Chapter 2: The Color of Silence
The silence that fell over Horizon Plaza was loud. Louder than the rift tearing open, louder than the monster's shriek, louder than the city's blaring alarms. It was a heavy, ringing silence, the kind that presses in on your eardrums, thick with the smell of ozone and burnt things. Alex knelt there, a statue in the center of the wreckage, the world reduced to the rhythmic, slick warmth of Lira's glowing blood soaking through the cheap fabric of his cloak and coating his trembling hands.
It was on him. All over him. The very essence of the power he didn't have. For a second, his mind short-circuited. He thought, ridiculously, that maybe it was contagious. That if he just held on long enough, some of that incandescent speed, that radiant light, would seep into his own useless Norma cells. A stupid, childish thought, but it was all he had.
"Move!"
A harsh bark of a voice snapped him out of it. Torren, the grizzled lightning Sentinel, was there, his own uniform singed, his face a mask of grim fury. He wasn't looking at Alex as a person. He was looking at him as a contamination. A civilian messing up a secure scene.
"Get your filthy hands off her," another Sentinel, one with an ice attribute who had just arrived, snarled. She knelt, her gloved hands glowing with a soft, cold light as she began to apply some form of cryo-stasis to Lira's wound, the blue blood instantly freezing into a crystalline lattice. "What were you even thinking? You could have compromised the integrity of the wound."
Compromised the integrity of the wound. Right. Because a gaping hole in the side of her body was perfectly fine, but a little bit of Norma touching it was the real problem. Alex scrambled back on his hands and knees, the sharp edges of shattered pavement digging into his palms. He felt small. Insignificant. The brief, frantic moment of bravery had evaporated, leaving behind the familiar, bitter residue of shame.
Kael was there suddenly, a bulwark of fierce, fiery loyalty. "He was helping, you bastards. He was the only one who moved. Where were you?"
Torren's jaw clenched, but he had no answer. He knew Kael was right. He shot Alex a final look of pure, unadulterated contempt. "Get him out of here," he grunted to another Sentinel. "Take his statement and send him home. I don't want any more static cluttering up my scene."
Static. That was the new one. He'd gone from "Frozen Failure" to background noise. At least it was a promotion. Sort of.
The trip home was a blur. A junior Sentinel, a kid who looked barely older than Alex felt, escorted him, asking questions in a monotone drone that Alex didn't really hear. He just kept looking at his hands. The blue blood had dried, leaving his skin stained and shimmering faintly under the eternal crimson sky. It looked like he'd tried to paint a new constellation onto his own skin and failed.
His apartment was… quiet. The kind of quiet that feels deliberate. His parents were there, sitting in the living room. His father, Blaze, was staring at a holo-pad, but his knuckles were white where he gripped it. His mother, Terra, was standing by the window, her back to him, as stiff as the stone she could command. His sister, Marina, was pointedly sharpening a set of what looked like throwing knives made of solid, condensed water.
"You're back," his father said, the words flat. He didn't look up.
"I am," Alex replied, his own voice sounding distant.
"The incident at the plaza," his mother said, her voice tight, still facing the window. "We heard you were involved."
"I helped," he said, the words feeling weak, pathetic.
Marina finally looked up from her blades, her blue eyes as cold as the ice she could have been shaping instead. "You got in the way," she corrected, her voice sharp. "You could have gotten yourself killed. You could have gotten Kael and Lily killed. Lira is in critical condition at the Spire. Did you ever think about that?"
He hadn't. He hadn't thought at all. He had just moved.
"Marina, that's enough," Blaze said, though the words lacked any real heat.
"Why?" she shot back, standing up now, a sliver of water snaking around her wrist like a living bracelet. "Why is it enough? He needs to understand. This isn't a game. It's not the 'before times'. You can't just run into a fight with good intentions and a piece of cloth and expect to walk away. The world doesn't work like that anymore, Alex. Maybe if you hadn't been asleep, you'd know that."
And there it was. The real rift. The one that wasn't a pulsing gash of violet energy, but a quiet, five-year-long chasm of shared experience that he could never cross. They had been fighting. He had been dreaming. They had scars. He had... a scorch mark on his cloak.
He felt something inside him just… shut down. He didn't have the energy to fight, to argue, to explain the feeling of utter uselessness that had propelled him forward.
"I'm going to my room," he mumbled, turning away before they could see the look on his face. He didn't want to see their pity. He couldn't stand it.
He closed the door to his room and leaned against it, the silence a welcome relief. His room was a museum of a life that no longer existed. Posters of old-world bands. Textbooks on astrophysics from a degree he'd never finished. A picture of him, Kael, and Lily from when they were kids, a lifetime ago, before the rifts, before the Speed Field, before he was a failure and they were his protectors.
He sank onto his bed, the mattress sighing under his weight. He looked at his stained blue hands. The color was starting to fade. He didn't want it to. It was the only proof he had that any of it was real. That for one, stupid, terrified moment, he had mattered.
His gaze drifted to his window, to the permanent crimson sunrise hanging in the sky. He thought of his sister's words. You have to understand. He didn't understand. He didn't understand this world of powers, this city of speed, this family of heroes.
He thought of Lira, bleeding on the pavement. He thought of the creature's roar, the feeling of its intent—a pure, simple desire to kill. He had stood between them. A Norma. A stone trying to stop a tidal wave.
A profound exhaustion settled over him, heavier than his cloak, heavier than his family's disappointment. It was the weight of stillness in a world that never stopped moving.
He closed his eyes. The shouting, the chaos, the fear from the plaza started to replay in his head. He tried to push it away, to think of something else. He focused on that single, strange moment. The instant before the Hunter's claws had reached him, right when Kael and Lily had intervened.
For a split second, time had seemed to... bend. It had felt thick. Slow.
He tried to recapture the feeling, the sensation. He focused on a single dust mote dancing in a stray beam of crimson light from his window. He held his breath, concentrating all of his will, all of his frustration and rage and despair, onto that tiny, insignificant speck.
Slow down, he pleaded in the quiet of his own mind. Just… slow down.
He stared, his eyes burning with the intensity of his focus. Nothing. The dust mote continued its lazy, chaotic dance. Of course nothing happened. He was an idiot. A Norma playing make-believe, trying to will the universe to obey him.
He let out a long, shuddering sigh of defeat and let his head fall back onto his pillow. A tear of pure, hot frustration escaped the corner of his eye and rolled down his temple into his hair.
And as it fell, it stopped.
It hung there, a perfect, glistening teardrop, suspended in mid-air an inch from his face, defying gravity for a single, impossible, heart-stopping second. It trembled, catching the crimson light like a tiny, liquid jewel.
Alex's eyes snapped wide open. He stared at it, his brain refusing to process what it was seeing.
Then, with a faint, almost inaudible plip, the tear released its hold on whatever had stopped it and finished its journey, soaking into his pillowcase.
He sat up, his heart pounding a new, thunderous rhythm. He looked around the empty room, then back at the damp spot on his pillow.
It hadn't been a hallucination. It wasn't trauma. It was real.
Something inside him, something that had been frozen for five long years, had just begun to thaw.