Chapter 16 #3
How do you know? The wrapper crinkled softly as Kaden took it, and the sound alone cracked something open.
He felt himself thrown back to the last time he’d bought a Mars bar.
Swimming. The sharp sting of chlorine in his nose.
Lying at the bottom of the pool, his lungs burning, but not being afraid. Chocolate on the way home.
He remembered a conversation about sweets being named after things in space. But… He’d been alone in the pool. Alone when he’d bought the Mars bar.
Jalis didn’t speak. He only watched Kaden’s face, studying it with a fragile, almost fearful hope.
The memory sharpened suddenly, then twisted. A strange, disorienting sensation rippled through Kaden’s mind.
Jalis didn’t say anything. He just watched Kaden intently, as if all his hopes hung on him.
Kaden remembered the feeling of not being alone even though he was.
Someone warm.
Someone curious.
Someone endlessly, painfully apologetic. Kaden remembered saying—don’t keep telling me you’re sorry, but who to? Someone inside me? No, that was ridiculous…
He’d clutched the Mars bar so hard it was starting to melt and he set it aside. Fragments fluttered through him like bits of dreams he was trying to recall.
Reading while he was asleep…
Feeling someone at his back when no one was there…
A hand on him that was not his own, but his own was all he could see…
A hole in the ground…
Wings being eaten…
His stomach turned. “It’s stupid. I keep getting these flashes. Dreams that don’t belong to me. Yet, not dreams at all.”
Jalis’ jaw tightened, barely perceptible but Kaden saw it. There was something about him that felt familiar in a way that had nothing to do with the past few days. It wasn’t his face. Nor his voice. It was deeper than that.
Recognition lived somewhere in Kaden’s bones. A quiet certainty that he had known Jalis longer than it appeared and that Jalis knew him well. It was as if his body had already solved a puzzle his mind was still clumsily trying to put together.
“You were important,” Kaden said slowly. It wasn’t a question. “Important to me.” That was a fact his heart already knew.
Jalis inhaled sharply. “You did everything for me. You gave me a future.”
“You talk like you’re not from anywhere I know.”
Jalis’ smile was soft, crooked and unbearably sad. “Maybe I’m not.”
Silence stretched, as fragile as glass. Jalis reached out, stopped himself, then let his fingers rest lightly against Kaden’s wrist.
The touch hit like warmth breaking through ice. Heat spread outward through Kaden’s arm, blooming in his chest, sinking deep into something older than memory.
And for one impossible heartbeat—he knew.
Stars. Endless, blazing stars. Weightlessness. A voice that wasn’t sound but meaning. A voice that wrapped around him like gravity. Like a second heartbeat inside his ribs.
You’re not alone.
Then it vanished.
Kaden gasped and pulled back, his heart racing. “What the hell was that?”
Jalis’ eyes were bright. Too bright. “A memory trying to come home.”
The fragments should have felt comforting.
Instead, they left Kaden dizzy and unmoored, as if another life was brushing against his own.
Every instinct in him said trust him, this matters, but his conscious mind had no proof to cling to.
Only loss. A quiet, aching grief for something vast and intimate, the shape of which he could feel but not quite see.
Jalis was waiting. Waiting for him to remember.
A flicker of anger rose in Kaden’s chest—not at Jalis, but at himself.
He could sense the truth sitting just beyond his reach.
He stood at the edge of it. And that edge felt dangerous.
Remembering might give him answers, but it might also take something away.
Maybe the fragile version of himself he was only just beginning to rebuild.
Memories might take Jalis. Or they might calm Kaden’s churning mind.
Why was he still struggling? The memory was there.
Then he felt it and he stopped breathing.
The truth was impossible.
Oh Christ. I can’t believe that.
It was so utterly impossible that he could barely even think it, let alone say aloud. Because it couldn’t be. And yet…
I remember a blue blob. I put my hand in the tank…
Kaden exhaled slowly, breath shaking. “Joe. Not Jalis.”
The face that stared at him now was electric with hope.
“I took you from the lab. Brought you here. You slid inside me. You… You lived in me. You were in my head. At the hospital you came out of me. That’s what we planned.”
Joe nodded once.
“You really are an alien,” Kaden whispered.
“Yes. Though not exactly now. Not entirely human. So…yes and no.” His voice caught. “I really missed you.”
Kaden didn’t say it back.
But he didn’t move away, either. Something deep inside him was beginning to fall into place. The strongest memory was the feeling of Joe curled quietly inside him like a second soul. Sharing breath. Sharing fear. Sharing joy. Memories settled in his chest.
“None of this is a dream.”
“No,” Joe said. “It all happened.”
Oh my God.