Water washed over the arena like a tide, revealing dark glass and a web of root-scars underfoot. The last tremor from the Watcher of Ashroot faded into the throat of the temple and went quiet.

  [Temple of the Dimming Sun, Instance Cleared]

  EXP Distributed: +1,550

  Loot: Unseelie Heart Shard (Quest)

  Instance Status: Core Neutralized | Respawns: Disabled

  Ironstride checked her shield, making sure that it didn’t sustain too much damage from the fight. “That’s it. No respawns.”

  Naō didn’t holster his flask. He stood still, listening. “The hum’s still there though, like a low band frequency. You hear it?”

  Kaiden did. He felt it more than heard it, thump… thump… thump.

  A slow pressure syncing with the faint pulse under his ribs where the Photosphere rested. He looked at Liri. Her small hands folded like a child about to pray.

  “The heart remembers you now,” she whispered. “So the sun will, too.”

  He wasn’t sure if that was a threat, prophecy, or both.

  Across his HUD, a prompt eased in:

  [You may now exit the instance.]

  “Let’s not outstay our welcome,” Kaiden said, forcing a breath. His muscles ached something fierce. He reached for the menu and triggered a logout.

  Everything around him faded to white.

  ???°?°???

  Emir’s room. The VR rig hummed a cooling whine down as its LEDs were still bleeding a steady blue. Kaiden blinked away the afterimage of the temple’s image as the world swapped its palette to the white overhead light.

  Sweat cooled on his back. His shirt clung to his collarbones. The thump didn’t stop. It heavily thrummed in his ears.

  He pulled the headset up, swallowing around a dry throat. The pulse lived on the inside of his ears, tinnitus with rhythm. He reached blindly for his phone: 7:30 PM.

  Two notifications stacked on the lock screen:

  Pollen Control Notice particulate index elevated. Non-allergy residents advised to limit outdoor exposure due to atypical reactions.

  Solar Wave Data: New correlation with photosynthetic fluctuations developing.

  A text from his mom. She wasn't worried, just checking in on him, and if he'd seen the news reports.

  “Hey, you’re awake,” Emir said, nudging the door with a forearm and a bottle of water balanced in his palm. He was in joggers wearing a faded phantom hoodie. “For a second I thought I lost you to the game.”

  Kaiden worked his jaw until it decided to work again and took the bottle. “Didn’t check if I was breathing?”

  “I did. Twice.” Emir forced a smirk, then tossed Kaiden a bottle of water. He winced trying to catch it. “Hey. You’re pushing too hard in there again.”

  Kaiden didn’t have a good lie lined up. He gulped down half the bottle of water.

  “We cleared a major boss,” he said instead. “We’re just gathering… as much information as we can.”

  “Uh-huh.” Emir lifted his chin at the rig. “You might gathering for a heart attack, maybe.” He could hear the sarcasm laced with worry. Emir hadn’t taken Kaiden’s ‘in-game traversal’ seriously at first. But Kaiden had shown up several days too tired, making excuses to log in and saying he’d go home after.

  He suspected that Kaiden’s dad had been overreacting when he took his gaming setup for, losing focus on reality, but now Emir wasn’t too sure.

  “Don’t make me ban you from my account,” Emir added, jokingly. Though there was a grounding layer of seriousness there. Kaiden could sense it.

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  Kaiden snorted despite himself. “As if that would stop me.” He hadn't meant to say those words aloud, or for Emir to hear them.

  Emir pretended not to notice, but it only increased his worries further.

  “Hey, uh. My roommate didn’t have any late class tonight. Thought maybe we could do something later. Movie, takeout. Keep it light so you don’t keel over.”

  Kaiden didn’t want to be social, didn’t want to do anything except go home before his parents bombed his phone, shower, and then stare at the ceiling while the hum in the back of his head petered out. But Emir was letting him use his rig, he couldn’t outright deny him if he wanted to keep using it. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay. What’s her name again?”

  “Francesca.”

  The bottle went slick in Kaiden’s grip.

  “Wait, what? Francesca?”

  Emir’s eyebrows climbed. “Yeah. You two know each other or something?”

  “Emir?” a voice called from the living room. “I’m back from the store. The weather’s doing that thing again. It went from cold to oven hot in an hour.”

  Every part of Kaiden that had been pretending to be fine clenched.

  He stood too fast, the chair wheels squeaking under him, the rig cables snaking like vines around his legs. Emir didn’t notice the way Kaiden’s balance wavered. He backed up to let him pass in the narrow hallway.

  The living room’s single window bled orange over the couch and the coffee table. The TV idled on some weather special with the volume down low.

  Francesca came in from the kitchen in a grey hoodie and black leggings, earbuds looped around one ear. She stopped in the doorway when she saw Kaiden.

  The room found grew silent. The hum in Kaiden’s head threaded through like a needle pulling string as the two of them just stared at each other.

  “Oh,” Emir said. “Cool. Saves me the introduction… I think.”

  “Didn’t think I’d see you again this soon,” Francesca said. Her voice was even, she didn’t seem surprised that he Kaiden was standing in front of her.

  “I didn’t think I’d have to either,” Kaiden said. He felt tired down to the bones, as an external weight washed over him. He wasn’t sure if it was from playing long hours in the game or from stress remembering the things that Francesca had said to him before.

  Emir looked between them, and cleared his throat. “Okay… I’m going to assume there’s history there. I will be in the kitchen making… snacks.” He retreated with a flippant little salute, because he was smart enough to know when to be elsewhere.

  Francesca nodded toward the couch. Kaiden stood. She took the love seat in the corner. Up close, she looked different than the last time: more… tired, then the ‘grieving girlfriend’ she portrayed herself the last time they had met. Whatever she’d been doing lately, it didn’t include sleep. Her eyes moved over his face with the detached cataloguing.

  “You shouldn’t still be playing that game,” she said softly. “Nothing good comes out of it.”

  Kaiden let the angle hit, then let it slide. “You tried to steal what Alex died for. You don’t get to tell me how to use it.”

  A flicker of emotion crossed her expression, regret or anger, maybe both, trying to wear the same mask. “I was told it was unstable. That if you kept syncing to it without supervision, it would anchor to your nervous system…permanently.”

  Kaiden’s laugh came out raspy and sick. “And you thought the best way to help was to lie? Pretend you cared about him just to get close to the thing he gave me?”

  “I didn’t think you’d believe the truth,” she said, and there was the crack under the mask for real this time. She glanced over at the headset in Emir’s room half on the chair, half on the floor, like it was a gun left chambered.

  “It’s not just a game. You know that now, right?”

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.

  She looked past him at the window, at the carnation flower in the pot. “They say the feedback loops are leaking into the grid. That the devs built something they couldn’t control.” She shook her head like she was disagreeing with a thought in her head. “But there’s always a chance the devs were trying to control something worse.”

  The hum in Kaiden’s ears found a higher register, a thin filament running through the back of his skull. He winced, fingers landing against his sternum without him deciding to put them there.

  The lamp above the couch flickered once. A single stutter. Emir cursed, distant, at the microwave’s betrayal.

  Kaiden and Francesca both looked at the carnation then like it was calling out to them. It didn’t lunge like Mina's plant did. It just turned, stem bending, petals angling toward Kaiden like a compass needle finding north.

  “You see that?” he asked.

  Francesca didn’t answer first. Then she nodded, a millimeter of motion. “Yeah.”

  “Power surge?” Emir called from the kitchen, trying on a lighter tone that didn’t fit. “We pay extra for atmospheric lighting now?”

  “No,” Francesca whispered more to herself. Her eyes stayed on the plant. “That’s resonance.”

  Kaiden dragged his gaze away and back to her. “Resonance,” he repeated, to try and make sense of it.

  She met his look. “Alex’s death was real,” she said, like she’d been waiting to say it to him out loud. “And the bleed that you feel right now. I don’t…” She cut herself off, changing her sentence.

  “Some of the people I answer to think RTS is causing it. They think the simulation’s too close to the truth. But… Kaiden, listen to me.” Her voice dropped until it was barely a whisper. “What if it’s not causing it at all? What if it’s… Mirroring it? What if it’s been telling us what’s coming the whole time?”

  His throat tried to close. Something inside him that had been insisting on this from the second Alex put the Photosphere in his hands. He nodded and only said one word: Yes.

  For a moment, it was like being in the temple all over again, The lamp steadied. The carnation held its tilt, then relaxed a degree, as if a breeze had shifted that wasn’t there.

  Francesca let out a breath she’d apparently been holding. “We have a lot to talk about.”

  “Yeah,” Kaiden said. He didn’t look at the headset. He didn’t need to. “’Cause now it’s not just in there anymore.”

  The TV inched its volume up on its own, a presenter’s voice threading in mid-sentence: “…new Solar Wave Data suggesting a correlation with photosynthetic activity, city officials remind residents to keep windows closed overnight…”

  Kaiden reached for the remote and clicked the sound off. The silence that followed wasn’t empty, but filled with the thrumming resonance that only seemed to intensify.