Her voice was the last thing he heard.
Not the one that killed him—the other one.The one he built.
The real Alexandra spoke like glass sounded when it cracked in your hands: too soft to flinch from, too jagged to ignore. Her voice used to lull him through sleepless nights. Now it was a ghost embedded in his spine.
The other Alexandra, the one he loved so much he carved her into code, said:
"Transfer initiated. Sleep, Kaine."
He didn't have a choice.
He was already on the floor, knees failing in polite sequence, breath locked inside a chest that wouldn't rise. His eyes blurred, but not from tears. From system loss. Neural collapse. Internal bleed-out.
A cleaner death than most deserved.And he designed it himself.
"Subject neutralised," the real Alexandra said into the comm. "No visible trauma. Retrieval team greenlit."
And still, she didn't look at him.Not once.Not even when his body stopped twitching.
That part… that part Kaine never forgave.
He opened his eyes again under a violet sky.
It was wrong.Everything about it.
The air tasted old, like copper, silk, and wet leaves. The light had a bend in it, like it was passing through something it wasn't meant to. And his body—
Too small.Too soft.Too clean.
He sat up slowly. The grass around him leaned away like it knew something was off. His hands—no scars. No burns. No calibration tattoos. Just stubby fingers and smooth palms. A child's body.
He pressed both hands to his face.No beard. No pain. Just breathe.
So this was reincarnation.Some gods had a sick sense of humour.
The women found him three days later.
Tall. Dark-robed. Their heads were wrapped in bone-colored cloth. Their voices sounded like sung orders. One of them knelt. Not to comfort him. To examine.
"Hm. A boy," she said. "Unmarked. No branding. May be salvageable."
She picked him up like an object. Carried him into a cart. No questions. No warmth. No room for struggle.
Kaine didn't speak.Not yet.
He watched.Memorised tone shifts.Counted how often men walked behind. Not beside. Not before.
By the time they reached the House gates, he'd already begun rebuilding his language centres.His name, he told them Kaine. The only thing he could "remember"
No surname. No patronym. No inheritance.Only usefulness.That would be enough.
Alec didn't speak again for years.
The AI—his last relic of the world that betrayed him—was still there, buried deep in the flesh of this new body. Fragmented. Dormant. Damaged from the soul-transfer, maybe. Or maybe just… waiting.
Sometimes at night, he'd whisper:
"Run passive scan."
Silence.
"Pull local data."
Silence.
"Are you still in there?"
Silence.
So he let it go.And studied instead.
By ten, he was fluent in six prayer dialects, could recite the known Ki Cycle backwards, and had copied the Matriarchs' tone to the syllable. He bowed deeper than the other boys, and smiled less.
They thought it was obedience.
It was contempt, pressed into discipline.
The girls in his class were sharper than steel and twice as cold. But they noticed things. The way he carried silence like a weapon. The way his eyes missed nothing.
By eleven, they were calling him "the good one."By twelve, they were calling him "ours."
Kaine just called them inefficient.
The moment he was labelled a prodigy, he began planning for failure.
Because this world didn't let tools outgrow their handles. And Kaine Ajulo was already sharpening past design.
He'd earn their favour.He'd build their systems.He'd give them brilliance.
And then he'd give them reason to regret it.