Chapter 26
Present day.
I don’t come back to pain, not at first. I come back to color.
It’s everywhere. Through me. Around me. Inside me in a way that doesn’t make sense, as though I am color. It’s not just red or blue or anything that has a name. It’s layers, frequencies, light bending into something I can feel instead of see.
I don’t have a body. I don’t have muscle or skin or bones. I’m just movement. Signals. Something vast and bright and endless…
Then something yanks me back, hard. Air slams into my lungs like a collision. I choke on it, body jerking violently as everything snaps back into place all at once. Weight, pressure, gravity, pain.
“Oh, shit.”
My voice comes out wrecked, like it had to claw its way back into existence with the rest of me. My back arches off the small bed, every muscle locking as I drag in another breath, then another, too fast, too much, too dizzy, can’t stop.
“Easy. Easy, Case.”
It’s Harrison’s voice, close and grounding. There are hands on both my shoulders, steady but not restraining, just there.
“You’re back.”
This time, it’s Lane who speaks, breathless in a way that tells me I might be lucky to be here.
I suck in another breath, coughing hard as my chest spasms.
“Yeah,” I rasp. “Felt that.”
I blink rapidly, trying to focus, but the world doesn’t come back the way it should.
It fractures and overlaps. The room is still here—the lights, the equipment, Harrison and Lane moving around checking my vitals—but there’s something else threaded throughout it all.
Lines and patterns and flickers of…binary code.
1s and 0s stutter across my vision like they’re trying to explain what I’m seeing. Or maybe rewrite it.
“Whoa.” I squeeze my eyes shut, pressing the heels of my palms against them. “Okay. No. No, that’s…new.”
Of course, coming back differently is the outcome I hoped for, but I’m not quite sure what else I was expecting. It certainly wasn’t the sensory overload I’m experiencing now.
“Hey, hey,” Lane says softly. “Stay with us.”
“I am,” I mutter on a breath. “I just…there’s…everything’s loud.”
Not with sound. With information. Too much of it, all at once.
I can feel the machines around me. Not just hear them, not just see them.
Literally feel them. The steady pulse of the heart monitor, the electrical current running through the wires still taped to my chest, the systems humming in the walls.
It’s like they’re…talking.
And I can understand them.
I gasp, my hand jerking off the bed, searching for something to hold onto to ground myself.
The second my fingers brush the metal edge of the nearest machine, something clicks.
Data explodes and floods my system. Not through my eyes, but through my hand.
Through me. I see the monitor and the screen but also everything else behind it.
The signals, the processing, the exact rhythm of my heartbeat translated into perfect, clean binary.
“Fuck!”
I rip my hand away like I’ve been burned. The connection snaps, and the world drops back into something almost normal. Bringing my hand up in front of my face, I stare at it like it betrayed me.
Holy fucking shit.
“Case?”
I look up to see Lane watching me like he’s concerned I might die again. Harrison is beside him now, typing on a laptop, his hands visibly shaking.
“I’m good,” I say, even though my voice is shaking too. “You two good?”
Lane lets out a breath and runs a hand through his loose curls. “We almost lost you.”
I wince. “Yeah, I got that vibe.”
“You were gone longer than we planned.” Harrison’s voice is tight even though the worst of it is over, and he doesn’t look up from his laptop. “Your heart didn’t—”
“He panicked,” Lane interrupts, glancing at his husband with a grin.
Harrison rolls his eyes. “Only because I didn’t want you to be an accomplice to murder, angel.”
Lane leans over me, lowering his voice. “He was worried about you.”
“I heard that,” Harrison snaps.
I smirk weakly. “Aw. You do care.”
“Don’t push it.”
I do anyway, pushing myself up onto my elbows while ignoring the aches and pains from dying and coming back to life. The lingering cold is still buried somewhere deep in my bones.
“Well, the good news is that I died.”
Lane huffs out a laugh. “We noticed.”
“Better news,” I add, holding up my hand as if I’m presenting evidence. “I think I downloaded something on the way back.”
Harrison’s head snaps up, his attention narrowing on me. He steps closer, the scientist focused on his subject. “You’re experiencing neurological deviation already?”
“That’s one way to put it.”
I glance toward the nearest machine, and the moment my gaze lands on it, it’s like it opens to me. Not physically, not in reality. But I can see it. Under it, through it. Code flickers at the edge of my vision again, clearer this time. More organized, less overwhelming. Like my brain is adjusting.
“Fucking wicked,” I mutter under my breath.
“What are you seeing?” Lane asks, and I catch the intrigue in his tone.
“Things that should definitely not be visible.”
I reach out again, slowly this time, more careful. My fingers brush the monitor, and the connection is immediate, seamless. Like plugging into something with the perfect fit. Data floods in again, but this time, I’m ready for it. It doesn’t drown me. It just…makes sense.
I can read it. Process it. Manipulate it…
The screen flickers.
Lane startles. “Did you just…”
“I don’t know. I didn’t mean to do—”
The heart monitor glitches, the rhythm stuttering for half a second before stabilizing again.
I yank my hand back. “Okay, yeah, I did that.”
There’s silence as the three of us stare at the screen for several seconds before a slow, delighted smile creeps onto Harrison’s face.
“Well,” he drawls, voice low with scientific curiosity and maybe even something a little darker. “Looks like you get to be insufferable after all.”
My shoulders slump with an unhappy sigh. “And you get to run even more tests.”
“That was the deal.”
I stare at my hands again, at the faint tremor in my fingers. At the electricity that I can feel just under my skin. And then…
It crackles above my skin.
At first, it’s subtle. There’s a faint shimmer, like heat rising off pavement in the summer.
Then it sharpens into tiny, erratic sparks that dance across my palms, flickering between my fingers in strands of white-blue light.
Similar to static electricity, but not quite.
It doesn’t jump randomly. It gathers and threads together.
The air around my hands prickles, charged, like the moment right before lightning splits the sky. Fine hairs along my arms stand on end as the current skims over my skin, not quite touching.
“Whoa,” Lane breathes.
I flex my fingers, and the sparks respond. They snap tighter, brighter, small arcs jumping from fingertip to fingertip, crawling over my palms like they’re alive.
“Yeah.” I swallow. “This is exactly what I needed.”
“Just don’t touch anything,” Harrison advises.
And as though the current takes that as a challenge, it pulses. Just once, a quick spike. The overhead lights flicker. All of them. The machines stutter in response, a brief hiccup in their steady hum before they even out again.
I freeze.
“Okay,” I say slowly. “So I can accidentally break things. Good to know. Love that for me.”
Even more chances to fuck up.
But then Harrison’s smile deepens, his eyes bright with something bordering on dangerous excitement. “Not break,” he corrects. “Disrupt.”
That helps ease some of the tension in my shoulders. Disrupt sounds promising. It sounds a lot better than break and way less concerning.
There are a lot of things I’d love to fucking disrupt.
I close my hand into a fist, and the sparks collapse inward, vanishing like they were never there. But I can still feel it, sitting under my skin. Waiting.
I look between Lane and Harrison, adrenaline starting to creep in under the shock, under the lingering cold, under the very real memory of my heart stopping. It was racing before, but this is different. This is anticipation.
“More good news?” Another smirk stretches my mouth, not weak this time. “I think I just leveled the playing field.”
By the time I get home, I feel like I’ve been taken apart and put back together at least six different ways. Which, to be fair, isn’t entirely inaccurate.
I let the door shut behind me and lean back against it, closing my eyes as the quiet of my apartment settles in around me. Real quiet. No buzzing of machines, no constant monitoring. Just my quiet home.
Then Felix is on me immediately. He weaves around my legs like I abandoned him even longer than I did last time. That wasn’t my fault, but he still doesn’t believe me.
“Miss me?”
He meows, probably hungry since I’ve been gone, what, twenty-four hours? Thirty? Time got a little weird in the whole dying and coming back to life portion of my schedule.
I push off the door and step further inside, rolling my shoulders as I move. Everything still aches, a dull reminder that my body did, in fact, shut down and reboot like a malfunctioning computer.
Lane and Harrison made sure I didn’t forget either. There were so many fucking tests, again. MRI. CT. Blood work. Reflex checks. Cognitive assessments. Wash, rinse, repeat. Again and again and again.
At one point, I’m pretty sure Harrison just stared at my brain scans like he was trying to solve a puzzle that personally offended him.
They wouldn’t let me leave.
“Observation period,” Harrison said.
“Because you literally died,” Lane added.
Fair.
But still…
I made it through the night. No spontaneous re-death. No system failures. Just…this. Whatever this is.