The room was still vibrating with leftover static when Director Senna finally broke the silence.
"Kairo Dune," she said softly, almost reverently, "you were never an accident. You were called."
Kairo felt his pulse loud in his ears. His hands trembled as thin blue sparks crawled over his skin like living threads.
"I don't understand," he whispered. "Called by what?"
Senna didn't answer immediately.
Instead, she tapped a command on her wristband, and the med-bay's damaged screens flickered back to life, showing an image Kairo had never seen before.
A storm.
But not a normal one.
A swirling, spiraling vortex of white-hot electricity high above the earth, shaped like a massive, glowing eye.
Kairo's breath caught.
"That's… the storm that hit me?"
"No," Senna said. "That is the storm from thirteen years ago."
Kairo blinked. "Thirteen… years…?"
Ms. Vale closed her eyes as if the memory hurt her.
Senna continued.
"Before you were even born, we detected a phenomenon identical to the lightning event that awakened your power. Same energy signature. Same frequency pattern. Same intensity."
Kairo shook his head. "But that doesn't make sense. Why would it happen before I existed?"
"That's what makes you unique," Senna said calmly. "You are not the result of the storm. You were the target of it. It was searching. Seeking. Tuning itself."
Kairo felt the room spin. His heart raced, and the electricity in his veins answered every beat with a painful spark.
Ms. Vale stepped forward quickly.
"Kairo, breathe. Focus on me."
He tried, but something inside him — something deep, primal — twisted at the sight of the storm on the screen.
Because when he looked at it…
he didn't feel fear.
He felt recognition.
"Why… why do I feel like I've seen this before?" he whispered.
Vale's voice broke. "Because you have."
Kairo froze.
Senna nodded, her expression unreadable. "The storm's energy signature matches your bio-electric pattern. Like a fingerprint. It wasn't creating a power. It was matching one."
Kairo shook his head violently. "That's impossible! I wasn't even alive—"
"But something connected to you was," Vale said quietly.
A chill crawled up his spine.
"What are you saying…?"
Vale hesitated, her eyes filled with something like regret.
"Kairo… the night of your birth, there was a blackout across the whole district. Every monitor failed. Every machine crashed. The power grid collapsed for twenty-seven seconds."
Kairo swallowed hard. "What does that have to do with me?"
"Because," Vale whispered, "all of that happened the instant you took your first breath."
He felt the world tilt.
No.
No. This couldn't be real.
"I'm just a boy," he said, voice shaking. "A normal kid who—"
Senna cut him off.
"No. You have never been normal. Your existence disrupted power before you were even conscious. The storm thirteen years ago was not an awakening event. It was an identification event. It was scanning the earth for something — someone — with your signature."
Kairo backed away until his shoulders hit the cold wall.
"What does that mean?" he whispered. "What am I?"
Senna stepped forward, eyes sharp as lightning.
"A doorway," she said.
"A link. A connection to the force that sent that signal."
Kairo felt the electricity pulse violently, his skin glowing brighter.
Ms. Vale rushed to him. "Kairo, listen to me. You are still YOU. No matter what they're saying—"
"Yes," Senna said, "he is still himself. But he is also a transmitter. A receiver. And something out there—"
She pointed to the swirling storm-eye on the screen.
"—is waiting for him to answer."
Kairo felt like he couldn't breathe.
Like his own heartbeat was calling to something far beyond the sky.
"Why me?" he choked out. "Why would something out there choose me?"
Director Senna looked at him with unsettling certainty.
"It didn't choose you," she said.
"You were born in alignment with it."
A flare of electricity burst from Kairo's palms, cracking the floor beneath him. The lights flickered violently.
"Kairo—" Vale grabbed his shoulders, her voice desperate. "Stay with me. Stay here. Don't let your fear connect to it."
But it was too late.
He felt something.
A pressure.
A pull.
Like a distant voice whispering in the static of his mind.
A wordless call.
A familiar hum.
The same one he felt the night of the lightning strike.
The same one he felt in the med-bay moments earlier.
The same one stirring in his blood right now.
Senna watched his reaction with a strange, almost triumphant calm.
"You feel it, don't you?" she asked softly. "The echo."
Kairo's lips trembled.
"W-what's… the echo?"
"A fragment of the original signal," Senna said.
"A message. Waiting inside you. Waiting for activation."
Kairo's knees buckled.
Ms. Vale caught him, pulling him into her arms as if shielding him from the truth.
"Kairo," she whispered fiercely, "whatever you hear, whatever you feel — you are not alone. You are not destined to be a tool for them or for anything out there. You decide who you are."
But the static whisper grew louder in his mind.
And Kairo realized something terrifying:
It wasn't speaking to him.
It was speaking through him.