Chapter 20: TRAITOR

Morning arrived gradually, turning the darkness outside the shelter into wet grass, trees and a pale strip of sky, while Sio lay awake enough to notice every stage of it. He had managed very little sleep. Whenever exhaustion finally pulled him under, Mira returned beneath the cold lights of Vise’s recording, and he woke with the same helpless anger sitting in his chest.

Caspian and Fern had both answered during the night. Between them, they had confirmed that Central personnel took Mira and that the order bypassed most of the local Nexus structure, but neither had found where she was being held. By the time the pickup window approached, Arch stopped checking the communicators and folded the maps away. "You already know what matters most, but I want you to hear it again before you leave. Vise wants information about your first Claim and the Scar. He’ll ask what they do, how they work and what happened to you. Don’t explain any of it."

Sio stopped checking his pockets and looked at him. "And when refusing stops being enough?"

"I’ll handle what comes after."

The answer bothered Sio for exactly the reason Arch probably expected. There were too many variables between those words and anything resembling a plan, and Sio had spent enough of the night imagining them already. "You don’t know where they’re taking me. You don’t know where Mum is. You barely remember Vise, and apparently he remembers enough about you to warn me about your ability before I even arrived. I’m trying to trust you here, Arch, but you’re asking for a lot."

"I know." Arch did not insult him by pretending otherwise. "That’s why I’m not asking you to understand my entire plan. I’m asking you to keep one part of it simple. Whatever happens after you arrive, don’t give Vise information he doesn’t already possess."

Sio looked toward the window, where morning had finally overtaken the last of the darkness. "And Mum?"

Arch took a moment before answering. "If you see her, think before you move."

That brought Sio’s attention straight back to him. The instruction sounded reasonable until he pictured Mira restrained somewhere beyond the coordinates, close enough to touch after an entire night of being unable to reach her. "I don’t know if I can promise that."

"I know that too." Arch stepped closer and checked him one final time, making certain nothing unnecessary remained in his clothes. There was no key, no equipment from Arch’s house and nothing Sio could lose that would give Central anything useful. When he finished, his hand remained against Sio’s shoulder for a brief moment before falling away. "Whatever Vise says to you, remember that he wants you reacting before you think. Don’t help him."

Sio gave a small nod. There was nothing left to prepare that either of them knew how to prepare for, so they left the shelter shortly afterward.

The pickup point sat beyond the ridge they had studied the previous night. Morning light had spread fully across the coast by the time they approached, touching the narrow water channels beside the paths and the vegetation covering the slopes. Under different circumstances Sio would have been staring at everything, asking Arch what grew where and what waited beyond every distant line of water. Today he barely noticed any of it.

Arch stopped before the final descent, far enough from the platform that Sio would appear to approach alone. The Central transport had not arrived yet, though a handful of ordinary travelers were already waiting near the coastal road. Sio watched them for a while, envying how normal their morning looked, before saying, "If you find Mum before they take me wherever they’re planning to take me, get her out first. Don’t wait because you’re trying to get both of us at once."

Arch’s expression tightened. "I heard you."

"I mean it."

"I know you do." Arch did not argue, which somehow made leaving harder. His gaze stayed on Sio for another moment before he added, "You keep quiet about the Claim and the Scar. I handle everything I can from my side."

Sio breathed slowly through the pressure gathering beneath his ribs. "That’s the arrangement."

Then he descended the ridge.

The Central transport arrived almost exactly when Vise had promised. Two officers stepped out and searched Sio before allowing him anywhere near the entrance. They emptied his pockets, removed his communicator and identification, then used a handheld scanner to check for anything the physical search might have missed. Whatever Vise expected Arch to send with him, they clearly had instructions to find it. When nothing interested them, one officer returned Sio’s identification to a sealed compartment rather than to him and motioned toward the vehicle.

Once the doors closed and the transport began moving, Sio sat opposite the officers with his hands between his knees and tried to follow the route through changes in direction and vibration beneath the floor. The windows darkened before they had traveled far, leaving him with guesses that contradicted one another within minutes. He tried counting turns anyway, then changes in elevation, then the stretches where the road sounded different beneath the tires. Eventually even Sio had to admit that his imaginary map was becoming useless.

At some point he pulled his left sleeve back just enough to see the symbol Arch had drawn. The dark lines had settled cleanly against his skin, two intersecting near the middle with the unfinished curve and smaller marks around them. Sio traced the shape with his eyes and felt an irritating tug of familiarity. He had seen something like it somewhere before, and the harder he tried to place the memory, the further it seemed to retreat. When one of the officers shifted in the opposite seat, Sio covered his arm again before the attention could become mutual.

For the remainder of the journey, he kept Arch’s warning in his head and tried not to imagine what waited at the other end.

The transport eventually slowed, carried them through several final turns and stopped. Sio was escorted into a windowless corridor unlike the Nexus facilities he had seen before. Dark stone covered much of the floor while sections of the walls seemed to belong to different periods of construction, one stretch nearly smooth and another visibly older. Sio might have spent longer wondering about the place if the officers had not led him through another door and shown him the only thing he cared about finding.

Mira sat near the far side of the room with both wrists secured to the arms of a heavy chair. Her hair had partly come loose, exhaustion shadowed the skin beneath her eyes and tears were already streaking her cheeks when she recognized her son.

Relief softened her face for barely a heartbeat before terror swallowed it.

"Sio, no. Please."

Something in her voice was wrong in a way he had never heard before. This was not the irritated worry she used when he came home injured or the sharp concern that usually turned into questions, food and instructions before Sio could defend himself. Mira sounded frightened enough that the words seemed to tear on their way out.

Sio heard her clearly, but after an entire night spent imagining where she might be, seeing her restrained only a few meters away overwhelmed everything Arch had told him. "Mum."

He pulled away from the officer beside him and started across the room. Mira immediately fought against the restraints, the chair scraping beneath her as she shook her head desperately. "Don’t come over here. Sio, listen to me. Please, stay where you are."

There were only a few meters between them. After everything Vise had forced him to imagine during the night, those few meters barely registered as distance, and Sio kept moving even as Mira’s desperation sharpened.

"Sio, stop! I already lost your father. I am not watching you die in front of me too. Please, just listen to me this once."

The words reached him, and his stride finally broke, but his body had already carried him too far.

Something changed beside him.

A section of the wall pushed outward with violent speed, taking shape as it crossed the room. Sio caught only the movement at the edge of his vision and began turning toward it.

Mira saw it before he did.

Her whole body jerked against the restraints as panic tore through her face, and the scream came out broken by crying.

"SIOOOOO!"

The hammer struck the side of his head.

White light swallowed the room. Sound collapsed into a violent ring inside his skull, and his body hit the floor before he understood that his legs were no longer underneath him. Mira was still screaming somewhere beyond the noise, her voice stretching and distorting until consciousness finally disappeared.

When awareness returned, it came through a sharp white burst of pain along the side of Sio’s skull. A high ringing filled his right ear so completely that the voices around him sounded distant and warped. Pressure throbbed beneath his temple, something wet had dried through his hair and across his cheek, and his shirt was stiff where blood had run down the side of his neck before somebody stopped the wound.

He forced his eyes open and found Mira immediately.

She was still restrained in the same chair. Her cheeks were wet and her eyes swollen from crying, and the moment she realized he was awake, relief broke through the fear so suddenly that her shoulders sagged against the restraints. "Sio. Look at me. Please, sweetheart, look at me."

He tried. The room shifted around her before settling again, and even forming her name seemed to require more effort than it should. "Mum."

Mira let out a broken breath and leaned toward him as far as the restraints allowed. "Stay down. Don’t try to come over here again. I don’t care what they say to me, I don’t care what they do in this room, you stay down and you stay alive. Do you understand me?"

Sio swallowed and instinctively tried to raise himself. The movement sent another spike of pain through his skull, and Mira’s composure cracked completely.

"Sio, please." Her voice dropped into something rawer than the scream had been. "I buried your father. I am not burying you too."

That stopped him more effectively than the restraints did.

For several seconds Sio could only look at her. He had known what losing Silas had done to Mira in the abstract way a son knew pieces of his mother’s life before his own memories began, but he had rarely heard her speak from inside that grief. Now it was sitting openly on her face, mixed with the terror that the only family she had left might disappear in front of her too.

Only then did Sio properly register the people gathered around the examination platform beneath him.

Three wore medical clothing. One was adjusting a diagnostic frame above his chest, another worked near the wound on his head, while the oldest studied a projection containing several readings Sio recognized from his examination with Fern and Caspian. His wrists were restrained to the platform, and smaller punctures along both arms showed where blood had been taken while he was unconscious.

Sio tested one restraint instinctively, earning an immediate warning from the older doctor. "I would strongly recommend against fighting those right now. You took significant trauma to the side of your head. We stabilized the injury, but trying to sit up again is going to make you considerably worse."

Sio barely acknowledged him. His attention remained on Mira until he convinced himself that, beyond the exhaustion and fear, she did not appear seriously injured.

The woman beside him moved a scanner slowly across his chest. "Scar signature remains present internally, but depth mapping is failing at the same point again. Different frequency and angle, same loss of resolution."

The older doctor enlarged part of the projection and asked about Sio’s classification. When she confirmed that the Veyr reading remained completely stable every time they isolated it, another doctor opened the profile associated with Sio’s first Claim and explained that the Claim structure was active but still incomplete. Identity remained unavailable, Nature unresolved, integration incomplete, and their attempts to pull anything useful about its Responsibility had produced little more than the previous examination.

Sio listened without moving, gradually understanding just how much of the Luminara examination Central possessed. They knew his previous baselines, the contradiction between his Veyr classification and the Scar, and the unresolved information surrounding his first Claim. They had enough to know what made him abnormal, but apparently not enough to understand why.

The older doctor compared the new readings with those records before drawing a chair nearer to Sio. His voice was controlled rather than openly hostile. "We’ve confirmed most of what the Luminara Nexus found, but the equipment can only tell us so much. The missing part has to come from you. When you deliberately use your first Claim, what happens? I’m not asking you for a theory. Describe what you physically experience."

Arch’s warning returned immediately.

Sio kept his eyes on the doctor without answering.

The man waited before asking whether activation required contact, a particular target or some other external condition. He deliberately kept the questions broad, searching for anything Sio might answer accidentally, but Sio remained silent. When the woman beside him tried asking about the Scar instead, mentioning the measurable response recorded during his earlier examination and asking Sio to describe any pain, altered perception or other sensation he experienced at the time, he understood exactly what they were doing.

These were careful questions.

They were also precisely the questions Arch had told him not to answer.

Sio turned his head slightly toward Mira. She was watching him closely, still frightened enough that he could almost see the urge to tell him to cooperate if cooperation meant nobody hit him again. Confusion lingered for a moment before something in her expression shifted. She knew Arch too, and slowly she seemed to realize that Sio’s silence was not stubbornness for its own sake.

Sio swallowed against the soreness in his throat. "Untie my mother."

The older doctor’s expression hardened slightly. "That isn’t under my authority."

"Then what you want from me isn’t under mine either."

Sio turned his eyes away, and when the doctors resumed the examination, he refused to help them. They checked blood responses, soul resonance, the passive signature surrounding his first Claim and the internal Scar from several positions. Instruments were changed, readings repeated and small variations debated, but nothing produced the explanation Central wanted.

His Veyr classification remained stable while the Scar stayed present without revealing a clear wound. His first Claim remained active without providing a complete Identity, Nature or Responsibility through their diagnostics, and nothing they measured told them what either ability actually did.

Sio held onto that knowledge while pain pulsed through his head with every heartbeat. Central had his records and his body restrained to a table, but there were still parts of him they could not reach without his cooperation. For the moment, that was something he could protect.

The door opened while the doctors were comparing another set of readings. Their conversation quieted as a man entered, and Sio recognized Vise from the recording immediately.

Seeing him in person made the absence of anything outwardly remarkable about him more unsettling. There was no dramatic uniform, no weapon displayed for intimidation and no expression that matched the kind of man who had taken Mira simply to force Sio into this room. Vise walked toward the platform with the unhurried manner of somebody entering a place that already belonged to him.

Before he reached Sio, something stirred beneath Sio’s awareness.

The sensation was faint, but the resemblance to what he had experienced around Arch was enough to make him notice it despite the pain. This reaction carried none of the strange familiarity Arch had produced. Something deeper inside Sio tightened at Vise’s approach, almost recoiling, before becoming quiet again, and Sio’s breathing shifted slightly before he could control it.

Vise noticed the change and stopped beside the platform, studying Sio for a moment before his gaze moved toward the blood dried through his hair. "You ran to her."

Sio forced the words through the ringing in his ear. "She’s my mother. What did you expect me to do?"

Vise’s eyes moved briefly toward Mira before returning to him. "Exactly what you did."

That answer sat badly in Sio’s stomach. Mira glared at Vise through the tears still drying on her face, fear turning visibly into anger now that he stood close enough to Sio for her to focus it somewhere. "You got what you wanted. He came here. Let him go."

Vise did not acknowledge her immediately. The deliberate disregard made Mira’s fingers tighten around the arms of the chair, but before she could say anything else, the older doctor approached with the examination results. He explained that they had confirmed the earlier findings without resolving either anomaly. Sio remained Veyr despite the Scar signature, the Scar could not be mapped properly, his first Claim continued returning an incomplete profile, and Sio had refused every question about how either manifested.

Vise listened without interrupting. When the doctor finished, he looked at Sio rather than the results and said, "Arch told you not to explain your ability."

Sio had been expecting another question about the examination. The statement caught him just enough that his fingers tightened against the restraint before he could stop them.

Vise’s attention dropped briefly toward the movement.

That was when Sio understood that the certainty had been bait.

Vise had not heard the conversation in Thalassia. He knew Arch well enough to predict what instruction Arch would give someone he was trying to protect, and Sio’s reaction had just told him the prediction was right.

"He would have told you to keep quiet," Vise continued, studying Sio with that same irritating calm, "and promised he would handle everything else himself."

This time Sio gave him nothing.

He did not need anything more.

"We’ll see how long you’re willing to wait for him."

The threat never needed to become louder.

While Sio lay restrained inside Central’s facility, Caspian was following the question that had bothered him since the transfer order appeared: how Sio’s examination had reached Central so quickly in the first place.

The trail brought him back to the local examination wing. He found the examiner who had originally tested Sio sitting at the same workstation where his Veyr classification and anomalous Scar signature had first appeared together. Her hands stopped moving across the console the moment Caspian entered, and the recognition in her expression made him close the door before approaching.

"Tell me I’m wrong."

The examiner watched him cautiously. "About what?"

Caspian’s usual ease had disappeared completely. "Fern locked Sio’s examination locally. I told you nothing from that file went to Central until we understood what we were looking at, and you agreed."

"I agreed the full examination should remain restricted."

His expression hardened. "Don’t change the wording now. You knew exactly what I meant yesterday."

The examiner looked toward the console instead of him. "He was classified Veyr while carrying an internal Scar that didn’t exist in either baseline examination. We couldn’t map it, we couldn’t properly resolve the first Claim, and the results contradicted what we know about Wayfarer classification. You wanted more time. I believed Central needed to know what we had found."

"You believed that after I explicitly told you not to send it."

"I believed the medical risk mattered more than keeping the case local."

Caspian reached past her and opened the transmission history himself. Fern’s restriction remained visible around the original examination record, but beneath it sat a second outgoing transmission authorized manually through the examiner’s credentials. The diagnostic summary had been sent alongside Sio’s previous baselines, the anomalous Scar findings and the incomplete first Claim profile. Its destination was Central Nexus Anomaly Review, and the timestamp showed it had been sent yesterday, shortly after Caspian told her to keep the information inside the branch, early enough for Central to have the results long before Sio surrendered himself.

Caspian stared at the record before looking at her again. "You went around Fern’s lock."

"I sent a medical anomaly report. I didn’t authorize anyone to break into Arch’s house. I didn’t know they would take Mira, and I certainly didn’t order them to drag Sio into Central custody."

"No. You just gave the people who could make those decisions everything they needed to make them."

The examiner opened her mouth, but whatever defense she had prepared did not come immediately. Caspian looked back at the authorization line. There was no stolen credential, no technical breach and no unknown intermediary left to blame. The examiner who had first examined Sio had deliberately sent his file to Central herself.