The silence in the dusty university basement was a physical presence, thick and heavy as the humidity outside. It was broken only by the frantic, rhythmic clicking of Jax's keyboard and the soft, pained rhythm of Alastor's breathing.
He sat apart from them, his back against a tower of boxes containing the complete works of Freud, his gaze fixed on some distant, internal horizon. The protein bar seemed to have settled his stomach, but it had done nothing for the storm in his eyes.
Leo, armed with his tablet and a dogged determination to rebuild his shattered reality, approached first. He pulled up a map of the world, zooming in on the Mediterranean, then Greece, then a specific set of coordinates. He held it out, his voice carefully neutral, a professor beginning a lecture.
"Alastor. This is the world. Your people... the Hound-Keepers. Do you recognize this land? The Aegean?"
Alastor's amber eyes flickered to the screen. He stared at the colorful, animated map, the shapes meaning nothing. He pointed a gauntleted finger at a blinking icon representing their own location in New York, and let out a short, sharp grunt of negation. Then he swept his hand across the entire screen, a gesture of vast, encompassing loss.
"Everywhere?" Leo asked, his brow furrowed. "You're saying your civilization was... everywhere?"
Alastor just stared at him, the wall of incomprehension solid and high.
Frustrated, Leo switched tactics. He pulled up images of ancient artifacts-Mycenaean daggers, Minoan frescoes, Egyptian hieroglyphs. "These symbols? These styles of art? Do any of these look familiar?"
Alastor glanced at them, his expression unchanging. To him, they were as alien as a smartphone. He reached out and tapped the screen, hard enough to make Leo flinch. The image shattered into a spiderweb of cracks. Alastor looked momentarily surprised, then annoyed, as if the device itself had offended him.
"Okay, not that," Leo muttered, retreating with his damaged tablet. "The language barrier is... absolute."
Next, it was Jax's turn. He was buzzing with a different kind of energy. He saw Alastor not as a historical subject, but as the ultimate piece of alien hardware. He approached with his electromagnetic sensor, its display glowing.
"I just want to get a baseline reading," Jax said, more to himself than to Alastor. "See what kind of energy signature you're putting out. That... light show... it had to come from somewhere, right?"
He moved the wand slowly towards Alastor's chest.
It was the wrong move.
The moment the device got within a foot of him, Alastor's head snapped up. The lost, confused expression vanished, replaced by the same feral panic they had seen in the trench. He saw the humming, glowing tech not as a tool, but as a weapon. A probe. Just like Thorne's.
He snarled, a low, dangerous sound deep in his throat, and swatted the device out of Jax's hand. It clattered against the concrete floor, its screen going dark.
"Hey!" Jax yelped, scrambling backward. "That was three thousand dollars!"
Alastor was on his feet now, his body coiled, his eyes blazing with a defensive fury. He looked from Jax's shocked face to the broken device, his chest heaving. The message was clear: You will not experiment on me.
"It's okay! It's okay, Jax, just back off," Maya said, stepping between them, her hands up in a placating gesture. She looked at Alastor, trying to project calm.
"He didn't mean to scare you. It's just a tool. Like... a trowel." She mimed digging, a hopelessly inadequate comparison.
The anger in Alastor's eyes slowly receded, replaced by a weary confusion. He looked at the terrified Jax, then at Maya's earnest face. He slowly settled back against the boxes, but the tension remained in his shoulders. The wall was now fortified with mistrust.
It was Chloe who finally found a crack. She had been watching quietly from the shadows, her own fear resonating with his. She didn't approach him with logic or technology. She simply sat down on the floor a few yards away, not looking at him, and opened her small, worn leather satchel.
She pulled out a piece of chalk and began to draw on the concrete floor. Not words. Not maps. She drew the symbol. The three-headed hound, wreathed in flame, exactly as it had appeared on the slab before it shattered.
The change in Alastor was instantaneous.
He went perfectly still. All the weariness, the confusion, the anger, drained away, replaced by a profound, heart-stopping intensity. His eyes were locked on the drawing, his breath caught in his chest.
He slowly, hesitantly, pushed himself away from the boxes and crawled over to her. He knelt before the chalk drawing, his gaze reverent, horrified. He reached out a trembling hand, his fingers hovering just above the lines, as if afraid to touch a holy relic-or a ghost.
He looked at Chloe, his eyes filled with a desperate, unspoken question.
"You know this," she whispered, not as a question, but as a statement.
He nodded, a single, sharp dip of his chin. The first clear communication.
He pointed to the symbol, then to his own chest.
"It's you," Chloe said softly.
He nodded again, more vigorously now. Then his face contorted with a grief so old and deep it seemed to suck the air from the room. He pointed to the symbol, then made a sweeping gesture with his arm, encompassing the entire basement, the world outside, and then clenched his fist over his heart. A single, black tear traced a path through the grime on his cheek.
He was the last. The symbol, his people, were gone. He was the only one left.
The wall was still there. The chasm of time and language was still vast. But in the dusty, silent basement, lit by a single bare bulb, a connection had been made. Not through words or technology, but through a shared image of loss. They couldn't speak to him. They couldn't understand his world.
But they could finally, truly, see his pain. And for now, that was the only language that mattered.