Kael was four and a half years old the day he repaired the oxygen manifold system without being asked.
The day began like most others, quiet, windblown, and colored in pale shades of rust and gold. A storm had passed through overnight, and the yard was littered with fine sand and thin debris that clung to every panel and every tool left out beneath the canopies.
Vessa arrived just after the first light, already tired. The backup filtration unit in the north dome had failed again, and she'd spent half the night rerouting its power drawing through the secondary grid. She hadn't even bothered resetting her sleep timer. Her hands were stiff, her back sore, and her patience thin.
Kael had shown up early.
As always.
Jace had dropped him off without fanfare, his pony-cycle barely idling before it zipped away down the access lane. Kael had walked the rest of the way across the open yard, the morning light glinting off his dust-specked goggles. He didn't speak. He never did first. But he nodded politely when Vessa looked up from her workbench.
They started the day on the eastern stack, an aging junction node that managed the cooling of the flow to three different buildings in the old quarter. It was temperamental, half-broken, and dangerous if mishandled.
Vessa didn't expect Kael to do anything. She never asked. But she had noticed lately that he wasn't just watching anymore, he was remembering. Measuring. Anticipating.
She handed him a diagnostic pad and asked him to run a thermal scan while she cracked open the coupling core.
When she turned around, he had already removed the exterior plate, flagged two faulty valves, and tagged the coolant cap with a red marker.
She didn't say anything then.
Instead, she took a break, a real one. She walked twenty meters to the shade canopy, sat down, and let her muscles loosen while she sipped from her ration flask. Five minutes of stillness. Five minutes of not being a mentor, a mechanic, or a babysitter.
When she came back, the manifold panel was sealed.
Not just sealed, perfectly realigned, cleaned, and re-pressurized. The access screen blinked green. The system read as balanced.
For a moment, Vessa thought she'd made a mistake. That maybe she'd done the work herself and forgotten. Sleep deprivation did strange things.
Then she saw it.
A folded cloth. Tucked neatly beneath the edge of the toolkit.
Kael's rag.
She looked around.
He was sitting five meters away, calmly coiling up an unused cable.
Vessa exhaled slowly.
"You little void-gremlin," she whispered, half in awe.
At home, Kael's bond with the Vireks had deepened into something quiet but indelible. It wasn't loud affection, but the sort of love shaped by routine, proximity, and presence.
Mirena often found herself talking to him while she worked sifting medical stock, logging oxygen use, or repairing med scanner ports. Kael would listen from his perch on the edge of the table, legs swinging, saying nothing unless prompted.
When he did speak, it was often strange. Observations instead of answers. Warnings instead of reactions.
"Seal's thin."
"That wire's humming wrong."
"Don't turn that on yet."
Sometimes, Mirena didn't know whether to laugh or worry.
More than once, she'd paused mid-task, stared at him, and thought: You're not just learning. You're remembering.
Arik didn't talk about it. But he had changed, too.
He started leaving tools out on purpose.
Little things at first, wrenches, sensor tags, a cracked scope module. To see which ones Kael would pick up.
Then he escalated, loosened a panel, reversed a wiring path, and left an airflow regulator misaligned.
Kael fixed each one without a word.
Then, one day, Arik didn't leave anything.
Kael created something instead of a working proximity sensor, using old signal wire, a broken compass coil, and the lens from an old scanner. He left it on the bench without a note.
Arik found it blinking steadily and sat down hard in the nearest chair.
Jace and Lenn, once older brothers and now young men in their own right, took to Kael in different ways.
Jace taught him to strip wires and joked about putting him on payroll. He'd ruffle Kael's hair when he passed and brag that his little brother could out-diagnose half the tech crew in Hollow.
Lenn, more serious, spent quiet hours showing Kael how to check for system drift, how to listen for cavitation in pipe pumps, and how to balance an intake flow.
Kael never spoke over them.
But he remembered everything.
He wasn't affectionate, not in the usual sense. He didn't hug often, and he rarely smiled just because someone was happy. But when Lenn's knee gave out during a dig run, Kael brought him a brace without being asked.
When Jace complained about the backlight flicker in his quarters, Kael replaced the old fuse in the panel.
When Mirena looked tired, he brewed her tea.
No instructions. No prompts.
Just presence.
Outside the Virek home and Vessa's yard, however, Kael remained a shadow.
His interactions with the rest of Grey Hollow were brief, polite, and controlled. He would nod to the quartermaster if they crossed paths, and offer a soft "Hello" to the old cook who managed the hydroponics tray.
But he never lingered.
Mirena had trained him well.
Not out of shame, but out of care.
Because Kael was beginning to ask questions now.
Real questions.
About where they were.
About where he came from.
And Mirena knew: the answers would not get simpler.
They would only get harder.