gasp and abandon the effort.
Exhaustion, deeper than any he had ever known, finally pulled him under into a fitful, dreamless sleep.
He was jolted awake by the sound of his door sliding open. A different soldier stood there, holding a tray.
"Food. Ten minutes."
The soldier placed the tray on the floor just inside the door and stepped back. The door slid shut. Kyon sat up, his body aching. He retrieved the tray. It held a lump of bland, nutrient-dense paste, a cup of water, and a single, hard biscuit. It was fuel, not food.
He ate it without tasting it, his stomach growling in protest at the meager offering. As he drank the water, he noticed a small, almost invisible seam on the wall opposite his cot, at about eye level. He wouldn't have seen it if the light from the ceiling hadn't caught it at just the right angle. A camera. Of course. He was always being watched.
After what he guessed was an hour, the door opened again. The same soldier stood there.
"Training. Now."
He was led back through the corridors, but this time to a different section. The doors here were wider, heavier. They entered a massive, hangar-like space that was almost entirely empty. The ceiling was several stories high. The walls were lined with the same matte-white, impact-absorbent material as his interrogation room. In the center of the room stood Colonel Rostova and a man Kyon hadn't seen before.
This man was tall and wiry, dressed in simple grey fatigues. He had a gaunt, weathered face and eyes that held a permanent, cynical squint. He looked like he hadn't slept well in a decade. He was leaning against a large, metal crate, looking bored.
"This is Jax," Rostova said, without preamble. "He will be your primary field trainer. He is a Class-B Teleporter. He has survived more frontline deployments than anyone else in this facility. You will listen to him. You will do what he says."
Jax pushed himself off the crate and gave Kyon a slow, appraising look. "So you're the big damn S-Rank, huh?" His voice was a gravelly baritone, laced with skepticism. "The Timekeeper. You don't look like much."
Kyon said nothing. He just met Jax's gaze, too tired and too scared to muster a retort.
Jax smirked. "Quiet one. Good. Maybe you're not a complete idiot." He gestured to the empty space around them. "This is the White Room. It's where we break the fragile ones. Today, we're not going to talk about saving people. We're going to talk about not shitting your pants when the world goes to hell."
Jax started pacing a slow circle around Kyon. "Rostova says you can stop time. Fine. But can you do it when someone is screaming in your ear? When the air is on fire? When you've got shrapnel in your leg? Power is useless without control. And control is what you learn when you're one second from death."
He stopped in front of Kyon. "Your power has a cost. A big one, from what I hear. Feedback. Pain. That's your body's way of telling you you're doing something it wasn't built for. You have to learn to ignore that signal. You have to learn to operate through the pain. Because out there," he jerked a thumb over his shoulder, towards some imagined battlefield, "the pain of using your power is always better than the alternative."
Jax walked over to the metal crate and flipped it open. Inside, nestled in foam, were two objects. One was a standard-issue GHDI sidearm. The other was a small, black remote.
"Lesson one," Jax said, picking up the remote. "The world doesn't stop when you do."
He pressed a button on the remote.
A section of the far wall shimmered and resolved into a stunningly realistic holographic projection. It was a street scene, eerily similar to the one in Oakland. Burning cars, rubble, the sounds of distant screams and explosions. In the foreground, a woman with a leg trapped under a collapsed beam was crying for help.
"Simulation is live," a disembodied voice said over a hidden speaker.
"Your objective," Jax said, his voice cold. "Get the civilian to the designated safe zone fifty meters behind her. You have one minute before the building to her left fully collapses. The simulation has real physical feedback. If you get hit by debris, you'll feel it. If you fail, she dies. In the simulation. This time."
Kyon's heart was in his throat. "I... I don't know if I can—"
"Fifty-nine seconds," Jax interrupted, his eyes hard. "The clock doesn't care about your feelings, kid. Move."
Kyon stared at the crying woman, her pleas echoing in the vast room. He tried to focus, to find that slippage. The headache flared immediately, a white-hot protest. He squeezed his eyes shut, gritting his teeth, pushing against the pain.
Stop. Just stop.
Nothing. The world kept moving. The simulation's sounds of chaos pressed in on him.
"Fifty seconds," Jax called out, his voice dripping with disdain. "She's already dead. You're just watching the rerun."
Panic seized Kyon. He couldn't do it. He was frozen, not with power, but with fear. He watched, helpless, as a crack spread up the side of the building next to the woman.
"Forty seconds. You're a fucking statue. Useless."
The woman's screams grew more frantic. Kyon felt a hot flush of shame and anger. He wasn't useless. He had saved them. He had saved Deon, and Tamika, and Ms. Clara. He focused on that memory—the silence, the weight of Deon's body, the feeling of doing something impossible.
The slippage came, not as a controlled effort, but as a violent, desperate lurch.
SCREEEEE——
The world didn't freeze so much as it jammed. The sound distorted into a single, endless, screeching note. The light fractured. The holographic woman was frozen mid-sob, a tear glistening on her cheek. The dust and smoke in the simulation hung in jagged, unmoving clouds. The pain in Kyon's head was instant and excruciating, like a hot icepick driving through his temples. A fresh trickle of warm blood ran from his nose.
He gasped, staggering under the mental weight. He looked at Jax. The trainer was frozen too, his face locked in its permanent scowl. But Kyon could have sworn, for a fraction of a second, he saw the man's eyes flicker, as if he were fighting against the hold.
Shaking, Kyon moved towards the trapped woman. It was just like in Oakland. The air was thick, syrupy. Each step was a monumental effort. He reached her, his breath coming in ragged pants. He tried to lift the beam pinning her leg. It wouldn't budge. It was part of the simulation, but it felt real, and in this frozen state, it was anchored with the weight of the world.
He couldn't move her. He wasn't strong enough.
Think, damn it! The temporal feedback was a fire in his brain. He couldn't hold this for long.
He looked at the beam. If he couldn't move her, maybe he could move the beam. Not physically. Temporally. He remembered the Breaker's shoulder, the clean hole. He remembered Rostova's words about rewinding. He focused on the beam, on the concept of it not being there. He pushed his will against it, imagining it unwinding, its history reversing, back to before it fell.
The pain intensified, blinding him for a second. He screamed, a silent scream in the frozen world.
A section of the beam, about a foot long, simply vanished. It didn't break or splinter. It was just... gone, leaving a perfectly smooth, cut-out section. The woman's leg was free.
It was enough. He grabbed her under the arms and began the agonizingly slow drag towards the safe zone. Every inch was a battle against the resistant air and the screaming agony in his skull. He was crying, tears of pain and effort mixing with the blood from his nose.
He finally dragged her past a shimmering boundary that marked the safe zone. He collapsed over her, his body trembling uncontrollably.
He let go.
The world slammed back into motion with a deafening ROAR.
The sound of the collapsing building was a thunderous crash. Dust billowed out, but the woman was safe, the simulation resetting. The hologram flickered and died, leaving the white wall once more.
Kyon lay on the floor, curled into a fetal position, clutching his head. The pain was worse than before, a searing, full-brain migraine that made him want to vomit. He could feel a warm, wetness soaking the collar of his shirt from his nosebleed.
Jax walked over and looked down at him. There was no praise in his eyes. No approval.
"You held a local stasis for one minute, twelve seconds, subjective time," Jax said, his voice flat. "You altered a localized event. The feedback should have put you in a coma." He nudged Kyon's side with his boot. "You left a piece of the beam behind. In a real scenario, that could have fallen and killed someone else. You were sloppy. Reckless."
Kyon could only moan in response.
"But," Jax said, a grudging note entering his voice. "You didn't just stand there. You adapted. You found a workaround. It was a stupid, brute-force workaround that probably fried half your synapses, but it was something. It means you might not be a complete waste of my time."
He turned and started walking away. "Get him cleaned up and back to his cell," he said to the soldiers who had been waiting by the door. "He stinks of fear and failure. We do it again tomorrow. And every day after that, until he either gets it right, or his brain melts out of his ears."
As the soldiers hauled him to his feet, Kyon caught one last look at the white, empty space where the simulation had been. Jax was right. He had been sloppy. He had been reckless.
But he had also learned something crucial, something that would become the foundation of his damnation. The pain was real. The cost was real. But the power... the power was real, too. And in that moment, lying broken on the floor, it was the only thing he had.
The leash was tight, and it was choking him. But he had felt its length. And he had started to learn how to pull back.