The rain didn't start with thunder, It started with silence, heavy and thick, like the air knew something no one else did. Kael stood at the edge of the old station platform, hoodie soaked, eyes staring at nothing in particular, Sai stood beside him, quiet, they had made it out of Westbridge before sunrise, her hand gripping his the whole way, but neither had spoken since the train pulled away, now they were in a place that looked like it hadn't heard laughter in years. The station was half-forgotten, windows cracked, the bench they sat on groaning beneath their weight.
Kael didn't move, his thoughts were already too loud.
"Sai," he said finally, "what if there's no end to this?"
Sai looked up. "No end?"
"This running, the letters, the shadows, what if there's no version of life where we're not being hunted?"
She tucked her damp hair behind her ears and leaned back against the post, "Then we stop being hunted."
Kael turned to her. "How?"
"We fight," she said simply. "We stop waiting for answers and start tearing them out of the people who've been hiding them."
Kael let out a breath, "That sounds nothing like the girl I met in the garden."
Sai smiled faintly. "And you're no longer the boy who flinched at his own reflection."
They made their way down the dirt road from the station, boots pressing into the wet ground, the pendant warm again under Kael's shirt. Sai carried her grandfather's journal in a waterproof wrap under her coat, the map folded tight inside it.
"Do you really believe this 'vault' exists?" Kael asked, his voice low, "I believe my grandfather wouldn't waste his last years chasing ghosts," Sai replied. "He left a trail for someone. For me, for us." Kael didn't respond. He just kept walking, jaw set.
At a small roadside inn just outside Marrow Hollow, they found a room with a single bed and broken heater. The innkeeper barely looked up when Sai signed the logbook. She scribbled false names. She didn't even flinch.
"Nice to know you've lied before," Kael muttered when they reached the room.
Sai shrugged, pulling off her wet boots. "You pick things up when you grow up with parents who lie for a living."
Kael sat on the bed, wiping his hands with a towel. "I hate this."
Sai raised a brow. "The running?"
"The helplessness."
She paused, watching him. "You're not helpless."
He looked up at her. "I feel like everything I love turns into smoke. My parents. My childhood. Even myself."
Sai walked toward him slowly. "You didn't lose yourself. You were buried. There's a difference."
Kael shook his head, but Sai knelt in front of him, forcing him to meet her eyes.
"You are still here, Kael. You're still choosing to fight, to feel, to protect." She touched his hand. "And I see you."
He exhaled shakily, his forehead falling against hers.
In the dim light of that cracked-window room, something shifted between them. Not heat — not lust — but the soft, trembling weight of closeness. The ache of two people who had both lost too much, and found each other anyway.
"I don't know what's coming," Kael whispered, "but I know I want you in it."
Sai didn't speak. She leaned forward and kissed him slow, deep, and filled with every word neither had said out loud. His arms wrapped around her as if she might vanish. She didn't.
The next morning, the storm had thickened. Wind slammed against the shutters, and news on the static radio spoke of a nearby government sweep for fugitives. It didn't mention names. But Kael didn't need to hear them, He paced.
Sai studied the map.
"There's a symbol here," she said, tapping a faded mark that looked like a tree with roots curling into three lines.
"That was on the gate outside the Asoluka estate," Kael said slowly.
Sai nodded. "There's an underground network beneath these cities , old routes used for smuggling and disappearances. My grandfather called them 'the veins beneath the crown.'"
Kael squinted at the paper. "So we follow the roots?"
"Yes. Toward where the three lines converge."
Kael stared at the map. "That's in Hollow's Keep. Isn't that where ..... "My grandfather died," Sai helped him. To complete the question "Yes."
Kael sat down hard. "This is getting bigger than us."
Sai met his gaze. "It was always bigger than us."
That night, as they prepared to move again, a black car parked down the road. Sai saw it first through the broken slats of the curtain. Two men got out. One checked his watch. The other pulled out a communicator.
Kael reached for the pendant, fingers trembling.
"We need to go," Sai said.
They packed in under two minutes. Sai clutched the journal, Kael threw a towel over the lamp, and they crept out the rear window, stepping into knee-high grass.
They ran.
They didn't stop until the town lights were behind them and the stars above were the only witnesses.
Kael turned to Sai, out of breath. "We can't keep doing this." "We won't," she said. "We find the vault. We end this."
Kael nodded slowly.
But neither of them saw the shadow watching from the tree line. Not a government agent. Not a paid tracker.
But someone who had once called Kael "brother."
And who had long since stopped saying his name without bitterness.