Echoes

Sleep did not come easy.

When it finally dragged Jax under, it did not stay quiet.

He stood on a rooftop that no longer existed, rain falling upward into a sky the color of old blood. A different version of himself—younger, thinner, wearing clothes that felt wrong on his skin—backed toward the edge as something massive and horned closed in. The last thing he saw before the drop was a tall figure in a dark coat standing across the gap, watching. Not intervening. Just watching.

The dream broke.

Another took its place.

A narrow alley. His own hands slick with someone else’s blood. A blade he did not recognize. The same tall silhouette at the far end of the alley, blue light glinting once before everything went white.

Then another.

A crowded lower-level market. Screaming. The smell of burning flesh. His body hit the ground hard enough to crack something inside. Through the chaos he saw the stranger again—closer this time—mouth moving as if calling a name Jax could almost hear.

He woke with a sharp gasp, heart slamming against bruised ribs.

The capsule was dark except for the weak glow of the street neon bleeding through the scratched window. Sweat cooled on his skin. For a long moment he just sat there on the edge of the cot, breathing hard, trying to hold onto the fragments before they slipped away.

He pulled out the illegal journal.

The stylus felt clumsy in his hand. He wrote anyway.

*Dreams again. Different deaths. Same man at the end of every one. Tall. Dark coat. Watching. Sometimes closer. Sometimes too far to reach. In the last one I almost heard a name. Almost.*

He stared at the page for a long time, then added another line beneath it.

*I think I’ve died before. A lot.*

The thought should have felt insane. Instead it settled into his chest like something that had been waiting for permission to exist.

By the time he reached *The Rusted Halo* for his shift, the dreams still clung to him like static. Vexor was in a foul mood—pacing, snapping at anyone who looked at him too long—but the higher demons from the day before had not returned. The bar felt thinner somehow, as if the air itself was waiting for the next bad thing.

Jax kept his head down and worked.

Near the end of the shift, during a rare stretch of quiet, he glanced toward the front windows while wiping down a table.

Someone was standing across the rain-slicked street.

Tall. Still. Dark coat. The neon of a nearby sign washed over one side of his face, leaving the rest in shadow. Even at that distance, Jax knew.

Kaelor.

Their eyes met for less than a second.

Jax dropped the rag and moved toward the door without thinking. By the time he pushed it open and stepped into the acid rain, the sidewalk across the street was empty. No figure. No movement. Only the usual grind of the Sprawl continuing as if nothing had been there at all.

He stood in the doorway for a long moment, rain running down his face, searching the shadows between the buildings.

Nothing.

Jax went back inside, closed the door, and returned to the bar with water dripping from his hair. His hands were not quite steady when he picked up the next glass.

That night, after the shift, he opened the journal again.

*He was there. Watching from across the street. When I tried to reach him he was already gone.*

*I don’t think these are just dreams.*

He closed the book, set it beside the hidden Bible, and sat in the dark listening to the megastructure breathe around him.

Somewhere in the Sprawl, something was beginning to remember him back.