For Rael!
Screamed Drav in his mind as wave after wave of unbearable pain enveloped him. The thought consumed Drav as his body burned, turning various shades of raw red and charcoal. The skin darkened at edges first as if his life force itself shied away from the sunlight.
He had known exhaustion. He had known hunger. He had known the slow ache of old injuries that never fully healed because rest was rationed beneath Skyside. He had known the deep bone pain of double shifts and the sharper pain of waiting for a son who did not come home.
This was different. It built itself through him layer by layer. Searing skin first, pouring fire through blood and nerves.
His hands turned into claws as his knees buckled, sending him sprawling on the grass covered ground as his screams tore through the grounds. The scream stopped Nira dead in her tracks.
“Drav!” shouted Nira.
Drav barely heard her over the overwhelming pain, his mouth hanging open. Ash spread across his jaw and down his arms as his skin cracked in thin lines.
Yellow sunlight poured into him, and every part of him tried to consume it. He had stepped into death. He had wanted death. Not because he was brave.
Because he was empty. Because Rael was gone and the system that killed him would celebrate above the blood of those it never counted.
Drav had imagined one clean end. But his body had other plans.
The sunlight split across hidden channels beneath his skin. It hurt so badly that thought became impossible. Then veins of golden light opened across his arms.
He felt stone heating beneath his feet. Metal rails trembling along the wall. Crystals around him fractured and melted under overwhelming stress of power. Irrigation pipes carrying pressure. Power lines choking under reroute locks. Emergency doors waiting for commands.
Drav stared at the waves of heat coming off him melting the very ground on which he had fallen. Drav lifted one arm and a nearby emergency door flew clean off its hinges.
He could feel the immense power flowing through him though the pain never receded.
I can bring down the shields after all! I can make them pay for Rael!
For a heartbeat his eyes locked with a stunned Nira. Something in his expression shocked Nira causing her to run towards cover.
Drav raised both his arms trying to send that immense power to bring down the shields. Drav tripped and fell as the ground shifted under his intense heat.
The entire floor of Garden courts trembled and shook as light leapt from his fingers and detonated near by. Super heated steam burst from the irrigation pipes.
Nira could not take her eyes off the screaming Drav. And right before she thought the screams would stop soon, his skin split showing golden veins made of molten light.
“Impossible!” whispered Nira to herself as she saw the heat radiate from Drav melting ground, stone and metal alike. Drav looked at his own hands as if they belonged to someone else.
Drav turned towards her, his expression conveying the extreme savage pain he felt even as his body became taller and stronger. Absolute, unbearable pain. Nira’s dread increased as she saw the veins on Drav’s body pulse, as if about to release the pressure of such extreme power.
Nira ran and dropped behind the maintenance divider she had passed earlier. The divider was decorative from the Skyside side, carved with flowering latticework for the Decadal Shift ceremony, but she knew the truth of its construction. Beneath the polished face was a service-grade heat sink connected to the garden’s climate regulation system.
It was not meant to stop a blast. Nothing in the garden was meant to stop this.
But it was meant to redirect excess thermal load away from ceremony crowds making it the best bet.
The light hit and the divider screamed.
Heat poured around both edges like water around stone. Crystal petals fused into warped glass. The polished surface blistered, split, then folded inward as if a giant hand were pressing from the other side.
Nira curled behind it, one arm over her head, and felt her sleeve smoke.
The blast did not expand evenly.
That was the second impossibility.
A normal explosion radiated. Fire consumed. Pressure spread.
This moved through systems.
The light struck metal first. The metal carried it. It raced along shieldwork seams, down crystal conduits, into irrigation channels, across decorative inlays, through maintenance rails beneath the floor. Anything designed to conduct power, heat, water, or signal became a path.
The garden was not being destroyed by fire. It was being used by it.
Nira forced her eyes open through the glare.
Drav stood at the center of the exposed terrace, shaking violently. The golden veins under his ashen skin pulsed in time with every flicker of the shield remnants overhead, which had a small hole in it, but still held.
He was not controlling the force. That was obvious.
His hands were open, fingers spread wide as if he were trying to drop something too hot to hold.
But the systems around him answered anyway. A service column near him brightened from within. Its maintenance crystal overloaded and burst. A row of ceremonial lamps ignited one by one as if multitudes of power had been routed to them.
The floor beneath him melted in a widening circle. Anything Drav touched burned.
No. Not only burned. Obeyed first. Then burned.
He staggered and grabbed the side of a pillar to steady himself. The carved stone blackened under his palm. Gold lines raced from his fingers through the pillar’s inlaid crystal inscription.
Then the pillar split down the middle under the heat stress it was never meant to bear. Drav snatched his hand back with a cry as he lost his balance again. But his palm kept burning. Not flame. Living Sunlight trapped in flesh.
Nira stared. Her mind tried to reject the conclusion and failed. A Shadowsider in yellow sunlight was not dying. He was destruction incarnate. Untrained and uncontained destruction.
Every Skyside shield equation she had ever studied rearranged itself inside her head around one impossible fact.
If one terrified Shadowsider could do this by accident, then what would a trained one do? What would a hundred do? Was this the reason for the Skyside obsession of keeping Shadowsiders away from yellow sunlight?
A section of roof collapsed as the pillar gave way completely.
Nira rolled away as a support beam slammed into the floor where her legs had been. Heat chased the impact, lighting the beam from within. She scrambled backward, coughing through dust and steam. For a moment, the entire court vanished behind white pressure. Nira ducked behind the ruined divider as superheated vapor tore past her face.
Think. She had to think. Panic would kill her faster than Drav would.
There were three systems adjacent to the garden courts. The irrigation systems were useless and blown to bits already. The crowd control might be slightly useful in dodging and escaping. And the shield system which was already under critical lock.
But the shield reserves were already depleted. Depleted by her. That reserve was the only thing that might help her.
Nira crawled toward the half-destroyed maintenance interface. Sparks spat from the panel. The crystals half cracked and melted but still functioning partially. She grabbed the edge of the crystal and screamed as heat seared her fingertips.
She yanked her hand back, shook it once, then tore a strip from her sleeve and wrapped it around her palm before trying again. The interface accepted her touch on the fourth try.
WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS ACTIVE.
“No one cares,” she hissed through gritted teeth.
She forced open the emergency garden controls. Vick had disabled all interfaces the moment she initiated the unauthorized transfer. But the system was damaged now. Locks held on clean systems. Broken systems had edges.
And Nira was expert on figuring out patterns.
Nira tried digging relentlessly to access the reserve intake. She could find the required settings in her sleep. Which was fortunate because the interface was barely readable in the current state.
Drav thought of Rael’s name carved in the Shadowside wall, cut by his own shaking hands, blood in the grooves because the chisel had slipped and he had not cared enough to stop. He pushed himself back on his feet and looked around. Drav saw the Skyside girl through the steam.
The girl was at a broken interface. Bleeding and burned and still working. Still trying to save the Skyside he so despised. Relentless. Why was the Shadowsider the only one burning alive? They all will. She should have run.
She should have done what the Skyside always did and called someone else to handle the cost and consequences.
Well, she will pay for it, and Skyside will pay for it. Today. In full.
Drav gathered all the power in his hands and slammed them down unleashing hell.
Nira felt her hackles rise, a feeling of intense hatred directed towards her. She looked up in time to see Drav staring at her, eyes filled with hatred and determination. For one instant, Nira felt him inside the system. Then his power slammed into the same control layer she was touching.
The interface burned under her wrapped hand.
Nira bit down on her own sleeve to keep from screaming and rerouted faster.
“Come on,” she whispered. “Come on, come on, come on.”
There! She enabled the protocol which allowed the reserves to pull power from public infra in cases of emergency to ensure that the shields never failed.
It wasn’t difficult since they were already depleted.
Drav’s progress staggered as the power flowing through the infra suddenly depleted and started flowing into the reserves. Drav’s next few attacks were absorbed by infrastructure. Drav’s pain and anger were palpable even at this distance.
Shear take her! Will she never give up?
The infrastructure obeys first! Burns later! Drav’s eyes fell on the shield lattice already damaged from his previous attacks. It was unstable. Drav pulled against it with all his power. The anchor allowed him to escape the glass hole he had been in the ground. He stopped his power output the moment he was out of it.
Drav looked at his hands. He still melted the ground he was on. The Skyside will never forget this day! Drav turned and started walking towards where the ceremony had faltered to a halt after the ceiling had collapsed.
Nira’s mind raced as Drav pulled himself out of the infrastructure drain. A trained Shadowsider under yellow sun would be impossible to imprison inside the city. Skyside’s whole doctrine relied on the belief that Shadowsiders avoided sunlight because sunlight killed them.
But what if the rule was never protection? What if it was containment? The thought was so dangerous she almost missed where Drav was heading. Nira looked around desperately for a way to stop him. The shield canopy!
Above the garden, the damaged shield canopy had begun to fold inward. Drav’s uncontrolled power kept hitting it in barely controlled pulses. It was going to collapse. The collapse could not be stopped. But it could be aimed.
She opened the old service schematic from memory and found the release pins for the canopy’s western arc. Still locked. She grabbed the physical lever beneath the interface. It was red-hot.
She wrapped both hands in her torn jacket and pulled. Nothing. She pulled till her lungs burned. The lever moved half an inch. Her palms burned through cloth.
The release pin fired. The western arc of the canopy gave way. For one breath, the entire structure hung in the air like a decision. Then it collapsed straight onto where Drav had been moving. The impact shook the garden. Drav vanished beneath falling light and crystal.
Nira’s heart stopped. Then the wreckage glowed. Gold spread through the collapsed canopy. The whole mass lifted. Not physically at first. It trembled, weight arguing with power. Then Drav rose from beneath it, one hand raised.
The canopy fragments hovered above him, all of them burning from within. He was not holding them with strength. He was powering the control lattice still embedded in the broken crystal.
Nira stared. Even untrained, even in agony, he was commanding infrastructure by instinct. Badly and poorly. But commanding it. Then his concentration broke. The canopy fragments shot outward.
Nira threw herself flat as burning crystal tore across the garden and smashed into nearby trees and buildings.
Drav staggered. He looked less human now. Not because his shape had changed. Because the pain had hollowed everything ordinary from his face. His skin remained ashen, cracked by gold. His eyes burned yellow-white. Every breath left light between his teeth.
For one second, she thought he might ask for help. Instead, he turned toward the Ascension Wall.
“Rael,” he said.
This time the word was audible. Barely. Drav looked at Nira. The gold in his veins dimmed by a fraction. His lips moved.
“Rael.”
Nira nodded, tears stinging in her smoke-burned eyes.
“I know.”
She did not know enough. But she knew that name mattered. Drav tried to smile. It looked like pain remembering kindness.
Drav collapsed. Not dead. Yet. His knees struck the fused stone. The golden veins flickered wildly under the ash of his skin, starved and surging at once. The power inside him, no longer fed evenly, recoiled through every path it had opened.
Nira realized what would happen one heartbeat too late. The energy had nowhere to go. Drav folded around himself.
Nira ran with all the energy left in her. She knew it was too late for her this time.
Light imploded. Then burst outward in one final uncontrolled pulse. The blast was smaller than the first. More contained. It carved a shallow glass crater into the garden ground. The tremors shook everything three blocks away. The tremors sent a crack up the Ascension Wall.
The heat wave raced down the drainage hard enough to rupture pipes three corridors away.
The shock wave sent Nira flying. Nira hit the floor. This time she did not get up quickly. The world rang. Dust fell like gray snow. When she finally lifted her head, Drav was nowhere to be found, completely vaporized.
For a moment, the garden was silent as if trying to deny the truth of the day. Alarms shattered the silence, distant and useless. Nira welcomed the darkness encroaching her vision as emergency personnel flooded the Garden Courts.