Chapter Two: Null
Work started before dawn.
Kael rolled off the cot, tugged on scuffed boots, and stepped into the bitter grey of a city that forgot it ever cared.
West End was barely breathing—its skeleton of burnt buildings and twisted steel draped in smoke. Ash fell like rain. Survivors haunted the edges. Outcasts. Nulls.
People like him.
Kael Vire. Seventeen. No Nexis affinity. No classification. No future. Just another file in a dead database.
He chewed a stale ration bar and headed for the checkpoint. The military was long gone. In its place: mercs, scavengers, freelancers. The Awakened. The ones who rewrote the rules after the world fell apart.
Rourke waited, arms crossed, jaw clenched.
"You're late."
Kael didn't reply. He wasn't. He held up his clearance card—temporary, non-combatant, grunt work only.
Rourke snatched it, scanned it. "Strip Team 2. You haul. Stay out of the Conjuror's way. He's twitchy."
The rig rumbled like a dying beast—patched with armor scraps, tagged with warnings and guild emblems. Inside, the crew stayed quiet. They didn't need to say it: Nulls were bad luck. Everyone knew it.
They crossed into the ghost zone.
Collapsed towers loomed. Streets cracked like dry skin. Mana hung in the air—static and bitter. The others strapped on masks. Kael didn't need one. Mana didn't touch him. It passed through him like smoke through stone.
The job was simple: pull salvage from a drone carrier half-buried in concrete. Strip what still worked. Load it fast. Get out before the zone shifted.
Simple didn't mean easy.
The gravity distortion dragged at everything. Each piece felt three times heavier. Kael's arms ached. His back screamed. He didn't stop.
Because every scrap meant credits. Credits meant meds. Meds kept Lira breathing.
His sister was twelve. Once, she ran faster than him. Laughed louder. Now she couldn't climb out of bed.
Mana poisoning. Blue rot. Call it whatever they wanted—she was dying.
They wrapped the job just before sundown. As Kael climbed aboard, he caught the eye of the Conjuror—a woman with crimson glyphs crawling up her neck like veins.
"You don't feel it?" she asked.
He blinked. "Feel what?"
She looked away, unsettled.
Back at base, Rourke tossed him a chipped data stick.
"Better haul today," he muttered. "Don't get used to it."
Kael took it without a word and walked straight to the clinic.
The nurse didn't bother looking up. "We're full."
"I have clearance."
She scanned his pass. "Twenty minutes. No more."
Lira lay curled under a thermal blanket, skin pale, lips cracked. Her chest rose and fell in shallow, uneven waves. He loaded the suppressant disc into her IV. The machine beeped. Her body relaxed.
He sat beside her, watching the slow rhythm of her breath, counting every fragile second until the nurse tapped his shoulder.
Time was up.
Kael stood, brushed her hair back, and kissed her forehead.
"I'll be back. Soon."
Outside, the sky roared. A Gate shimmered in the distance, framed by lightning.
Kael stared at it.
Once—when the world ended—he felt something. A flicker of power. A thread of something vast and impossible.
It never came back.
But he hadn't forgotten.
He'd stop being a Null.
Even if it killed him.