By the time Kael turned two, the world had started to reveal itself to him not through stories or spoken words, but through the hum of machinery, the flicker of power readouts, the shiver of electromagnetic tension before a circuit burst.
He didn't speak much. Sometimes not at all. But he understood.
He knew when the atmospheric filters needed recalibration. He could tell which drone was about to malfunction by the way its frame vibrated. He'd tap his fingers against the floor, counting out the interval of a damaged coolant valve before it choked. He wasn't learning. He was remembering things no one had taught him.
At least, that's how it felt to Mirena.
"Kael?" she called gently. "Where'd you go?
It was late afternoon, and the twin moons had already begun to crest behind the canyon spires, painting the settlement in lavender light and long shadows. Most of the town had retired indoors, save for the hum of the outpost's relay tower and the occasional clang of a distant tool.
Inside the workshop, Mirena found Kael crouched beneath the central bench, both hands deep in the belly of a salvaged servo panel.
He didn't look up when she approached. His brow was furrowed, concentrated in an almost unsettling way. His right hand held a pronged tool with three stripped wires attached, and his left was carefully balancing the stabilizer capacitor for the second time that day.
"Kael," she said again, kneeling beside him. "What are you working on?"
He paused. Not because he was startled, Kael never startled, but because he had finished his thought. He slowly withdrew the tool, placed the components back into the small tray beside him, and crawled out with dust smudged on his cheeks and a streak of grease across one brow.
He pointed at the bench. "Fan was skipping," he said, voice small but confident.
"That's right," she whispered, blinking. It was one of the only phrases he'd spoken aloud in days.
"Did you fix it?"
Kael nodded once.
Mirena rose and flipped the main toggle. The workshop lights flickered. Then steadied. The fan in the ceiling spun up with a soft, even rhythm, not the rattling clatter it had made since before Kael could walk.
She stared at it for a long moment, then at him.
"How did you know it was the timing relay?"
Kael tilted his head slightly. "It pulsed wrong."
"You heard that?"
"I felt it."
She knelt again and pulled him gently into her arms. He allowed it, small limbs resting against her as if he were still trying to map how comfort worked.
"You're getting too smart for this place," she whispered into his hair.
Kael said nothing.
But from beneath the floor, far below where he could reach or even understand, something hummed back.
A vibration. A resonance.
Waiting.
*****
It started with patterns.
Kael didn't understand the words yet, but he understood the rhythm. The shift in light between dusk and dawn. The way sure wires buzzed at different intervals. The way machines whispered warnings long before anyone else heard them.
He wasn't trying to change things. Not yet. He was simply observing the invisible clockwork beneath reality. The way everything moved. The way it pulsed.
The way it breathed.
At nearly three years old, Kael still didn't speak much. When he did, it came in single words, quiet, clipped, precise. "Wrong." "Burn." "Skip." Words that made Arik's jaw clench and Mirena's heart flutter.
Words that meant something were about to break.