The hallways of Guardian HQ felt too big at night.

  Lights dimmed, motion sensors set to quiet mode, the towering walls of glass and metal swallowed footsteps like secrets. Dominic moved through them alone, his hoodie pulled up, his shoulders tight with tension. He’d disabled the security camera near the East Wing stairwell—something Daisy had once shown him how to do during a tour back when it had all still felt like a dream.

  He wasn’t supposed to be here. Not this late. Not unsupervised. But tonight, he needed answers.

  The elevator to the research lab was locked behind two biometric gates and a palm reader. Dominic paused outside it, heart thudding. He could turn back. Pretend this had been a passing thought. Go back to his room, lie down, and pretend sleep would eventually come.

  Instead, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a worn keycard Daisy had given him weeks ago—“in case of emergency,” she’d said.

  This counted.

  He slid it into the panel. The door hissed open.

  Inside, the lab was a cathedral of glass and chrome. Panels glowed faint blue. Dozens of terminals blinked like quiet minds waiting for instructions. Suspended displays hovered above workstations, translucent and silent. At the far end, tucked behind a partition of frosted light, sat Daisy Carter, still in her lab coat, eyes fixed on the data spiraling across her screen.

  She didn’t flinch when he entered.

  “I thought it might be you,” she said, not turning around. “You’re the only person under fifteen who can bypass a third-tier security node without setting off silent alarms.”

  Dominic let the door close behind him. “Didn’t mean to sneak in.”

  “You did anyway.” She swiveled toward him, her expression tired but not unkind. “You okay?”

  He didn’t answer right away. He walked past rows of sealed samples, bioscanners, and prototype gear until he reached the table where she sat. She looked older tonight. Not in age, but in wear—the kind of exhaustion that clung to your skin when the adrenaline finally wore off.

  He sat across from her, quiet. Daisy waited, as she always did.

  Finally, Dominic asked, “Is there a way to tell when a power is coming?”

  Her brows lifted slightly, but she didn’t speak.

  He looked down at his hands. “I mean… I know it doesn’t always happen at once. Some people get it at twelve. Some at sixteen. Some wake up with it. Some have their whole life changed by one moment. But is there… a sign?”

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  Daisy leaned back, folding her arms. “You thinking about your mom?”

  He nodded. “She could see everything. Patterns, space, probabilities. She was always five steps ahead, like she had a map of the future.”

  “And your father?”

  Dominic hesitated. “He was power. Pure. The kind of strength that didn’t ask permission.”

  Daisy was quiet for a moment. “And what about you?”

  He met her eyes. “What if there’s nothing? What if I don’t get anything? Or what if I do and it’s… useless?”

  Daisy leaned forward slightly, the light from her display casting soft shadows across her face. “Every single person gets a power. That’s not in question. It’s biology. You’ve got the gene cluster. I’ve seen the scans. It’ll happen.”

  Dominic nodded, but it didn’t seem to help. “But will it matter?”

  She tilted her head. “What do you mean?”

  He clenched his fists. “People talk about me like I’m supposed to become something. That because of who my parents were, I’m going to inherit greatness. But I watched my father destroy people. I watched my mother die. I stood in the middle of a massacre and couldn’t stop any of it.”

  His voice cracked, just slightly. “What if I’m just ordinary?”

  Daisy didn’t answer right away. She tapped something into the console and turned the screen so he could see. It was a genome simulation—his own. A three-dimensional spiral of energy and light, rotating slowly as faint indicators marked sequences she’d flagged.

  “Want to see something?” she said.

  He nodded.

  She highlighted a section near the top. “This is your mother’s spatial mapping cluster. You have traces of it—residual threads that haven’t expressed yet. Now this…” she shifted the simulation, zooming in on a different strand, more volatile, more electric, “this is a cluster similar to your father’s regenerative-laced strength markers. But again, they’re muted. Dormant.”

  Dominic frowned. “So I’ve got echoes of both?”

  Daisy smiled. “You’ve got the architecture of both. But echoes? No. What you’ll have, when it manifests, won’t be a remix. It’ll be yours. Something new.”

  “But what if it’s not… powerful?”

  Her gaze sharpened. “Dominic, the Chancellor was the most dangerous psychic in the country, probably the world. He almost brought it to its knees. But the person who broke him wasn’t another level-five. It was a man who stood for what he believed in and refused to move.”

  He swallowed hard.

  “You want to know what makes someone extraordinary?” Daisy asked, quieter now. “It’s not powers. It’s choice. You ran toward the danger. You pulled people from rubble. You buried the dead when no one else could look at them. That doesn’t make you ordinary. That makes you terrifying to the people who think power is about domination.”

  Dominic stared at the glowing strands of his DNA, rotating like slow galaxies.

  “I want to do more,” he said softly. “When it comes… whatever it is… I want to use it. Not just because of my parents. But because of me.”

  Daisy stood, walked around the table, and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Then you already made the choice. The rest is biology.”

  They stayed like that for a moment, the lab humming softly around them.

  Dominic stood to leave, but paused at the door. “Thanks.”

  She smiled. “Anytime.”

  As the door hissed shut behind him, Daisy returned to her screen. She watched the simulation spin a moment longer, her eyes narrowing slightly at an anomaly deep in the strand—something odd, unpredictable.

  She flagged it for later.

  And then she turned off the lights.

  Behind her, the spiraling helix faded into the dark.