The rooftop in daylight felt like another world.

Max stepped out barefoot, the heavy door shutting behind him with a hollow click. Warmth from the afternoon sun seeped into the concrete under his feet, still slick in places where last night's rain clung in shallow puddles. The thin hospital gown at his back was plastered to his skin, the damp fabric clinging like wet gauze. Every breath carried the dry bite of city heat, every exhale stolen away before it could cool him.

He moved without direction, his body drawn toward the railing as though pulled by something older than choice.

The city stretched out before him in a hard, pitiless panorama — silver towers knifing into a washed-blue sky, bridged by glass that caught the sun like a blade. Construction cranes held their frozen poses above the skyline, and carefully staged rooftop gardens spilled artificial green into the geometry of steel and concrete. From here, it looked like a place without flaws, a city built to resist time, sealed behind invisible glass.

Yesterday, that view had felt distant — like a painting hung too far away to touch. Today it stared back at him. Unblinking. Cruel.

Max squinted against the glare until his eyes prickled. The light caught something inside him, and for a second he couldn't tell if the burn in his vision came from the sun… or from the fire.

It was supposed to be her last day.

His hands closed around the railing, the chill of the steel cutting through the heat on his palms. Bone whitened beneath the skin of his knuckles. The words came back to him exactly as the nurse had said them: We've given it as long as we can, Mr. Jaeger. Her brain activity hasn't changed in months. Unless there's a change, the machines will be powered down this afternoon.

The tone had been careful. Soft enough to sound merciful. Gentle enough to pass for kindness. As if there was a kind way to tell someone they were about to lose their child.

They hadn't expected him to stay. They never did. Just sign the forms. Go home. Learn how to live with the empty space.

But where was home now?

He let out a breath, ragged at the edges. The air felt heavier for having carried it.

In his mind, Liz was still there — not the way she was now, pale and half-vanished under white hospital linen, but as she'd been before: sharp-eyed, quick to smile, sixteen and already too smart for her own good. The machines had stolen her colour hour by hour, feeding her air but taking everything else.

That was why he'd done it.

The ritual. The circle. The blood soaking into the cheap motel carpet.

He hadn't understood half of what he'd drawn, not really. The diagrams had been copied from April's notebooks — fragments in dead languages scrawled between notes on necromancy, sigil arrays, and bindings meant for spirits that had no business in the mortal world. It was part guesswork, part faith, and entirely desperation.

He hadn't believed it would work. Not for real. But belief didn't matter when the alternative was to do nothing and watch her fade.

So he had knelt, knees grinding into coarse carpet, marker shaking in his hand. He had spoken the words until his throat bled. He had begged, not to anyone in particular, but into the dark itself — and something in the dark had listened.

When the world went white, it had felt like the air itself had been stripped of weight.

A muscle twitched beneath the skin of his hand. He looked down — and too late, saw it. Gold light, sharp as the edge of a coin, bled from the knuckles, pulsing in time with his heartbeat. The faint glow traced the blue of his veins, curling toward his wrist like a river seeking an ocean.

The fire was close now. Always close. Always listening.

He imagined Liz's monitor going still. The line flattening. The silence after.

His heart jolted, and the fire jolted with it — a sudden flare that ran the length of his arms, the glow curling tight around his wrists before sinking again into his skin. He hissed and pulled his hands back from the railing, as though the heat had come from the steel instead of from inside him.

The warmth drained away.

Max curled his fingers into fists, shaking out the tremor that remained. His voice came low and unsteady.

"I don't even know if this'll work," he said to the empty air.

He looked at his hands as though they belonged to someone else.

"What if I kill her?"

***

Max stayed by the railing, shoulders rounded, the city's glare still stamped behind his eyelids. But it wasn't the skyline he was seeing anymore.

His eyes flicked to the horizon on instinct, searching for a glint of silver. Dan's flight should have landed by now.

Dan.

April's little brother. Years younger, but somehow always the steady one. Max had called him the moment the doctors gave up — not because he wanted to, but because there was no one else he could call. Because Dan was family. Because Liz was his niece.

Dan had been there for all of it — through April's death, through Liz's slow unravelling, through Max's own collapse into something unrecognisable. He never raised his voice. Never judged. Never said the words Max was already saying to himself every day. That unshakable calm had always made it worse, like standing in front of a mirror that showed not your face, but the sum of your mistakes.

Once, in the worst week after April's funeral, Dan had turned up at midnight with a thermos of coffee and two meat pies, saying only, 'Figured you forgot to eat.' Max had never told him that was the first hot meal he'd managed in three days.

Max dragged a hand down his face. Dan was too good for this world. Too good for him. And standing next to him always felt like being measured against a standard you could never meet.

Victor would be on his way too. The thought almost curled Max's mouth into a smile. Almost. Victor was chaos crammed into a frame built for war — his oldest friend from their firefighter days, back when life was dangerous but still made sense. Victor had pulled him out of burning rooms, laughed in the smoke, and then disappeared into the military: special units, shadow contracts, deserts and jungles Max had only seen on news broadcasts. Somewhere in there he'd earned a PhD in Zoology, and now he tracked lions across African grasslands like it was the most normal career shift in the world.

When Max called, there were no questions. Just: I'll be there. Loyalty without limits. The kind that made you grateful and ashamed at the same time.

He shifted his grip on the railing. Felt the fire stir somewhere low in his chest, that restless, patient heat. He ignored it.

The hardest ones were still to come.

Chloe and Alyssa. Sixteen now, but they'd been in Liz's life since Year Five — inseparable, practically sisters. They never stopped showing up, even when the doctors stopped pretending hope was a possibility. Every week in Sydney, they came. With voice recordings. With drawings. Taking turns telling Liz about school gossip, dumb memes, bad movies — speaking to her like she could hear every word. They had refused to let her fade into the kind of absence people stop noticing.

He'd booked their flights without explaining. Didn't have the spine to call their parents and say, Come quick. This is it. Instead, he'd just said, "Liz could use familiar voices. Might be her last chance."

And then there was Jack.

Seventeen, awkward, hair in his eyes, shirts hanging two sizes too big. Liz's boyfriend. The kind of kid who'd rather sit silently beside her bed than try to fill the quiet. Max had walked in once to find him folding paper cranes, one after another, lining them up on her pillow like an army of fragile things.

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He hadn't told Jack either. Just told him to come.

Max leaned forward, forearms braced on cold metal, throat tight enough to ache. The wind pushed against him, sharp with the smell of rain still trapped in the concrete, but he didn't blink.

Everything was gone. The mortgage overdraft had bled past the point of return. The cash reserves were gone months ago. Even the house was already someone else's future on paper. Every last scrap of what his life had been was funneled into this — this one day, this one gathering of the people who still mattered.

The last goodbye.

Max swallowed, but it caught halfway down.

"I didn't just fail her," he said to the wind. His voice sounded thin against the open air.

His fingers locked tighter around the railing.

"I dragged everyone else into my failure."

The words tasted like metal.

"They're all flying here for a funeral," he whispered.

"They just don't know whose."

***

The wind shifted, carrying the warm breath of the city up over the rooftop. It brushed against Max's face, but there was no relief in it. Nothing cooled him anymore. Not when the heat under his skin had its own pulse.

He turned from the edge, letting the railing press between his shoulders, the sun at his back throwing his shadow long across the concrete. He told himself not to think about Ethan. The thought came anyway.

It had been a week since he made the call. Four tries to get through — each one unanswered, the ringing stretching on until it felt like a dare. No replies to messages. Emails sitting unopened somewhere in a cluttered inbox. When Ethan finally picked up, the voice that came down the line had been unfamiliar. Not in sound, but in weight. Lighter in some places, hollowed in others, as if the person Max had known had been scraped thin from the inside.

It was short. Too short.

"Hey," Max had said, gripping the phone like it could keep the conversation from ending. "She's not… she's not doing well. They're talking about pulling the plug."

A pause. Silence so complete it felt intentional. Then the faint crackle of static.

"I've already said my goodbyes."

Max had waited, certain he'd misheard. "What?"

"I'm sorry, Max. I can't come. I've got work. You know how it is."

But he didn't. He couldn't reconcile that voice with the Ethan he knew — the one who'd built a company with him from nothing, running on bad coffee and shared stubbornness. The one who rewrote evacuation protocols at 2 a.m. without complaint, who told jokes so stupid you couldn't help laughing during site inspections. The man Liz used to call Uncle E, the same man who stood at April's funeral and gave the eulogy when Max couldn't force the words out.

Now there was only this distance. This frost. As if something in Max had gone rancid, and Ethan could smell it over the phone.

Maybe he could.

Maybe the failure clung to him so completely that it drove away anyone still breathing.

It reminded Max of walking into a room you'd once lived in — same walls, same light, but stripped of everything that made it yours.

Max hadn't pressed. Hadn't asked why. Hadn't begged. He didn't have the energy. But the call still played in his head on a loop — not the words themselves so much as the absences between them. Ethan hadn't asked how Liz was. Hadn't even asked where they were staying.

Something had shifted in the years between then and now, a weight falling somewhere Max couldn't see. He didn't know what it was, only that it had pulled them out of alignment for good.

He glanced at the rooftop door. Still closed. Still quiet. No shadow breaking its frame. No hand on the handle.

Not yet.

A taste rose in his throat, bitter and dry, as if the wind had carried ash instead of warmth.

Even my friends can't look at me anymore.

***

Max drifted back to the edge of the rooftop, his fingers grazing the sun-warmed railing. Below, Singapore moved like a precision engine — trains sliding between stations, glass towers catching the light, crosswalks pulsing with patient crowds. It was beautiful in that manicured way only money and discipline could make a city.

But all he could see was ruin.

The crater. The scorched rings carved into stone like scars the earth had chosen to keep.

The fire hadn't just answered him; It had announced him.

He closed his eyes, and the memory uncoiled with claws.

The smell came first — hot metal, burning stone, ozone sharp enough to cut. The air had cracked in his ears, a pressure drop so sudden it hollowed his skull. Then the flash — blue-white, blinding, an unmaking light that swallowed the motel whole. One breath it was there, the next it had been unwritten. No wreckage, no rubble, only a ringing silence that stretched on and on, as though the world were deciding whether to start up again.

When he woke, everything was wrong.

The paramedics looked at him like he was a mirage. The medics kept their distance, gloved hands hovering instead of touching. They strapped him to a gurney and ran scan after scan, but the results bent their machines sideways. No burns. No shrapnel. No collapsed lung or ruptured vessel. Just numbers that spiked and broke monitors until they switched them off in frustration.

And then there were the bodies.

He hadn't seen them directly — not all of them — but the glimpses had been enough. Black smears against concrete. Glass shattered into patterns that no detonation could explain. The smell of blood undercut by something colder, older. The emergency teams had moved with a choreography that told him this was not their first clean-up. Less than an hour and it was gone. No cameras. No press. No statements.

Like it had never happened.

But it had.

One medic had whispered something into a comms unit before realising Max was close enough to hear. The voice was tight, urgent. A name he hadn't recognised at first.

Grimm Institute.

It had lodged in him like a splinter.

He knew the name from somewhere — not a clinic, not a hospital. Bigger. Stranger. A billionaire, if he remembered right. Secretive. Reclusive. April had mentioned him once, in the years before her smile had dulled. Back when she was still a professor — ancient history, myth, the occult. She'd kept that last passion quiet, like a precious thing, never saying "demonology" in public but letting it slip at the kitchen table, her eyes lit with a private fire. Grimm had come up in one of those midnight rambles — tied to something old enough to have no proper name. Max hadn't listened closely then. Now he wished he had.

He opened his eyes. The sun had risen high, the light hard and unforgiving, but the air around him felt colder than it had all morning.

Someone wanted me dead.

The thought came with weight. Not paranoia, not self-pity. Certainty.

Why then? Why there?

It hadn't been random. Couldn't have been. The timing was too precise. He'd been hours away from surrender — days from letting Liz's machines go quiet. And then the fire had answered.

And something else had answered too.

It had noticed. It had judged. And it hadn't liked what it saw him becoming.

Max flexed his hand. The flame stirred beneath his skin, not roaring but breathing, patient and close.

The grief sat in him like a stone sunk to the seabed — unseen from the surface, but dragging at everything that tried to rise.

Survival.

After Liz, he thought, there would be time for questions. For hunts. For debts to be settled.

And he would find out who had come for him.

And why.

***

The rooftop was still again. Just Max and the wind, trading breaths above the city. Far below, Singapore kept its clockwork rhythm — trains sliding through tunnels, traffic lights blinking in time, footsteps merging into the muted hum of another morning. It all felt distant. Irrelevant.

Max stood near the edge, the sun-warmed concrete beneath his bare feet grounding him in the moment. His hospital gown tugged lightly at his back as the breeze curled past. He raised one hand, palm open, fingers spread in a silent summons.

The fire came.

Not in the wild surge it had before, but in a slow, deliberate ascent — coiling up from his palm, winding between his fingers like a living ribbon. Threads of gold and pale blue shimmered in the light, a quiet crackle tracing their edges.

Max drew in a breath. Pushed.

The fire tightened, drawing to a fine, searing point at the centre of his palm. He cut sideways through the air — no hiss, no recoil — just a clean line of light that vanished as soon as it was made. Controlled. Precise.

He shaped it again, folding the glow inward until it formed a sphere no larger than an apple. It pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat, edges flickering but holding shape. Not wild. Not feral. Still dangerous, yes — alive in the way storms are alive — but now it listened.

Max let the sphere dissolve, the light trailing off his skin. He stepped toward a dented ventilation pipe near the edge of the roof. Rust flaked under the sun's glare. He drove his fist into it.

The steel folded with a deep groan. Not shattered. Not ripped apart. Dented. Deliberate. The mark of a blow given with purpose instead of rage.

Power hummed through him — not the frantic rush of adrenaline, but the clean readiness of a body tuned for war. His muscles felt leaner, sharper. Every nerve was awake. Steam ghosted up from his shoulders in the heat.

He looked over the railing.

Three floors down, the hospital's side entrance spilled staff into the morning: nurses, porters, a handful of lab coats. Ordinary people, shoulders bent to their day. But over some of their heads — faint in the haze — tiny glimmers trembled.

Halos.

Dim. Incomplete. Weak little embers that pulsed in uneven rhythm. No two were the same. A young nurse with tired eyes and a paper cup carried one that guttered like a candle about to die.

Max narrowed his eyes. He wasn't seeing their souls. He was seeing potential.

"Echoes," he murmured. "Not just who they are… but what they could be."

He stepped back from the edge. His reflection caught in the rooftop access window — and for a moment, he didn't recognise the man looking back.

Above his head burned his own halo.

Not a spark. Not a flicker. A full ring, jagged and haloed in trailing flame — as if the fire had crowned him for a war only it understood. One half shone brighter than the other, like a sun caught mid-eclipse. It crackled at the edges, as if each flame were earned, not gifted.

He lowered his hand, and the fire bled away into his skin.

April was gone. Ethan had turned away. Everyone else was flying in for a goodbye he still refused to believe in.

And downstairs — Liz.

Sixteen. Motionless. Still breathing.

The knot in his chest pulled tight, but the fire didn't flare. It steadied, low and certain.

"She's all I have left," he said quietly. "This can't fail."

He turned toward the door.

"If it kills me — fine." His fingers curled around the handle. His eyes fixed forward. "But it won't kill her."

He pulled the rooftop door open. The hinges protested with a tired creak. Stale air rolled out, smelling of recycled ventilation and the faint tang of disinfectant. Bare feet on concrete, each step echoed up the stairwell.

The fire didn't roar. It banked itself, patient. Waiting.

One floor down. Then another.

Every footfall felt like a decision. Every breath was part of a countdown. By the final landing, his hands were still.

Room 805 lay at the far end of the corridor — just a door, just a number. But behind it was everything left in his world.

His daughter.

Max squared his shoulders. Closed his eyes.

And walked toward whatever came next.

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