Chapter 1

  The countdown echoed through the control room like a heartbeat—slow, steady, inevitable.

  "T-minus thirty seconds."

  Victor Caelum stood at the center of it all—hands clasped behind his back, eyes fixed on the fusion reactor beyond the reinforced glass. It pulsed with a cold, blue light, restrained power thrumming just beneath its shell. His life’s work. Years of theory. Decades of ridicule. And tonight, everything changed.

  Behind him, rows of technicians and graduate students worked in perfect sync, their movements sharp and practiced. Camera drones floated silently above, broadcasting to investors and university officials in a private gallery overhead. The whole world wasn’t watching—but the ones with power were.

  “Containment fields stable,” someone called out over the hum of machinery. “Core temperature nominal.”

  Victor didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. His mind was already five steps ahead, tracking every variable, predicting every shift.

  Twenty seconds. The room held its breath.

  He glanced up toward the observation window. The university officials stood behind it—suits pressed, expressions unreadable. Among them was Dr. Elizabeth Marron, Vice Chancellor of Energy Sciences—the one who’d fought hardest to fund the experiment. She nodded once.

  Ten seconds. Even the machines seemed to go quiet.

  Victor took a single breath. Shallow. Steady. Focused.

  “Five… four… three… two…”

  The reactor surged awake in a blaze of light and sound.

  Light flooded the chamber. A low, harmonic resonance rolled through the facility. Consoles lit up in perfect sync. Inside the core, plasma spun in a graceful spiral, the confinement rings stabilizing in real time. The impossible had become real.

  Cheers erupted. Laughter. Applause.

  Victor allowed himself the faintest smile.

  Then the readings dipped.

  Just a blip. Less than half a percent. The harmonics rebalanced almost instantly.

  Victor’s brow furrowed.

  He tapped through the diagnostics. A spike in loop voltage—too brief to trigger an alert. His fingers hesitated over the manual override. One of the safety routines had reinitialized. No warning. No prompt.

  He reached for the failsafe. Nothing. The interface blinked red—nonresponsive. Something had overridden it.

  His stomach turned. This wasn’t a failure. This was deliberate.

  “Shut it down,” he snapped.

  “Trying!” Mara’s voice cracked with panic.

  The magnetic field surged. Alarms blared. A gout of plasma licked the inner chamber, vaporizing the shielding in a burst of ultraviolet light.

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  Victor lunged forward toward the console—too late. A searing arc leapt from the panel to his chest. The world tilted—flashed—and then he was on the ground.

  He gasped for air. Smoke poured from the vents. The room was screams and fire. Through the haze, he saw Mara still at her station, trying to reach the emergency cutoff—

  From the gallery above, the university officials were gone. Only Elizabeth remained, frozen in horror as the reactor flared white-hot behind the protective glass.

  Victor tried to shout, to warn her, but no sound came.

  Then came the explosion.

  Everything went white.

  The world vanished in fire and pressure and silence. There was no pain at first. Just absence. Then flickers—sirens, movement, light behind his eyelids. Hands on his chest. Voices shouting over each other. The sound of a rotor. A mask pressed to his face. Then darkness again.

  Victor faded in and out of consciousness that first week, memory fragmented, time bleeding from one moment into the next. There were voices, flashes of ceiling tiles, the sting of antiseptic, and the quiet beeping of machines that told him he was still alive.

  It wasn’t until the second week that the door creaked open quietly.

  Lucas Caelum stood in the doorway, a tablet clutched tight in one hand. At just fourteen, he was already tall—five foot ten—but his frame was skinny, almost frail, like a blueprint not yet filled in. His blond hair was tousled, as if sleep had been traded for worry, and his hazel eyes were ringed with exhaustion. There was something older in his expression, a sharpness that hadn’t been there before the explosion. He didn’t say anything as he stepped into the hospital room, just gave a brief nod to Dr. Amelia Reynolds, who slipped out without protest.

  Victor blinked, bleary-eyed, but more alert than he’d been in days. The man in the bed looked thinner, grayer than the one who had stood proudly before a reactor. His salt-and-pepper hair had surrendered to the strain, dulled by shock and smoke. His brown eyes—usually sharp and unrelenting—now carried the weight of loss behind their clarity.

  Lucas approached slowly, dragging a chair next to the bed.

  “I wasn’t sure you were going to wake up,” he said, his voice steady despite the exhaustion in his eyes, gesturing slightly toward Dr. Reynolds as she quietly exited the room. “They weren’t either.”

  Victor didn’t speak at first; his throat felt like sandpaper, and every breath was a rasp. Lucas noticed and quickly poured a cup of water from the bedside table, handing it to his father. Victor took a sip, the cool liquid easing the rawness enough for him to finally rasp out,

  “How long…?”

  Lucas’s eyes snapped back to his father. “Two weeks,” he said quietly. “They kept you heavily sedated.”

  He hesitated, then added, “I wasn’t just waiting around, though.” Lucas reached for the tablet he’d brought, laying it gently on the bed. “I pulled the logs from the lab’s backup node.”

  Victor’s eyes narrowed. “Sabotage?”

  Lucas nodded, but his voice was cautious. “The logs don’t match the expected failure curve. I pulled the error cascade and found injected lines—buried deep. Someone tampered with the primary governor.”

  Victor’s throat tightened again, this time from something colder than dehydration. “You’re sure?”

  “I triple-checked it. Someone wanted it to fail. And they wanted it to look like your math was wrong.”

  Victor blinked slowly. The weight of that truth pressed heavier than the pain. “How long have you known?”

  Lucas exhaled. “By day three I knew something was off. The logs weren’t right, and nobody was asking the right questions.”

  Victor raised an eyebrow.

  “I didn’t get everything from the backup node,” Lucas admitted. “There was… a dump. Encrypted. High-level access. It just showed up on my relay. No traceable origin.”

  He hesitated, then added, “I chased the routes—whoever sent it buried the trail deep. Dozens of relays, spoofed domains. But two of the packet tags were old Nexora subnet identifiers. Could be noise. Could mean something.”

  Victor’s voice dropped, rough. “Nexora?”

  Lucas nodded. “I traced the code signature through dummy endpoints and shell corps. Whoever did this knew what they were doing.”

  Victor’s gaze flicked back to Lucas, sharper now. “And CrossTech?”

  “They pulled out just before the meltdown. Quietly. No press. No noise. Maybe they knew something. Maybe they didn’t.”

  Victor turned his gaze back to the ceiling, silent. Then his eyes hardened.

  “They killed them,” he said at last. “They killed my students. And they left me to take the blame.”

  Lucas nodded. “And they almost got away with it.”

  Victor turned his head slightly toward him. “You kept it safe?”

  Lucas tapped the tablet. “Redundant backups, encrypted, off-grid. No one’s taking it from us.”

  A silence stretched between them, deep and absolute.

  Then Victor said, with a voice that had regained a thread of steel,

  “We’re going to finish it. No more oversight. No more politics. No one gets to bury us again.”

  Lucas gave a faint, grim smile. “I was hoping you’d say that.”