I can’t believe it’s finally happening.

  My brother is coming back from the dead.

  I stood with my grandmother at the Hoverport, fingers curled tight around the strap of my satchel. The place smelled faintly of ozone and iron from the docking lines, the wide expanse of polished glass buzzing with anticipation.

  It had been more than ten years.

  Ten years since I got sick and stayed home with Gran in our little provincial house. Ten years since my parents, my grandfather, my two uncles, their children—and my brother, Cale—boarded a transport bound for Bloston Paradise. It was supposed to be a quick trip, a two-day holiday at a riverside resort.

  But the transport never arrived.

  One of the safest forms of travel in the Upper Tiers, they’d said. It went down anyway. Wreckage scattered. Lives lost. Bodies never recovered.

  I lost almost my entire family in a single day.

  After that, it was just me and Gran. She kept her job as a public administrator for the education bureau, steady and reliable, and raised me the best she could. She was the one who pulled the strings to get me into the Arclight Academy system—I started high school just three weeks ago.

  And then—everything changed.

  Six months ago, a communication came from the Knights’ Order. They believed they had found my brother. He had been living in the Wastes with no memory of who he was. Only recently, after being seen by a Saint-Level Healer, had fragments returned. They verified his identity through the Arcane Match-Up Registry.

  Three weeks ago, the official confirmation arrived.

  And so now, here we are. My world turned upside down.

  Waiting for the transport to dock.

  Waiting to see my brother again.

  The brother I haven’t seen in ten years.

  The transport that docked was nothing special.

  It was neither a military ship nor a luxury liner—just a budget carrier, the kind that ferries workers, students, and families from place to place without ceremony or story.

  People streamed out in a tired trickle—ordinary faces, ordinary bags, children dragging soft shoes across polished stone. There was no brass, fanfare, or banner. Nothing that looked like someone was returning from the dead.

  The captain hadn’t told us much. Only that they’d found my brother. Only that fragments of his memory had returned. He’d asked if we wanted him to come home. He hadn’t said where they found him, or why it took ten years, or why now.

  Just that Cale understood. And he wanted to come back.

  I shifted on my feet until Gran’s hand tapped my wrist.

  “Stand up straight, Ellara. You’re fidgeting.”

  “I know,” I whispered. “But… do you think he remembers us? Do you think he’ll be like before?”

  The words slipped out before I could gather them. “I barely remember him, Gran. Just that he was soft. Kind.”

  Gran’s gaze didn’t leave the docking gate. “Oh, sweetheart. I don’t think you can be where he was, or go through what he’s been through, and be the same person. You’ll have to give him time. Give him space. Be there for him. He won’t understand what your life has been here—the academy, the quiet, the choices we get on a higher-plane world. Not at first.”

  She squeezed my hand. “We just have to love him.”

  I nodded, swallowing. Of course. Love him.

  My brother. Four years older than me—eight to my four when they left. I remembered the smallest things: how he loved chocolate and pie; how his laugh bounced off the kitchen tiles; how he insisted I play when the older cousins tried to exclude me. But faces fade. Voices fade. I couldn’t hear his in my head no matter how I tried. Only one thing stayed clear—his eyes. Deep purple, so dark they sometimes read black until light caught them. When he got worked up, the shade shifted, like stormglass taking on weather.

  The memory made me laugh under my breath, sharp and nervous.

  “Gran?” a voice called as someone pushed past with a luggage cart. We both turned reflexively toward the sound, then back to the gate as the final chime rang and the last line of passengers stepped through.

  He appeared with them.

  The man who stepped off the transport was… plain. Painfully plain.

  Dull brown hair, cut close. Simple travel clothes—gray jacket, neutral trousers, boots with scuffed toes. His face blurred the moment I looked away, like a sketch smudged under a careless thumb. If I dropped him in a crowd, I’d lose him in two steps.

  My chest sank. This is my brother? After ten years?

  He was tall—that much was impossible to hide. Built lean but not slight, the kind of strength you get from hauling weight because you must, not because someone timed you in a training hall. His shoulders seemed made for carrying. His arms were marked by work. There was a held energy in the way he moved, a quiet coil, as if he’d learned the cost of taking up space and paid it in advance.

  But his features… blurred. Almost muted. Ordinary in a way that hurt. None of which made any sense.

  Do I even remember him right? Could this really be Cale?

  Beside me, Gran sucked in a breath that broke on the way out. Her hand lifted to her mouth, trembling.

  “Cale,” she whispered.

  The name sounded like a prayer she’d been afraid to say out loud.

  Her fingers dug into my forearm, anchoring herself. “My boy. My boy. My boy…” She said it again and again, as if repetition could stitch ten missing years back into our lives.

  Something strange happened as we stepped forward. People flowed around him without seeing him. Their eyes slid off his shoulders, turning before they could settle on his face. A porter looked up as if to offer help, then blinked and looked right past him to the couple behind. Even the gate attendant—mid-scan, mid-salute—stuttered and resumed without speaking to him at all.

  We stopped three paces away. He stopped too.

  Up close, “plain” sharpened into meticulous absence. The brown of his hair was the exact brown of the terminal benches. The tan of his skin carried the same washed undertone as the floor’s light. His eyes were… hazel-ish. Muddy. Noncommittal. I searched for purple and found none. A stupid part of me wanted to reach out and tilt his face toward the light, like refraction might rediscover my memory.

  He looked at Gran first.

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  “Gran,” he said, and the quiet of it took my breath. The lack of fanfare was almost disappointing for a heartbeat. It was a low, careful word—like he wasn’t sure if the room could hold it.

  Gran didn’t see it that way. She broke. She crossed the distance between them, arms flung around his neck, sobbing in gulping waves that made me ache and made me jealous and made me grateful all at once. He went rigid for a heartbeat, then brought his arms up awkwardly, as if learning the shape of an embrace, and held her. One hand—not plain at all up close—rested between her shoulders. Calloused. Scarred along the knuckles in a crosshatch of old work. He rubbed small circles at first, then steadier.

  “You got taller,” Gran managed, wet and absurd, and it broke me; I laughed and cried at the same time.

  He smiled—small, almost a crease instead of an expression—and lifted a shoulder like he didn’t know what to do with pride. “Yeah, that happens over time,” he said. His voice was deeper than I expected, but even. It kept to the ground.

  He turned to me. I felt that same sense of misplacement, and I smiled at him anyway.

  “Ellara,” he said. He didn’t ask. He knew.

  For a second I couldn’t speak. All the lines I’d practiced in the mirror—Welcome home, We missed you, I missed you—evaporated like breath against glass.

  “Hi,” I said, because my brain had chosen ruin. “You look… tired.”

  “Honest,” he said, just like I remembered.

  My breath caught again, and I burst into tears.

  I wanted to hug him, but I pushed at the impulse. He saved me by shifting his weight and sticking out his hand, which was both painfully formal and exactly right. I took it, and his grip was careful, like he’d learned the force that breaks things and promised not to use it on me.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Gran said, wiping at her face with a handkerchief and frowning at her own lack of composure. “Before I frighten the port authorities.”

  We collected the single bag at his feet. It looked heavy. He didn’t shift when he lifted it—just a small brace in his core, a practiced economy. We moved through the terminal, and I noticed how he interacted with those around him. People stepped in and around him like they didn’t know him but subconsciously knew he was there. Cale—my brother—walked with even surety even when people seemed to ignore him at the last moment.

  The outside air tasted like iron and ozone—the hover-lines singing faintly in the sky as transit skiffs threaded the city’s spires. Our little provincial capital, now a major player in everything from politics to economics, had grown in the decade since the crash—more glass, more light, more people who had never learned to fear shortages. A breeze tugged at Gran’s scarf; she retied it automatically, her eyes never leaving Cale’s profile.

  We took the skytram. Gran insisted on the window bench because “boys need to see home first,” and Cale let her steer him like he’d always belonged to her. He sat with his back turned just enough to keep the aisle in view, an action that appeared second nature.

  I tried small talk because silence pressed on my teeth.

  “The Knights’ Order said you were working with… with a caravan,” I said carefully. “That they found records. That someone was able to get through to the Bureau of Citizenship and identify you.”

  His jaw shifted like he was lining up words with care. “Indeed, the Knights’ Order located me,” he said. “And they were able to connect me with the right people to help.”

  “How did they find you?” I asked, too quickly.

  He hesitated. “I was injured in an attack, and they brought me to safety.”

  He looked uncomfortable as he said it. I noticed my eyes widen, but he didn’t say anything. I had a million questions.

  I was just about to ask when Gran gave me a sharp look.

  Space. Right. He needs space, Ellara.

  He had just come home after a long time, and I had no idea what he endured. I could give him that much.

  Gran changed the subject the way only grandmothers can. “We stocked the pantry,” she said, and the next few minutes were a gentle cascade of domestic bulletins: the state of the kettle, the stubborn oven rune, the neighbor who insists on feeding the stray cat who is absolutely not our cat. Cale nodded at all of it, as if these updates were mission-critical. They told him what had stayed the same while he was gone.

  Halfway to our stop, a vendor boarded with a tray of parcels and a clear voice. “Hand pies! Meat and mushroom. Apple-cinnamon. Chocolate.”

  Cale’s head turned before he could stop it.

  It was tiny, the movement. Most would have missed it, but I saw the flicker of interest in his dull brown eyes.

  It was so strange that his eye color was so different from what I remembered.

  “Chocolate?” Gran asked, and there was hope in it that made my throat ache.

  He looked at me, then at her, then gave the smallest nod.

  Gran bought three chocolate and one apple-cinnamon “for balance” and parceled them like a priest on Giving Day. I held mine untouched as Cale took a bite. His mouth tightened for a heartbeat, working against some ghost—hunger, habit, absence—and then the line between his brows eased. He didn’t close his eyes. He didn’t sigh. He simply took another bite with less caution. A simple, ordinary motion that made Gran sob-laugh into her handkerchief again.

  Something like a smile reached his lips. It made him look younger.

  The transport made its way through the city. In the distance, we could see Arclight’s world-renowned spires. The late sun cut them into ribbons—glass, runic steel, and old stone braided into something the city liked to put on postcards. It was my current campus. My world for the last two years that started with middle school into high school. I watched Cale study the spires, the look of contemplation obvious and painful. I wanted to ask what he was thinking.

  I didn’t.

  “We’ll go by the river,” Gran said as we disembarked, because routines make new things less sharp. We walked the last stretch along the water’s edge, where the light takes on metal and the gulls pretend we’re near the sea.

  The house—ours, somehow still ours—waited at the end of the lane like it always had. It sat in one of those old neighborhoods that brushed up against wealth without ever quite belonging to it, where professors, civil administrators, and retired officers lived beside families whose fortunes had peaked a generation ago. The streets were narrow and tree-lined, the stones worn smooth by decades of careful footsteps. The houses here weren’t grand, but they were solid—thick walls, deep foundations, doors made to last rather than impress.

  Our place had a stubborn doorframe that never quite lined up in winter, a cricket-run garden that refused to die no matter how often Gran threatened it, and a sagging front step polished smooth by years of use. The paint had been red once. Now it was something softer, faded by sun and time. The windows were old glass, slightly warped, bending reflections the way memory does.

  The wind-chime Cale made when he was eight still hung from the eaves. It had never been balanced properly. It caught the breeze at odd angles and rang off-key more often than not, but Gran had never taken it down. None of us had.

  It wasn’t a rich house.

  But it was a safe one.

  And somehow, after everything, it was still home.

  Inside, Gran fussed the way she’d promised she wouldn’t. She set his bag by the sofa “for now,” turned on the kettle, then turned it off because tea wasn’t enough, then turned it on again because tea is always enough. Cale stood in the center of the room like he didn’t want to imprint anything with the wrong weight of his presence.

  “Sit,” Gran ordered, pointing at the sofa. “Both of you. I’ll get cups.”

  He obeyed. I took the other end, turning half toward him, then away, then back again, probably looking as awkward as I felt.

  “I’m sorry,” I blurted, and he looked surprised enough that I rushed to clarify. “For saying you look tired. I meant it as… you know. Not an insult.”

  He considered me, then shook his head. “It’s true,” he said, and the corner of his mouth tipped. “Honest works for me. You don’t have to be afraid to be honest. Ever.”

  “I remembered your eyes,” I said, because I wanted to offer something that was about him and not what the last ten years had done to us. “They were purple. I’ve never seen anyone else with that shade. Did the color change while you were in the Wastes?”

  He glanced toward the window, where evening stretched into a thinner blue. “I remember pie,” he said. “And the wind-chime that never worked. As for my eye color… not exactly.”

  I blinked. “What do you mean, not exactly—wait, the wind-chime, you remember that?”

  A pause. “A little.”

  I kept staring at his face, watching his eyes. The color stayed muddy. But in the pane’s reflection, just for a heartbeat, I thought I saw a darker ring, a whisper of violet gathering like a storm too far to hear. When I looked straight at him, it was gone.

  Gran returned with tea that was too hot and biscuits no one wanted but everyone took. She told him where everything lived in the house again, as if the drawers might have developed new habits while he was gone. He listened like you listen when someone teaches you the perimeter of a sanctuary.

  “I’ve a mattress to set up in your old room,” she said briskly now, business giving her tears somewhere useful to go. “You’ll tell me if anything is wrong with it. We can go tomorrow for clothes—maybe visit the farmers’ market. And the day after, if you like, we can walk by Arclight Academy. Just to see.”

  Cale’s gaze flicked to me, not quite asking, not quite refusing.

  “We can go whenever,” I said. “No rush.”

  My voice sounded even, and I was proud of it.

  He nodded. “Tomorrow, maybe. After the market.”

  “After the market,” Gran echoed, satisfied—as if scheduling ordinary errands could tether him to our world.

  Later, after tea turned into soup and soup turned into Gran insisting he have the last piece of bread because “you’re taller now,” he stood at the doorway to the hall and examined the family photos that had survived ten years of painful glances and heavy sighs. Cale looked at them, and I noticed the silent way he leaned in without touching, the way his breath changed at the picture of my mother holding him as a baby, hair falling into her face.

  He didn’t ask anything. He didn’t promise he would remember. He only stood a long time and then said, “Good night,” like he meant it both for us and for the ghosts.

  I lay awake later and listened to the house learning his footsteps again. He moved quieter than anyone I’d ever known, as if he had learned to be noise only when the world demanded it. Sometime before dawn, a breeze nudged the bad wind-chime into a single, off-key note. I smiled at the ceiling and decided I could be patient.

  I wondered about my brother—where he had been, what he had experienced, why he looked so different, and how...how he had finally got back to us.