Chapter 1: The First Signal

Sora Kim felt the fear before the sound reached her.

It struck like lightning behind her eyes — sharp, breath-stealing, and alien.

Move.

The command crashed through her mind.

She froze on the subway platform, heart pounding. The evening crowd flowed around her in tired currents, shoes scraping concrete, conversations dissolving into white noise.

MOVE NOW.

The urgency wasn’t hers.

Her body reacted before her thoughts could catch up. Sora stepped back just as a metal maintenance ladder, loosened from above, crashed down exactly where she had been standing.

The impact rang through the station.

Gasps erupted. Someone screamed. A transit officer shouted for everyone to clear the platform.

Sora stumbled backward, shaking.

And then the fear vanished.

Not faded. Not eased.

Gone.

She pressed a trembling hand to her chest.

That wasn’t me.

Across the city, Kai Nakamura jerked upright beneath the hood of a half-repaired motorbike.

The wrench slipped from his hand and clattered against the concrete.

His heart thundered.

He had seen nothing.

Yet he had felt it all — the falling metal, the shockwave of panic, the cold edge of almost-death.

And beneath it, something else.

A presence.

Someone else’s heartbeat echoing against his own.

Kai swallowed hard.

“…Who are you?” he murmured.

The garage answered only with the ticking of cooling metal.

But the feeling lingered.

Like an open channel waiting to speak again.

Monitors flickered in a dim control room.

A waveform spiked across one screen.

NEURAL ECHO EVENT DETECTED

A technician leaned forward.

“Signal pair confirmed.”

On a larger display, two dots pulsed to life on a city map — miles apart, synchronized in rhythm.

A tall figure stepped from the shadows.

“After all this time,” he said quietly, “the link has awakened.”

The dots continued to pulse.

Alive. Connected. Trackable.

“Deploy surveillance,” he ordered.

“Do not engage yet.”