Echoes in the Dust

By the time Kael turned two, the world had started to reveal itself to him not through stories or spoken words, but through the hum of machinery, the flicker of power readouts, the shiver of electromagnetic tension before a circuit burst.

He didn't speak much. Sometimes not at all. But he understood.

He knew when the atmospheric filters needed recalibration. He could tell which drone was about to malfunction by the way its frame vibrated. He'd tap his fingers against the floor, counting out the interval of a damaged coolant valve before it choked. He wasn't learning. He was remembering things no one had taught him.

At least, that's how it felt to Mirena.

"Kael?" she called gently. "Where'd you go?"

It was late afternoon, and the twin moons had already begun to crest behind the canyon spires, painting the settlement in lavender light and long shadows. Most of the town had retired indoors, save for the hum of the outpost's relay tower and the occasional clang of a distant tool.

Inside the workshop, Mirena found Kael crouched beneath the central bench, both hands deep in the belly of a salvaged servo panel.

He didn't look up when she approached. His brow was furrowed, concentrated in an almost unsettling way. His right hand held a pronged tool with three stripped wires attached. His left hand carefully balanced the stabilizer capacitor for the second time that day.

"Kael," she said, kneeling beside him. "What are you working on?"

He paused. Not because he was startled, Kael never startled, but because he had finished his thought. He slowly withdrew the tool, placed the components back into the small tray beside him, and crawled out with dust smudged on his cheeks and a streak of grease across one brow.

He pointed at the bench. "Fan was skipping," he said, voice small but confident.

"That's right," she whispered, blinking. It was one of the only phrases he'd spoken aloud in days.

"Did you fix it?"

Kael nodded once.

Mirena rose and flipped the main toggle. The workshop lights flickered. Then steadied. The ceiling fan spun up with a soft, even rhythm, not the rattling clatter it had made since before Kael could walk.

She stared at it for a long moment, then at him.

"How did you know it was the timing relay?"

Kael tilted his head slightly. "It pulsed wrong."

"You heard that?"

"I felt it."

She knelt again and pulled him gently into her arms. He allowed it, his small limbs resting against her like he was still learning the shape of comfort.

"You're getting too smart for this place," she whispered into his hair.

Kael said nothing.

But from beneath the floor, far below where he could reach or even understand, something hummed back.

A vibration. A resonance.

Waiting.

It started with patterns.

Kael didn't understand the words yet, but he understood the rhythm. The shift in light between dusk and dawn. The way sure wires buzzed at different intervals. The way machines whispered warnings long before anyone else heard them.

He wasn't trying to change things. Not yet. He was simply observing the invisible clockwork beneath reality. The way everything moved. The way it pulsed.

The way it breathed.

At nearly three years old, Kael still didn't speak much. When he did, it came in single words—quiet, clipped, precise. "Wrong." "Burn." "Skip." Words that made Arik's jaw clench and Mirena's heart flutter.

Words that meant something were about to break.

One night, after the rest of the household had gone to sleep, Mirena woke to the sound of faint static.

She slipped from her cot and padded barefoot across the cool metal floor, following the noise. It wasn't loud, but it had a texture like sand caught in a comm relay, or the faint grind of magnetized dust shifting along a charge line.

The sound led her to the old monitoring station in the rear storage room. The unit hadn't powered on in years, not since the battery array failed during the last solar flare.

Kael stood in front of it. His hands weren't touching it. Just… hovering. Inches from the dead interface screen. The static pulsed from the machine like a broken breath.

"Kael?" she whispered.

He didn't flinch. Didn't speak. His eyes were wide and unfocused, like he wasn't seeing the unit but something behind it—something mirrored in circuitry, encoded in the dark.

Then the monitor flickered. Once. Twice.

It powered on.

Mirena's heart caught in her chest. The screen glowed faintly. No system boot. No menu. Just a grid of soft green lights blinking in a pattern she didn't recognize but Kael did.

He tilted his head.

And blinked once.

Then the screen went dark again.

He turned to her and, without saying a word, reached for her hand.

She held it tightly all the way back to bed but didn't sleep the rest of the night.

The south maintenance yard of Grey Hollow was one of the few places in the settlement that didn't feel suffocating. It sat close to the canyon wall, partially shaded throughout the day. Around its edges lay the half-buried frames of decommissioned crawler rigs and atmospheric skiffs no one had flown in decades.

It was also where Vessa Norn worked most days.

She preferred it over the plaza workshops. It was less noisy, had fewer eyes on her, and offered more quiet time to fix what no one else cared to understand.

Today, she was crouched beside a rust-locked exo-loader shell, elbow-deep in the cracked outer chassis of its core hydraulic spine. The heat was unforgiving, the wind dry and mean. She'd lost feeling in her fingers an hour ago.

Then a voice.

"Hot."

She jerked upward, banging her shoulder on the loader frame. "Void!"

Kael was standing two meters away, arms loose at his sides, a wrench in one hand that was three sizes too big for him.

He stared at her.

"Where did you come from?" Vessa asked, catching her breath.

Kael pointed at the control panel she'd left open.

"Hot," he repeated.

Vessa followed his gesture. The loader's battery module indicator blinked yellow, a sign she had missed entirely.

Her eyes narrowed. "Did Mirena send you?"

Kael tilted his head.

Of course not.

Vessa stood slowly, brushing dust from her knees. "You know you're not supposed to wander."

Kael didn't move.

Vessa sighed, then gestured to the shade beside the loader. "Alright, genius. You can stay, but sit over there. Don't touch anything."

Kael obeyed without a sound.

But as she worked, she noticed his eyes, always watching. Not like a child. Not even like an apprentice. He watched like someone memorizing a language they already half understood.

After twenty minutes, Vessa finally cracked the faulty coolant loop. "There," she muttered.

Kael stood.

Vessa looked over. "I said, don't move."

Kael stepped forward anyway, pointed to the replacement tube she had set aside. "Wrong one."

Vessa frowned. "That's a T4-M assembly. It's standard__"

Kael reached over, took a second coil, dust-covered, from the parts tray, and held it up.

"Low shift," he said. "T4-F."

She stared.

Then, with a muttered curse, she checked the loader's build plate.

He was right.

Later that night, Kael sat alone by the vent grate in the Virek home, a small copper coil spinning between his fingers.

He didn't know why, but the south yard was louder tonight, not with sound, but with feeling. A deep, slow pulse that only he seemed to notice. Like a heartbeat buried under miles of sand and steel.

He touched the floor with one hand.

The vibration met him. Just a tremble. But alive.

Below the stone, below the veins of scrap and ore, something stirred.

Something old.

Something that had waited longer than any child should understand.

Kael lay down, eyes half-lidded, his small fingers spread across the metal.

And for a moment, a flicker passed through him.

A breath of heat. A glimmer of light behind his eyes. An image he didn't have words for:

A shape.

A cage.

A presence.

The coil dropped from his hand.