The Cain estate slept under a sheet of rain.
Past midnight, the mansion's lights dimmed one by one until only the security drones patrolling the halls stayed awake.
But Luther wasn't sleeping.
He sat in the dark on the edge of his bed, staring at his phone. The message from earlier that night glowed across the screen:
UNKNOWN SENDER: If you want the truth about the crash, come to the sub-basement. Midnight.
Come alone.
He should've deleted it.
He didn't.
The elevator ride down was silent.
As the numbers dropped, the walls shifted from marble to steel, the air colder and sharper. The Cain estate's underground levels were supposed to be storage but Luther had already learned that nothing about this family was what it seemed.
When the doors slid open, he stepped into a corridor lined with humming servers and flickering lights. Cables snaked across the floor like veins.
At the end of the hallway, a figure waited...hood up, face half-lit by a monitor's glow.
"You came," the figure said, voice calm, feminine.
Luther's guard rose instantly. "You sent the message?"
"Obviously. You're not easy to reach, Cain."
He frowned. "You know who I am?"
The woman turned fully toward him. She couldn't have been more than twenty-five. short black hair, a faint scar across her jaw, eyes sharp enough to cut glass.
"Name's Elara," she said. "And yeah, I know exactly who you are. You were supposed to die in that crash."
The air between them crackled.
"Supposed to?" Luther repeated. "Then you know who did it."
Elara crossed her arms. "Your uncle. Victor Cain. But not for the reason you think."
Luther's jaw clenched. "Try me."
"He wasn't trying to kill you, Luther. He was trying to activate you."
That stopped him cold.
She walked past him, fingers flying across a nearby terminal. Screens lit up, showing archived files blurred documents, DNA sequences, and photos of his father in a white lab coat.
"Project Echelon," she said. "Your father's masterpiece. He believed certain bloodlines could rewrite probability. Bend the threads that bind cause and effect. He called it Thread Theory."
Luther stared at the images. "And Victor wanted that power."
"Wanted? He's still chasing it," Elara said. "Every Cain Global acquisition in the last decade was to find missing carriers. People like you."
"There are others?"
"Were," she said. "Most of them didn't survive the awakening process."
Luther's stomach twisted. "And me?"
Elara met his gaze. "You're the only one who did."
He turned away, trying to process it all. His father's research, the crash, and Victor's plans.
The silver threads flickered faintly around him again, reacting to his heartbeat.
Elara noticed. "There it is," she said quietly. "The Echelon pulse. You can already control it."
"Control?" Luther scoffed. "I can barely stop it from destroying things."
"Then learn," she said. "Because Victor will come for you the moment he realizes what you can do."
"And you? Why help me?"
Elara hesitated, then flicked a flash drive toward him. He caught it automatically.
"Because your father saved my life once," she said. "And because if you don't stop Victor, he'll burn the world to find what's inside your blood."
The lights above them flickered not once, but twice, and then went dark.
An alarm wailed somewhere above.
Elara swore under her breath. "They traced my signal, and he knows you're here!"
Luther's instincts kicked in. "Move!"
They sprinted through the corridor as red emergency lights pulsed. Drones dropped from the ceiling, targeting them with blinding beams.
Luther's vision sharpened, and the threads came alive again, hundreds of glowing lines stretching between walls, drones, and doorways.
For a split second, he saw what would happen before it did the angle of the lasers, the path of the bullets.
He pulled Elara down just as a drone's shot split the air where her head had been.
She blinked. "How did you..."
"Later!" he barked. "Move!"
They burst through a maintenance door, tumbling into the rain-soaked garden above.
The alarm's echo faded behind them. Elara turned to him, soaked, breathing hard.
Her eyes burned with something between awe and fear.
"You're more than a survivor," she said.
"You're what Victor's been trying to build."
Luther looked down at the flash drive in his palm, the only thing she'd risked everything to give him.
"Then I'll finish what my father started," he said. "But not for Victor. For the truth."
Elara's lips curved into a faint, grim smile.
"Then you'd better learn to use those threads, Cain. Because he's already hunting you."
The storm had broken again, lightning crawling across the sky like a living thing.
Luther and Elara ran through the lower gardens, past statues glistening with rain, toward the estate's perimeter fence. Alarms still wailed faintly in the distance, echoing like angry ghosts.
Elara stopped beside a maintenance shed, fingers flying over a small keypad hidden behind the vines.
"Give me twenty seconds," she hissed. "I can loop the perimeter feed."
Luther scanned the horizon. The silver threads had returned, faint but pulsing in rhythm with his heartbeat.
He could feel movement through them: guards sweeping the grounds, drones shifting overhead, even the slow hum of Victor's security systems locking into place.
He didn't understand how he knew it, but he knew.
"Left side's clear," he said suddenly. "Two guards, one drone. They'll circle back in twelve seconds."
Elara glanced up, eyes narrowing.
"You're guessing."
"No," he said quietly. "I can see it."
The words sounded insane, even to him but a moment later, the guards did exactly what he'd predicted, vanishing behind the hedge.
Elara froze mid-type. "You really can see the threads, can't you?"
"Whatever this is," he said, "it's not a gift. It's a curse."
"That depends on how you use it."
The keypad beeped. The fence gate clicked open just as lightning split the sky above them.
They dashed through the gap, sprinting into the wet darkness beyond the estate walls. A black SUV waited at the end of the service road, engine running, wipers slashing at the rain.
Elara yanked the door open. "Get in!"
Luther hesitated. "You had an exit plan?"
"Always." She slid behind the wheel. "I don't do suicide missions."
The SUV shot forward, tires spitting mud. Through the back window, Luther saw the Cain estate shrinking into shadow its towers gleaming like a kingdom of glass and lies.
He pressed a hand to his ribs where the stitches tugged.
"You said Victor wanted to activate me. What does that mean?"
Elara kept her eyes on the road.
"Your father's research talked about a failsafe. Something that could force the Echelon gene to wake up under extreme stress. Victor must've recreated it on that plane."
"You're saying he knew it would crash?"
"No," she said. "He made sure it would."
The words hit like a punch to the chest. Luther turned toward the window, jaw locked tight. "He killed my father… and left me to burn."
"And now," Elara said, "he's bringing you back under his control. You're proof the experiment worked."
Silence filled the car except for the sound of rain hammering the windshield.
Finally, Luther spoke.
"Then we make sure it never works again."
Elara's mouth twitched into something that wasn't quite a smile. "Now you sound like your father."
Half an hour later, the SUV stopped under an abandoned bridge on the city's edge.
A hidden staircase led down to a dimly lit bunker filled with old tech, glowing monitors, and stacks of servers humming softly.
It looked like a digital cathedral...Elara's domain.
Luther followed her inside. "You live here?"
"I hide here," she corrected. "Cain Global doesn't take kindly to whistleblowers."
She set the flash drive into a terminal. Code streamed across the screen...then froze.
"Encrypted," she muttered. "Your father used a triple-layer cipher. I can crack it, but it'll take time."
Luther leaned on the desk, staring at the code like it might suddenly explain his life. "What's in it?"
"Blueprints. Logs. Maybe proof that Victor caused the crash." She glanced at him. "Or something worse."
He rubbed his temples. The silver threads still shimmered faintly around him reacting to his thoughts, the way nerves react to pain.
Elara noticed. "You're pulsing again."
"I can't stop it," he said through clenched teeth. "It happens when I'm angry."
She took a cautious step closer. "Then control it. Don't let it control you."
He looked up, meeting her eyes. "Easier said than done."
"Maybe," she said, "but the alternative is letting Victor use it against you."
He forced a slow breath. The threads flickered then steadied, drawing back into his skin. The glow faded.
Elara exhaled. "You just stabilized your own bio-field."
"I what?"
"You're learning, Cain," she said, half-smiling. "Faster than any subject I've seen."
Before he could reply, one of the screens blinked. A security feed from outside showed headlights approaching fast.
Elara cursed. "How the hell did they find us so soon?"
Luther's eyes sharpened, the threads exploded into view again, wrapping around him like armor. He could feel the bullets before they came, the air vibrating with hostile intent.
"Get behind me," he said, voice low.
"What are you..."
The door burst open.
Armed men flooded the stairwell, black uniforms gleaming with Cain Global insignias. Muzzles flared with light.
Luther raised a hand instinctively, not consciously, and the world bent.
The bullets froze midair.
For half a heartbeat, everything hung suspended, rain, sound, even breath held in place by silver threads radiating from Luther's outstretched hand. Then, with a flick of his wrist, the projectiles snapped backward, tearing through their shooters instead.
Silence, smoke, and the smell of ozone.
Elara stared, stunned.
"That… was impossible."
Luther's hand trembled as the last threads faded. His voice was barely a whisper.
"No," he said. "It was inevitable."
Outside, in the backseat of a black limousine parked on the ridge, Victor Cain watched the explosion of light from a distance.
He smiled faintly.
"Welcome back, Luther."