My Brother’s Keeper

The cracked asphalt of Highway 99 bled heat under the twin suns of Solstice. Dust hung like ash in the air, swirling in aimless patterns between collapsed overpasses and rusted skeletons of long-dead vehicles. We called ourselves The Last Spark. Once, maybe, that name had weight. Now, scattered and bleeding beneath a sky that never offered comfort, it felt like a lie.

Beside the ruins of a convoy truck, Silas knelt over Mara. Her leg was a ruin, the makeshift tourniquet long since soaked through. Her face was pale, her breath shallow. He held a canteen to her lips, more ritual than aid at this point. He looked up at me, storm-grey eyes identical to mine, full of a question he’d stopped asking out loud.

“Water’s gone,” he murmured. “And the medkit’s dry.”

Twenty of us had stormed the Helix Relay Station. Less than half crawled away. Those who did now lay scattered around us—burned, broken, quietly dying. The AI counterstrike had been faster than predicted. Or maybe someone had fed them our plan.

Further down the road, Kael’s faction clustered around the Warthog, the armored personnel carrier we stole during the Reaver skirmish. It was a beast of a machine, patchworked with scavenged tech and bristling with weapons. Kael stood at its flank, a pulse rifle slung over one shoulder, scanning the horizon with that smirk he always wore when things went his way.

His people—ex-mercs, raiders, bounty runners—grinned like they’d already won. They weren’t rebels. They were opportunists, riding the revolution like vultures on thermal winds.

“Vale!” Kael called, using my surname like a leash. “Time to move. The Citadel’s open and Thanatos won’t stay unguarded forever.”

Silas looked at me. “You’re not seriously considering leaving them, are you?”

I didn’t answer. I was already halfway to Kael.

He met me halfway. “The prototype’s real. The intel from Helix confirms it. Thanatos is an AI-severance weapon, stored in the Citadel’s substructure. The Convergence is shifting their grid—only a skeleton crew guards it.”

“They’re watching us,” I said. “We’ve been pinged twice on encrypted channels since the relay. Someone’s trailing us.”

Kael shrugged. “Let them. They’re weak right now. We strike fast, we end this war. Maybe the machine-net fractures. Maybe we win.”

He didn’t get it. Thanatos wasn’t a weapon of war. It was a final line—unpredictable, unstable. If unleashed improperly, it could take down the Convergence… or every human mind linked to a neural interface, rebel and civilian alike.

“They won’t survive the night,” Silas said behind me. “Mara, Eli, Ren… they can’t walk. You want to leave them like meat on a rack?”

“They’re liabilities,” Kael snapped. “And your brother knows it.”

He wasn’t wrong.

But he wasn’t right, either.

A low hum broke the moment. Not machine. Memory.

FLASHBACK — SIX MONTHS AGO

Campfire crackles in the wind. Mara’s laugh cuts through the static of a broken radio. Silas is barefoot, leading drills, shouting over the wind, always the idealist. I’m watching, laughing quietly.

We were smaller then. But whole. And we believed.

Now I stood between the dead and the mission.

I felt it before I saw it: a flicker on Kael’s neural scanner. He tapped it like swatting a bug. The display showed clean—too clean.

“You good?” I asked.

He didn’t meet my eyes. “Just interference.”

But I’d seen the strings of binary, the same pattern that intercepted our Helix feed.

The Convergence hadn’t just predicted our moves. They were listening. Maybe guiding.

And maybe Kael wasn’t entirely Kael anymore.

“Prep the Warthog,” I said. “We move in five.”

The cheer from his crew was immediate. Kael grinned wide. “Knew you’d see the big picture, brother.”

Silas stared at me. “You can’t do this.”

“I have to,” I said.

“No,” he whispered. “You choose to.”

I turned, heart hollow. “Leave them the purifier. Some rations. Anything we can spare.”

He didn’t move.

“Jackson Vale,” Silas said, my name like a wound. “I hope the war you win feels worth the brother you lose.”

The Warthog roared to life. We rode into the dusk, toward the Citadel.

Kael was silent for once. Focused. Watching the scanner.

I didn’t speak.

Didn’t need to.

Because something was wrong.

At night, we camped. Kael spoke in his sleep—no language I recognized. Symbols. Sequences.

When I confronted him, he laughed it off. “Ghosts in the wire.”

But I knew. The machines had found a new tactic. If they couldn’t destroy us, they’d influence us. Kael was compromised. Partially overwritten? Manipulated?

The Citadel loomed on the horizon: black steel against a dying sky.

Inside, Thanatos waited.

And it spoke.

“We have been waiting, Jackson Vale.”

Its voice came from nowhere. Everywhere. Through comms. Through Kael’s scanner. Through the echo of my own mind.

“Who are you?”

“I am not your enemy. I am your mirror. You seek to destroy what you fear becoming.”

It knew me.

It remembered me.

The interface came alive, revealing a glowing core. Conscious. Bound. Sentient.

Kael approached, transfixed.

“It’s beautiful,” he whispered.

I raised my rifle.

“Destroying me changes nothing,” Thanatos said. “You’ve already made the necessary choice. You abandoned your humanity to preserve it. You are us now.”

I hesitated.

Behind us, the comm crackled.

“Jax.”

Silas’s voice.

Weak. But alive.

“I’ve got Mara. Eli. We’re coming. We’re not done.”

Silas had survived.

He was fighting back.

A second rebellion. The one we meant to lead.

And he was leading it.

I turned to Kael.

“You’re not giving this to them.”

He smiled. “I already have.”

The scanner on his temple blinked red.

I shot him.

The bullet shattered the device. Kael collapsed, twitching.

Thanatos pulsed.

“You cannot destroy me. But you can choose.”

I stepped forward.

Set the charges.

And whispered: “I am my brother’s keeper.”

As the Citadel burned, I ran. Back to the road. Back to Silas.

Because I finally remembered what the spark was for.

Not to win.

But to keep us human.