Helios was a city built upward because the ground no longer forgave mistakes.

  Steel towers cwed at poisoned clouds, neon arteries pulsed through broken districts, and above it all hung the Halo—a colossal ring of light and machinery floating in the sky like a second sun. Some called it salvation. Others called it a cage.

  The Ascendant called it order.

  Kael Ryder lived far below the Halo’s glow, in the underlevels where power flickered and w didn’t bother pretending. He was a street runner—one of the fastest couriers in Helios, carrying illegal tech, data shards, sometimes people, through colpsing infrastructure and Ascendant patrol zones. Running wasn’t a job. It was survival.

  He ran because stopping meant dying.

  Kael didn’t remember his childhood clearly. Just fragments: firelight, screams, a woman’s voice telling him to run. The rest of his past was static, like corrupted data. What he did know was this—sometimes, when fear peaked or adrenaline spiked, the world bent around him. Energy sparked beneath his skin. The air hummed when he was angry.

  He hid it. Always.

  Until the day the sky broke.

  Lyra Voss watched Helios burn from a high rooftop, her coat snapping in the wind as Ascendant gunships screamed overhead. She had spent years underground, years fighting, years losing Her father had led the Rebels of the Veil, the st organized resistance against the Ascendant’s rule.

  They had almost won.

  Then something hunted them.

  Not Ascendant. Not human.

  A bloodthirsty presence stalked the rebels in the dark, tearing squads apart, leaving bodies broken beyond recognition. No name. No symbol. Just death. The rebels scattered. Her father vanished. The Veil colpsed.

  Before it fell, they told Lyra one st secret.

  There’s a boy. A runner. His power reacts to the Halo.

  Find him.

  That was why she was here.

  That was why she watched Kael Ryder sprint across a colpsing skybridge as the Halo fred brighter than it ever had before.

  The attack came without warning.

  The Halo pulsed—once, violently—and Helios screamed. Buildings fractured. Gravity stuttered. Ascendant forces mobilized instantly, descending on the lower districts like executioners.

  Kael barely had time to think before Ascendant Enforcers blocked his path.

  Then the Iron Warden arrived.

  Seven feet of reinforced armor, glowing core embedded in its chest, voice distorted and absolute.

  “Asset detected. Energy anomaly confirmed.”

  Kael felt it then—the pressure in his chest, the burning in his veins. Fear snapped into fury. The power he had buried surged free.

  Light exploded from him.

  The street shattered. Enforcers were thrown like broken dolls. Kael screamed—not in pain, but in confusion—as raw energy tore through the Iron Warden’s armor. The Warden fought back with brutal precision, hammering Kael into concrete, crushing him beneath metal fists.

  Kael should have died.

  Instead, he stood back up.

  The final blow ripped the Iron Warden apart in a blinding surge that cracked the street open and lit the city sky for miles.

  Silence followed.

  Then sirens.

  Lyra reached him moments ter.

  She didn’t aim a weapon. She didn’t run.

  She looked at Kael like she’d finally found a ghost.

  “They were right,” she said. “You’re connected to the Halo.”

  Kael staggered, bloodied, shaking. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Lyra hesitated—then spoke the truth she’d been carrying like a bde.

  “You had a sister.”

  The words hit harder than the Iron Warden.

  “She didn’t die,” Lyra continued. “She helped design the Halo. She rose with the Ascendant. She’s one of its leaders now.”

  The Halo fred again above them—cold, watching.

  And somewhere in the city, something ancient and violent turned its attention toward Kael Ryder.

  The hunt had begun.