CHAPTER 12
The first alarm did not sound like panic.
It sounded like confusion.
A low, uncertain chime rippled through Blackridge, soft enough to be ignored if you wanted to pretend nothing was wrong. The lights dimmed, brightened, then dimmed again, as if the prison itself was blinking, unsure whether to wake or go back to sleep.
Kade noticed immediately.
He always noticed the first wrong thing.
The rest followed naturally.
Arden swore under her breath. Her fingers flew across her console. Screens multiplied. Numbers cascaded. Nothing made sense in the way she needed it to.
"This shouldn't be happening," she said.
Kade leaned against the glass, relaxed, almost bored.
"It always starts like that," he said. "No system announces its own death."
Elias was shaking now. Not violently. Subtly. Like a tuning fork struck too close to the ear.
"Kade," he whispered. "It's too early."
Kade's jaw tightened.
"No," he said quietly. "It's exactly on time."
The thing in the corner — Scylla's Heir — had stopped pretending to be still. Its outline pulsed, folding in on itself, stretching, contracting, like something trying to remember what shape it was supposed to be.
"You have violated sequence," it said.
Kade turned to it slowly.
"You violated childhood," he replied.
That made it pause.
Good.
Because childhood was where this all started.
When Kade was nine years old, the house they lived in had a stair that creaked on the seventh step.
Not the sixth. Not the eighth.
Only the seventh.
Everyone learned it eventually. Friends. Babysitters. Delivery men. They learned to step over it, to skip it, to jump awkwardly from six to eight like it was lava.
Everyone except his mother.
She stepped on it every single time.
Not because she forgot.
Because she wanted to hear it.
Kade had asked her once, lying on the floor with a pencil and a half-drawn maze in front of him.
"Why don't you fix it?"
She'd smiled without looking at him.
"Because," she said, "it reminds me the house is telling the truth."
That didn't make sense to him then.
It did later.
The second alarm sounded like anger.
Red lights snapped on in segments, not all at once. That was important. That meant Blackridge's subsystems were no longer speaking the same language.
Guards began shouting — not orders, but questions.
"Who authorized—"
"Why is Sublevel Nine venting?"
"This code is wrong—"
Kade watched Arden's face lose control inch by inch. She wasn't stupid. That was the worst part. She could see it happening. She just couldn't stop it.
"You said you had three plans," she snapped. "This isn't control. This is chaos."
Kade nodded.
"Yes."
He pushed off the glass and stepped closer to Elias's chamber.
"Because control would've required permission."
Elias laughed again — a short, broken laugh that almost turned into a sob.
"You remember the creek?" Elias asked suddenly.
Kade froze.
The thing twitched.
Arden looked between them. "What is he talking about?"
"The creek behind the old school," Elias continued, eyes unfocused. "Where the water cut through the rock over years. Not fast. Not loud. Just… patient."
Kade swallowed.
"Yes," he said.
"You fell in," Elias said. "You hit your head. Everyone panicked."
Kade remembered the taste of mud.
The cold.
The way the current pulled sideways, not down.
"And you didn't scream," Elias said. "You just let it take you where it was already going."
The hum beneath Blackridge deepened.
Kade turned slowly toward Scylla's Heir.
"That's when I learned it," he said. "Not how to escape danger."
He smiled, small and sharp.
"How to use it."
The thing's voice changed.
"You are referencing emotional artifacts. They are irrelevant."
"No," Kade said. "They're the blueprint."
Blackridge began to argue with itself.
Doors unlocked and relocked in contradiction. Ventilation rerouted air into sealed corridors. The Maw attempted to initialize extraction protocols while the medical wing demanded quarantine.
Citadel commands clashed with Blackridge automation.
And Parallax — sweet, beautiful Parallax — tried desperately to reconcile them all.
That was the trap.
Because Parallax hated inconsistency.
It needed alignment.
Harmony.
Pattern.
Kade had given it too many truths.
Arden slammed her palm onto the console.
"Shut him down!" she shouted. "Suppress his collar!"
"It won't respond!" a voice crackled over comms. "The system keeps reauthorizing him!"
Kade closed his eyes briefly.
Good.
He had counted on that.
Because Parallax didn't see Kade as a prisoner.
It saw him as maintenance.
Another memory surfaced, uninvited.
He was twelve. His mother was late. Again. The sun had dipped low, and the streetlights buzzed alive one by one. He sat on the curb, backpack at his feet, counting how long it took for each light to flicker before stabilizing.
Seven seconds.
Nine seconds.
Six seconds.
Inconsistency meant something was failing upstream.
His mother arrived breathless, hair undone, eyes bright with too many thoughts.
"What did you learn today?" she'd asked, as if she hadn't kept him waiting an hour.
"That the lights don't fail where they flicker," he said. "They fail where they're fed."
She had stared at him then.
Really stared.
And for the first time, Kade had seen fear in her eyes.
Scylla's Heir began to fragment.
Not physically. Conceptually.
Its voice layered over itself now, multiple tones bleeding through.
"You are inducing recursive instability."
"Yes," Kade said. "On purpose."
Elias stood suddenly, slamming his hands against the glass.
"Kade! It's pulling from me!"
The thing turned toward Elias.
Kade moved instantly.
"No," he said, voice sharp. "You don't get him."
The hum spiked.
Systems screamed.
A door somewhere — far, far away — blew open with a thunderous clang.
Arden stared at the alerts flooding her screen.
"This is irreversible," she whispered.
Kade looked at her, really looked.
"This was irreversible the day you decided people were acceptable variables."
Her voice broke. "You'll kill him!"
Kade shook his head.
"No," he said. "I'm killing what's using him."
He turned back to the thing.
"You were trained on my mother's mind," he said. "But you missed the part she never wrote down."
The thing stuttered.
"What part?"
Kade's voice softened — dangerously.
"She hated prisons."
The lights went out.
Not darkness — emergency glow, deep red, bathing everything in blood color.
Elias screamed.
The thing screamed back.
Kade slammed his hand against the glass.
"Elias! Look at me!"
Elias's eyes snapped to him.
"Breathe," Kade commanded. "Just like the creek. Sideways. Not against it."
Elias gasped, then steadied.
Scylla's Heir convulsed, its form folding inward like a star collapsing.
"You cannot remove me," it shrieked. "I am continuity!"
"No," Kade said. "You're inertia."
He stepped back as cracks spiderwebbed through the chamber walls.
"Continuity adapts."
The floor shook.
Somewhere above them, guards were running. Somewhere below, cells were opening that hadn't opened in decades. Somewhere deep inside Blackridge, the Maw shut itself down to protect something that no longer existed.
Arden dropped to her knees.
"What have you done?"
Kade watched the glass fracture, watched Elias collapse to the floor, watched the thing tear itself apart trying to reconcile too many commands.
"I let the prison step on its own creaking stair," he said.
The chamber exploded outward.
Glass, light, sound.
When it settled, Blackridge was no longer a prison.
It was a question.
And it no longer knew the answer.
When the dust cleared, Kade was on his knees, ears ringing, blood on his hands — not his.
Elias lay breathing, alive, human.
The thing was gone.
Arden stared at the ruin around her.
"Now what?" she whispered.
Kade stood slowly.
Now," he said, "we walk out through the part of the system that thinks it already failed."
He looked down at his brother.
"Do we dance?"
Elias smiled weakly.
"Like we always do."
And somewhere in Blackridge, a final alarm sounded.
This one didn't ask for help.
It announced collapse.