The mansion was silent at 5 AM.

  Brad sat slumped in the chair beside Butter’s bed, his fingers laced with hers. The dim glow of her prosthetic leg pulsed faintly in the dark, the only light in the room besides the moonlight spilling through the window.

  Lucien’s words echoed in his head.

  "We can’t heal her. Her magic has to replenish itself."

  He swallowed hard, thumb brushing over her knuckles. She looked so small like this, no candy-colored explosions, no chaotic sketches, just a girl too pale against the pillows, her white curls tangled from restless sleep.

  A knock on the window. Brad’s head snapped up.

  There, floating outside the window like some ghostly rockstar, was an albino boy with sharp violet eyes and a smirk that screamed trouble. His platinum hair fell in messy strands over his forehead, and his ears were adorned with chess-piece earrings, a white queen on one side, black king on the other. He wore a fitted leather jacket over a shredded band tee, fingerless gloves, and skinny jeans ripped at the knees. An electric guitar, glossy black with neon purple strings, was slung across his back like a weapon.

  Clock.

  Brad stared in confusion. Who the hell is this?

  The Syndicate’s shadow-warrior tilted his head, rapping on the glass again with one gloved knuckle.

  "Hey, Bradford Whitenhall," he mouthed, voice muffled but unmistakably amused. "Let me in."

  Brad stared, his pulse kicking up. He didn’t recognize him. But the way the boy looked at him, like he was a puzzle missing half its pieces, sent a chill down his spine.

  Brad’s muscles locked. How does he know my name?

  The thought was immediately followed by a more pressing, logistical terror. And how is he outside the window? This is the second floor.

  His eyes raked over the boy’s face, and a fresh, uncanny chill settled in his gut. The albino-pale skin, the sharp, almost severe bone structure... it was a distorted mirror of Butter. They shared the same blueprint, the same foundational architecture, but where she was all soft pastels and rounded edges, he was monochrome and sharp angles. It was like looking at two buildings from the same set of plans: one a whimsical, candy-colored cottage, the other a sleek, predatory stone tower.

  But the most dangerous question of all cut through his daze, cold and sharp as a scalpel.

  How did he find this place?

  Lucien’s mansion was a ghost. It didn’t exist on any map, shielded by more layers of tech and magic than most small countries. The Syndicate had breached it once, but that backdoor was supposed to be sealed, the defenses rewritten, the location scrambled.

  Yet here one of their top operatives was, floating outside the window as casually as a neighbor stopping by for coffee.

  It meant one of two terrifying things: either the Syndicate had access again, a thought that made his blood run cold, or this boy, Clock, had found a way to track something —or someone— that even Lucien’s best systems couldn’t hide.

  Slowly, he stood, his shadow stretching long across the floor. He didn’t let go of Butter’s hand.

  Clock’s grin sharpened.

  Brad stepped closer to the window, close enough to see his own reflection superimposed over Clock’s pale face. The boy’s violet eyes gleamed with something unsettling, recognition? Mockery?

  Brad’s voice was low, rough with sleep and suspicion.

  "How do you know my name?"

  Clock’s smirk twisted into something darker.

  "Because we used to be best friends, loser." A heartbeat. "Damn, the Syndicate really wiped your brain clean when they put that rune on your chest, didn’t they?"

  The words hit like a sucker punch. Brad’s breath caught. Best friends?

  No. No, that couldn’t be right. He’d remember someone like Clock, someone who looked like he’d stepped out of a fever dream, all sharp edges and sharper smiles.

  But then why did the way Clock tilted his head just feel so damn familiar? The silence stretched, thick as syrup.

  Clock’s grin never wavered. The air in the room suddenly turned thick, charged.

  Butter’s fingers twitched against the sheets. A whimper escaped her lips, raw and small, as her body arched like a bowstring. Sweat beaded along her forehead, her white curls plastered to her skin as she thrashed, caught in some invisible storm. The glow from her prosthetic leg flickered wildly, casting jagged shadows across the walls.

  Brad’s breath hitched. "Butter?" He squeezed her hand, but she didn’t wake. Her pulse hammered under his fingertips, too fast, too frantic.

  A chuckle cut through the dark.

  "Tsk. Looks like she’s stuck in the Gloom dimension."

  Brad’s head snapped toward the window. Clock still hovered outside, his violet eyes fixed on Butter with clinical interest. One gloved hand pressed against the glass, pale fingers splayed like a spider’s legs. "Magic depletion’s a bitch. Lucky for you, I know how to pull her out."

  Brad’s jaw clenched. "Bullshit."

  Clock’s smirk didn’t waver. "She’s my sister. You really think I’d hurt her?"

  The word sister landed like a knife between Brad’s ribs. His gaze darted between Butter’s trembling form and Clock’s unnerving grin. The resemblance was there, the sharp cheekbones, the too-pale skin. But Butter’s chaos was warm, bright. Clock’s was all edges and teeth.

  A ragged gasp tore from Butter’s throat. Her prosthetic flared blue once, painfully bright, before dimming again. Damn. Brad’s resolve cracked.

  In one fluid motion, he snatched Harmony off the bedside table. The weight was unfamiliar in his grip, he'd never held it before.

  Then it settled, and his breath caught.

  It wasn't just heavy; it was alive. A low, resonant hum traveled up his arm, a vibration that wasn't mechanical, but organic, like feeling the purr of a colossal cat. The grip seemed to mold to his palm, and in that instant, he understood why Butter was never without it. This wasn't wielding a tool. It was holding a force of nature. He felt a surge of raw, terrifying power, a conviction that with a single, focused swing, he could peel open a battle tank like a tin can.

  A sudden, ice-cold realization cut through the awe: Butter never told me its name.

  The word Harmony had simply been there in his mind since the first moment he'd laid eyes on it, a fundamental piece of knowledge, as innate as knowing the sky was sky or the color blue was blue. The uneasiness spread through him, a chilling counterpoint to the weapon's warm hum. What else had her magic woven into him without his consent?

  But Clock was more important now. The mystery of his own mind would have to wait.

  "Don’t try anything," Brad growled, the weapon's latent energy thrumming in his bones as he wrenched the window open. Cold air rushed in, carrying the scent of rain and something metallic, like ozone. "Or I’ll reintroduce your face to Newton’s Third Law."

  Clock’s grin widened. "Cute." He slid inside, boots soundless against the floorboards. Up close, he smelled like static and leather, his guitar strings humming faintly as he moved. "Relax, Bradford. If I wanted her dead, she’d be ash by now."

  Brad tightened his grip on Harmony. "Then help her."

  Clock tilted his head, studying Butter’s seizing form. For the first time, his smirk faltered. Something flickered in his violet eyes, guilt? Hunger? before he reached into his jacket and pulled out a sharp shiny silver dagger.

  Shadows bled from his fingertips, swirling down the blade like ink in water until the metal pulsed with an eerie violet glow.

  Brad tensed, Harmony raised. “The hell are you-”

  Clock slashed the dagger across his own palm.

  Blood welled, but not normal blood. It shimmered, a viscous mix of crimson, inky black, and neon purple, like liquid galaxies trapped under skin. Brad’s stomach lurched.

  That’s not human.

  The thought was immediate, instinctive, a primal recoil from the unnatural. But in its wake, a hot flush of shame followed. His eyes darted to Butter’s pale, still face on the pillows. She wasn't human either. He’d spent so many days and nights with her, surrounded by the evidence of her impossible magic, that he’d somehow folded her into his understanding of "person." Her laughter, her fears, her joy with candy, it had all felt so profoundly real that he’d let the foundational truth of her existence fade into the background. He’d accepted her, but in this moment, his own instinct had drawn a line, and he felt like a traitor for it.

  Before he could fully process the self-disgust, Clock clamped his bleeding hand over Butter’s mouth.

  “Swallow,” he commanded.

  Butter’s throat convulsed once, twice, then her body jolted. Her back arched off the bed, tendons straining like wires, her prosthetic leg flaring blinding white. The veins in her neck darkened, spreading like cracks in glass as Clock’s corrupted blood flooded her system.

  “What did you DO?” Brad roared, surging forward.

  Clock didn’t flinch. His violet eyes tracked Butter’s spasms with clinical detachment. “Stabilizing her magic. Mine’s close enough to hers to jumpstart the link.” A pause. Butter’s fingers clawed at the sheets, her pupils blown wide. Clock’s jaw tightened. “...Too much resistance. Her mind’s fighting it.”

  He shrugged off his leather jacket, tossing it aside. The chess-piece earrings swayed as he rolled his shoulders. “I have to go in.”

  Brad barely had time to blink before Clock pressed two fingers to Butter’s forehead, and his eyes rolled back, whites swallowing violet. Butter screamed.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Not pain, not fear. Something worse. Recognition. Then all fell silent and they both went rigid.

  ///

  Brad stared at Clock’s limp body slumped beside Butter’s bed, the boy’s pallor almost matching hers. Harmony felt cold and alien in his grip.

  Best friends?

  The words scraped raw against his mind. He searched Clock’s face, the sharp jaw, the chess-piece earrings glinting in the moonlight, for any flicker of recognition. Nothing. Just a void where memory should be.

  But then...

  A phantom sensation prickled his fingertips. The ghost-weight of a guitar pick. The echo of laughter over distorted amp feedback. A name almost surfacing, something sharp and musical, like "Staccato" or "Cadence" before dissolving into static.

  He flinched, dropping Harmony with a clatter. Why did Clock smell like burnt marshmallows?

  Brad looked at Butter, then back at Clock. Two siblings, one drowning in dreams, the other in... what? Shadows? Lies? What else did they steal from me?

  His hand flew to the mark on his sternum, hidden beneath his shirt. It was warm. It was always warm. A fact he’d filed away for years under ‘mildly concerning quirks of his own body’ and staunchly refused to examine further.

  His breath came too fast. He stumbled back from the bed, his back hitting the cold wall. The logical part of his brain, the part that ran calculations and built siege engines out of trash, kicked into overdrive, dragging the evidence into the light and forcing him to look at it.

  Exhibit A: The Rune.

  A pulsing, warm anomaly on his skin. Not a birthmark. Birthmarks don’t thrum with a low-grade energy. Birthmarks don’t feel... aware.

  Exhibit B: The Gaps.

  His childhood memories were a curated gallery, not a lived-in home. There were impressions, feelings, the smell of wind and burnt marshmallows, the phantom weight of a guitar pick, but the faces, the names, the stories were smoke. He’d chalked it up to a bad childhood, the kind you’re better off forgetting. A convenient, comforting lie.

  Exhibit C: The Anomalies.

  The impossible survivals. The times a bullet just missed, a shockwave just dissipated before it pulverized him, a fall that should have broken his spine only left him bruised. He’d called it luck. A statistical improbability he was grateful for.

  Exhibit D: Trust.

  Lucien, a man who trusted no one, had taken him in. Yume, in her rage, had accidentally vaporized him, or tried to, the rune had prevented it. He’d believed it was his usefulness, his intellect.

  A delusional lie. The thought was a spike of ice in his gut. What if it was the rune?

  It wasn't a shield; shields absorb or deflect. This was subtler, more fundamental. He ran the calculations: the angle of a bullet's ricochet, the precise decay rate of a concussive wave that should have liquefied his organs, the near-infinite variables that had to align perfectly for his survival. The probability of any single event was infinitesimal. The probability of all of them occurring in sequence wasn't a number; it was an error code in the logic of the universe. The conclusion was inescapable, a cold, hard law written in the language of physics: the rune wasn't bending fate, it was editing the mathematical constants of reality in a localized field around him.

  A probability manipulator.

  Clock’s words weren’t just an accusation; they were a key. A terrible, horrifying key that suddenly unlocked every strange moment of his life and rearranged them into a new, monstrous shape.

  The rune pulsed against his fingertips, a lazy, rhythmic beat. A heartbeat that wasn't his own.

  It was a parasite. A leash. A program running in the background of his soul, subtly bending the world to make people forget, to make them trust, to keep its host alive so it could fulfill its purpose: making him the perfect, unwitting Trojan horse.

  And he had led it right to Winter’s doorstep. The air left his lungs. His vision tunneled. The panic was a physical thing, a serpent coiling around his ribs, squeezing.

  His fault.

  The thought was a scream. Lucien’s mansion. The breached defenses. Winter’s broken body.

  His fault.

  He had done that. He had been the flaw in the system. His very presence had been the exploit.

  A raw, silent gasp tore from his throat. He slid down the wall, knees buckling, hitting the floor with a dull thud. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, trying to push the truth out, to shove the pieces back into the comforting darkness of ignorance.

  He couldn’t. The puzzle was solved. The equation was balanced. And the answer was monstrous.

  With a force of will that felt like tearing his own mind in two, he did the only thing he could. He took the terrifying, complete picture, the rune, the wiped memories, the manipulated trust, the corpse of his friend, and he mentally grabbed the entire, horrifying stack of evidence and shoved it into a box labeled ‘AVOID.’

  He slammed the lid. He locked it. He pushed it into the deepest, darkest corner of his psyche.

  His breathing slowed, ragged but controlled. The trembling in his hands stilled. He looked up, his eyes clearing, focusing on Butter’s sleeping form.

  The fear wasn’t gone. It was just... contained. Processed. A problem to be solved.

  But for now, survival was a higher priority than sanity. He could not afford to unravel. Not here. Not now.

  He refused to accept it. So he wouldn’t. He stood up, his movements precise, deliberate. He walked to the bed, adjusted Butter’s blanket, and sat back in the chair.

  And he did not look at the floor where Clock had fallen. He did not touch the warm spot on his chest. He just watched the steady rise and fall of Butter’s breathing, and held the door to his own panic shut with every ounce of his will.

  ///

  Clock’s consciousness plunged, and then he was falling through a sky that wasn’t a sky.

  Space stretched around him, but not the cold void he knew, this was a living, breathing cosmos painted in molten gold, pulsing violet, swirling crimson, and neon pink. Nebulas pulsed like jellyfish, their tendrils curling around floating islands of crystalline rock. Fireflies the size of eagles darted past, trailing sparks that smelled like burnt sugar.

  And the creatures...

  Dragons coiled through the air, their scales shifting from sunset-orange to deep violet with every sinuous movement. Griffins with feathers like stained glass rode thermal winds, while enormous birds, their plumage a riot of colors he had no name for, sang in harmonies that made Clock’s teeth vibrate.

  Butter’s mind. It should have been beautiful. It wasn’t. Because beneath the kaleidoscopic beauty, something was wrong.

  The colors bled at the edges, dripping like wet paint. The dragons’ wings frayed into static. The fireflies sputtered, their light guttering out too soon.

  And at the center of it all, Butter floated, legs crossed in a lotus pose, her white curls haloed around her. Her eyes were closed, her face eerily serene, but the air around her warped, as if reality itself was struggling to hold her together.

  Clock kicked off a floating rock, propelling himself toward her. The moment he touched the dreamspace, his shadow magic rippled, his usual violet energy now streaked with Butter’s candy-colored chaos.

  “Sister,” he called, voice echoing strangely. “You’re drowning.”

  Butter didn’t respond.

  A shadow passed overhead, one of the dragons, its massive head swinging toward him. Clock froze as it sniffed him, eyes like liquid amber narrowing. Then, with a huff, it let him pass. Interesting.

  He drifted closer, until he was eye-level with Butter. Up close, he could see the cracks, thin, glowing fissures running along her arms, her neck, pulsing with unstable magic.

  “You’re burning out,” Clock muttered. He reached out, hesitated, then pressed his fingertips to her forehead. “Wake. Up.”

  The dream shuddered. Butter’s eyes flew open, and they were full of stars.

  Clock barely registered the shift before Butter erupted. Her stance dropped, elbows in, shoulders loose, and then her fists became a blur of chain punches, each strike faster than the last. Clock's forearms came up, blocking the first three.

  Pak! Pak! Pak!

  But the fourth slipped through, knuckles cracking against his ribs.

  "Ghk—!"

  He tried to pivot, to counter with a brutal flying knee, but Butter's hands flared open. Twin slaps crushed against both his ears at once.

  The world whited out. Pressure screamed through his skull, his balance short-circuiting as his eardrums threatened to burst. He barely registered Butter coiling back...

  ...until her uppercut exploded into his jaw.

  The punch lifted him clean off his feet, his body arcing backward through the dreamspace like a shot bird. He crashed through a floating island, crystalline shards bursting around him as he tumbled end-over-end through the neon sky.

  A dragon roared as he flew past its wings. Clock finally skidded to a stop on a floating slab of emerald, his vision swimming. He spat violet-tinged blood, tasting copper and static.

  "...Okay," he wheezed, pushing himself up on shaking arms. "That hurt, I guess my powers don't work in here."

  Across the void, Butter stood frozen, her fists still raised, her star-filled eyes wide. Clock’s shadow energy flickered uselessly at his fingertips, then died.

  His grin turned feral.

  "Fine," he spat, cracking his knuckles. "I can still fight."

  He pivoted, driving his fist into the nearest floating island. The crystalline structure shattered, fracturing into jagged slabs the size of tombstones. With a roar, he hurled them at Butter, one after another, each spinning like deadly discs through the nebula-lit void.

  Butter moved like water.

  She blocked the first with a forearm shiver, sending it careening off-course. The second, she dodged, twisting her body in a near-impossible contortion. The third, she punched, her fist connecting dead-center, the crystal exploding into glittering dust.

  But the fourth, a massive, spinning shard, grazed her palm as she deflected it sideways. A thin line of blood welled on her knuckles.

  Clock’s eyes widened. "Neither do hers. This is just a dream."

  The relief was instantaneous. This wasn't a demigod; this was just his sister, sleep-fighting. He could handle this. He lowered his guard a fraction, mind racing to formulate a new, power-less strategy.

  The air in front of him stuttered.

  There was no blur, no wind-up, no transition. One moment, empty space. The next, Butter was there, her form already fully extended in mid-air, having bypassed the very concept of acceleration.

  Her eyes were still star-filled voids. Her expression, serene and empty.

  CRACK-BOOM!

  Twin soles of her feet connected with his chest in a perfect, brutal double front kick. The impact wasn't just physical; it was a violation of cause and effect, a shock to the logical mind more jarring than the force that blasted the air from his lungs.

  He was thrown backward, skidding across the floating emerald slab, his vision swimming not from pain, but from sheer, disorienting impossibility.

  How? his mind screamed, scrambling for purchase. The powers are disabled! There's no magic for teleportation! No energy for—

  And then, he understood. The cold truth washed over him, more terrifying than any magical attack.

  He wasn't fighting Butter's power. He was fighting her muscle memory.

  The glitch wasn't a magical teleport. It was the physical manifestation of a neural pathway so deeply engraved, so perfectly honed by hundreds of life-or-death fights, that her dream-body executed it without the need for conscious thought or magical fuel. It was a pure, refined, instinctual reaction to an opponent lowering their guard. A reaction faster than thought.

  Her body had learned to edit space. And in this place made of her mind, that learning was law.

  Butter landed silently from the kick that had seemingly originated from nowhere, her white curls undisturbed. She settled back into her loose, ready stance, a silent engine of perfected violence waiting for the next input.

  Clock pushed himself up, his ribs aching, his pride shattered. He stared at his sister, not as a person, but as a living monument to the brutal curriculum she had survived.

  "I thought powers were disabled here," he whispered to the neon sky, the statement a pathetic, hollow thing. They were. And that was the most horrifying part.

  His analytical pause was a luxury the simulation did not allow. The air compressed. Then, she was on him.

  There was no gap between his realization and her violence. Her double-palm struck his chest like a cannon blast, the impact not just hitting him, but denting the dreamstuff around him, sending him skidding backward in a shower of emerald sparks. Before his brain could even register the pain, before his feet could find purchase, her fingers, cold and hard as iron, hooked into his arms and yanked him forward, off-balance, helpless, right into the devastating rise of her elbow.

  CRACK.

  His head snapped back, teeth rattling. He barely registered the pain before her chain punches came again, one-two-three-four, each strike aimed to dismantle him.

  But Clock was done playing defense. His forearms became a blur, blocking each punch in rapid succession, the rhythm like gunfire. He countered with a vicious kick, but Butter sidestepped, caught his leg, and dropped her elbow onto his thigh.

  "Gah-!"

  The pain was a bright, electric shock, but it crystallized his focus. He wasn't just blocking now; he was processing. As he deflected another flurry: a jab, a cross, a hook that would have shattered his jaw... he saw it. The ghost of a pattern in her chaos. A fractal logic to the violence, a rhythm he could now hear beneath the noise of his own pain.

  He settled into his stance, his body flowing into the forms of his own brutal art: The Dancing Statue.

  It was a fusion of contradictions: the deceptive, flowing evasions of Capoeira, the brutal economy of boxing, the unpredictable angles of Liuhebafa, the long-range power of Chang Quan, and the close-quarter devastation of Judo. He became fluid and unyielding all at once.

  Butter's ghost was dancing, and he would dance with it.

  ///

  Butter spasmed towards him in another of her reality-editing lurches. But this time, his hands were already there, not to block, but to deflect, to guide her force harmlessly past his head. Butter launched another glitching lunge, a knife-hand aimed to spear his throat. This time, Clock didn't just deflect. He flowed.

  He spun inside her reach, the momentum whipping his elbow around in a brutal arc meant to crush her temple. It was a feint. The moment she committed to blocking it, he dropped, using his own spin's momentum to fall below her guard. One palm slapped the floor for support, and his leg shot out in a vicious, horizontal kick that cracked against the side of her hip.

  The force wrenched her pelvis sideways, twisting her spine and forcing a sharp, startled grunt from her lips. Her feet scrambled for purchase on the dream-stuff, not sliding backward but stumbling several steps to the side, her balance critically compromised.

  Clock rose smoothly back to his full height, the ghost of a real smile touching his lips for the first time.

  "Alright," he said, his voice steady, a conductor who had finally found the beat of the orchestra. "I think I'm getting the hang of this."

  The serene, starlit emptiness in Butter's eyes did not change. But the air around her began to hum, the colors of the dreamscape deepening, bleeding toward a single, ominous shade of gold.