CHAPTER THREE: THE NIGHT EVERYTHING BROKE

  

  “People ask me when I became dangerous. They mean Jakarta. They mean Singapore. They mean the classified things I cannot discuss. They are wrong. I became dangerous the night my three-year-old son broke a table with his mind and I realized every government on Earth would want to break him next. The night I stopped being a soldier and became something they do not have a rank for.”

  — Commander Mira Valdris, Personal Journals (Recovered), 2014

  The apartment smelled of cracked plaster, old coffee, and the copper tang of fear. Mira’s pulse was still hammering from her own conviction, that white-hot certainty that had crystallized in her chest and was not leaving. Her children needed answers, and she was the only one who could give them.

  She held them until the trembling stopped. Both theirs and hers.

  The Awakened. The word echoed in Mira’s mind as she held her children, as Lyra’s tears dried and Kael’s shaking eased, as the cracked table sat in the middle of the room like a monument to everything she had feared since the twins were born.

  Everyone knew the stories. Everyone had heard whispers. A soldier whose wounds healed in minutes instead of months. Tissue knitting together while medics stared in disbelief. A civilian who moved objects without touching them. First small things, cups and papers, then larger, a car pushed aside during an accident. A child who knew things before they happened. Speaking warnings that saved lives before anyone understood they needed saving.

  The American Compact did not confirm that the Awakened existed. Official policy was careful neutrality: neither acknowledge nor deny. Everyone in uniform knew what that meant. The government was managing them.

  The people who got managed tended to disappear.

  Special programs with names that never appeared in any database.

  Training facilities in remote locations. Children separated from families for “their protection” and returned, if they returned at all, with dead eyes and careful words and skills that made them valuable.

  Weapons. They turn them into weapons. The same way they turned me into a weapon, except I had a choice. These children do not.

  She held her twins tighter.

  “Mama,” Lyra complained, voice muffled, “you are squishing.”

  “Sorry, baby.” She loosened her grip but did not let go. “Kael, I need you to tell me more about the thing that hums.”

  Eyes too old for his face studied her. Eyes that had glimpsed something vast and powerful and had reached out to touch it.

  “You do not hear it?”

  “No, sweetheart. I do not. Most people do not.”

  “Oh.” He processed this. “I thought everyone did. It has been there as long as I can remember. Like the floor under my feet. I did not know it would do things when I asked.”

  “And you, Lyra?” Mira turned to her daughter. “Do you hear anything?”

  Lyra shook her head. Then paused, considering. “Not hear. Sometimes I get warm. Like there is a fire inside but it does not burn, and when Kael listens to his humming, my warm gets warmer.”

  Connected, Mira realized. They are connected to each other and to another thing. To the Towers. To Verathos. To whatever force is reshaping the world. Her children were three years old, and they were already touching powers that governments fought wars to control.

  Night fell over Residential District 12 like a shroud. The twins were asleep in their room, curled together in Kael’s bed because Lyra refused to let go of her brother after what she had witnessed. Their breathing had synchronized almost immediately. Two small chests rising and falling in perfect rhythm, two heartbeats finding each other across the inches between them.

  Mira stood in the doorway for a long time. Studied how Lyra’s hand curled around Kael’s even in sleep. Noted how Kael’s face had finally relaxed, the fear and confusion smoothing out into the peaceful blankness of deep rest.

  They look so normal. Two children. Twins sleeping. Nobody examining them would ever guess.

  Then the thought she did not want to think. The ugly one, the selfish one, crawling up from whatever dark place honest thoughts live before we learn to bury them:

  What if only Kael has this? What if Lyra is normal and he is not?

  She hated herself for thinking it. Hated the part of her that calculated odds, that weighed which child was safer, that wondered if one normal twin could hide behind the other’s shadow. What kind of mother divides her children into categories of risk?

  The kind who survived the Breach, she answered herself. The kind who knows exactly what happens to the ones who stand out.

  The door closed silently behind her. The living room waited.

  The ruined table sat in the center of the room like an accusation.

  Indestructible, Drayven had called it. His proud grin came back to her, the way he had treated the table like a trophy from some war only furniture could fight. Built to last, he had joked once, in the early years when jokes came easier. Like us.

  The table had lasted three years. So had her certainty that she could protect her children from the world.

  A slow circuit around it. Combat instincts mapping the damage with cold precision, struck in spite of herself by the sheer strangeness of what she was seeing. The cut was even cleaner than she had first thought.

  Beyond straight. Perfect. Skill that demanded laser-cutting equipment or molecular disassembly. The polymer had separated along a plane so exact that she could have used it to calibrate measurement instruments.

  Nothing is indestructible, a wave whispered in the back of her mind. Not tables. Not promises. The only question is what you build from the pieces.

  Her son had done this. Her three-year-old son, with his quiet certainty and his tilted head and his talk of humming underneath everything.

  The implications fell through her mind like dominoes toppling. If anyone finds out.

  She had seen what the Compact did with unusual manifestations. Everyone in the military had heard the rumors, even if nobody spoke them aloud where the walls might be listening. There were programs. Facilities.

  Places with clinical names like “Development Center” and “Potential Optimization Wing” where children who showed signs of Awakening were sent to be studied, trained, and deployed.

  The official literature talked about “supporting exceptional individuals” and “channeling unique abilities for the common good.”

  The unofficial reality was darker.

  She had met a man once, during her fourth deployment. A lieutenant who had transferred from one of those programs. He never talked about what he had seen. His eyes had the same expression she had observed in prisoners of war: the hollow stare of a witness to things that broke a foundation inside them.

  “They take the strong ones young,” he had told her once, drunk enough to let the words slip out. “Before they learn to question. Before they learn to resist. Break them down, build them back up, turn them into weapons that aim where they are pointed and fire when they are told.”

  He had taken his life three months later.

  The Compact did not create soldiers from Awakened children. It created weapons. And her son. Her beautiful, gentle, serious little boy who built towers with his sister and tilted his head when he listened to sounds nobody else heard. Had demonstrated more raw power than most adult Awakened ever developed.

  If the Compact found out.

  No. The word solidified in her mind like a nuclear detonation. Absolute. Final. Beyond negotiation.

  No. They will not have my children. They will not turn Kael into a weapon. They will not take Lyra for study and dissection and whatever else they do to the ones who show unusual potential. I have killed for less important things. I will kill for this.

  She sat down at the kitchen table, pulled up her tablet, and composed a message. Drayven. Her husband. The father of her children. The researcher who spent more time with Tower data than with his family, who carried secrets she had long since stopped asking about, who studied the twins sometimes with a look she could not fully read, love tangled with something colder.

  One that might have been recognition.

  The message she sent was crafted:

  NEED TO TALK. URGENT. NOT EMERGENCY BUT CLOSE.

  THE CHILDREN.

  COME HOME.

  Three sentences. Coded in the personal shorthand they had developed over years of military separation. “Not emergency but close” meant no immediate threat, so do not blow your cover or trigger security protocols. “The children” meant exactly what it sounded like. Their twins were involved. “Come home” meant she could not handle this alone.

  She sent it through his secure channel and hoped it would reach him faster than normal communications. Hoped he would understand. Hoped he would know what to do.

  Then she waited.

  The three days that followed were the longest of Mira’s life. Longer than Jakarta, when she had spent seventy-two hours in a shimmer zone watching reality eat her squad one soldier at a time. Longer than the siege of Busan, when the Concordat’s enhanced troops had pressed against their positions for a week without pause. Longer than childbirth, longer than basic training, longer than any of the thousand moments that had taught her the true meaning of patience.

  Every waking hour, her eyes tracked the twins. Searching for signs. Symptoms.

  Another manifestation that would prove the first had not been a fluke.

  Kael had retreated from whatever power he had touched. The humming was “quiet,” he said, when she asked worried questions. “Like it used up its strength and needs to rest.”

  He played normally, ate normally, slept normally. In the quiet moments, when no one was watching, he could still feel the frequency humming beneath everything, and the wonder never dimmed. If you did not study too closely how his eyes sometimes unfocused, tracking things that were not there.

  Lyra showed no sign of abilities at all. Mira caught her daughter studying Kael with new awareness, like she was waiting for something.

  The bond between them was a quiet marvel, growing stronger even as their world cracked apart, and sometimes, late at night when Mira checked on them, a faint glow ringed Lyra’s hands. A warmth that had nothing to do with body heat.

  They are both Awakened, she realized. Kael’s power is obvious.

  Destructive, flashy, unfathomable to hide. Lyra’s is there too, sleeping, waiting for the right trigger. Two Awakened children. From the same parents. At the same time. That is not supposed to be possible.

  Drayven’s old files consumed her nights until her vision blurred. The documents he had shared with her years ago. Theoretical papers, statistical analyses, things that had not been classified because they had been too speculative to take seriously. Now she read them with new eyes.

  VERATHOS MANIFESTATION PATTERNS (DRAFT 12): “Early emergence typically correlates with significantly higher development ceilings but also markedly elevated risks of catastrophic discharge events.”

  TWIN STUDY PRELIMINARY FINDINGS: “Simultaneous Awakening in siblings is vanishingly rare. When it occurs, however, the linked individuals tend to develop complementary ability profiles. One offensive, one defensive, or one destructive and one supportive. The elegance staggered her.

  Nature, or whatever force governed the Awakened, had designed a balance so perfect it bordered on art.”

  Or a weapons program.

  PROJECT RESONANCE ABSTRACT: “The frequency appears to respond to emotional stimuli, particularly protective instincts. Most early manifestations involve threat responses. The Awakened individual perceives danger to themselves or loved ones and unconsciously channels energy to address that threat.”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Kael had heard Lyra scream. Had shared her fear through whatever connection linked them, and the humming had answered.

  Protective instinct. The manifestation came because he wanted to protect his sister. The power came from love. That should have been comforting. It was not. Because love was something the Compact could exploit. Something they could manipulate. Put Lyra in danger, and Kael would move mountains to save her. Threaten one twin, control the other.

  They can never know about the bond, she decided. Never know that hurting one affects the other. Never know they are connected. That is our weakness, and our strength.

  On the second night, she sat by the window and studied the shimmer zone glow on the horizon. Tower 47 was forty miles away. Close enough to register during expansions, far enough to pretend safety most days. Its shimmer painted the sky in colors that did not fit in the normal spectrum: violet-tinged greens, blue-shifted reds, wavelengths human eyes had no business parsing. Even knowing what it was, even knowing the horrors that lived inside it, the shimmer was beautiful. The kind of beautiful a hurricane has from orbit. The kind that made her chest ache and her instincts scream at the same time.

  The glow pulsed in rhythms that scientists had spent a decade trying to decode. Some said the patterns were random. The natural fluctuation of Verathos energy, like a candle’s flicker. Others claimed to have found meaning in the pulses, messages waiting to be translated, countdown timers ticking toward some unknown event.

  Mira had spent time in shimmer zones. Had seen what happened when the energy surged, when reality became negotiable, when things beyond naming crawled out of nowhere to hunt whatever flesh they could find.

  Now that energy was inside her children.

  What are you? she wondered, staring at the distant glow. What do you want with my babies?

  The shimmer pulsed: slow, slow, fast-fast-fast, slow. Almost like an answer. Almost like a laugh.

  The reply came six hours later, in the deep quiet of 3 AM: EN ROUTE.

  THREE DAYS. DO NOT TELL ANYONE. I KNOW WHAT THIS IS.

  Mira read the message twice. Three times. Let the words sink in until they stopped being shapes and started being meaning.

  I know what this is. He had known. Maybe not specifically. Maybe not that Kael would crack a table with his mind at age three. He had suspected. Had been watching for signs. Had information he had never shared because sharing it would make it real.

  She should have been angry. Part of her was angry. A cold fury that her husband had kept secrets about their children, had suspected they might be Awakened and never told her, had let her live in ignorance while he studied the phenomena that were now manifesting in their living room.

  Mostly she was relieved. She was not alone. Drayven had answers. Had resources. Had a plan.

  Three days. Keep them safe for three days. Keep them hidden. Keep them normal. Keep the world from finding out what they are.

  Three days. A lifetime.

  The door chimed at 6 PM on the third day. Mira’s hand was on her sidearm before conscious thought caught up. Twelve years of combat reflexes dying hard. The security feed. Finger on the trigger guard. Heart pounding, adrenaline spiking before the threat materialized.

  Drayven stood in the hallway. Sleep had not visited him since her message arrived. His uniform, normally crisp, always regulation-perfect, was wrinkled, travel-stained, missing the small insignias that usually marked his clearance level. His eyes were shadowed with exhaustion so deep it looked like bruises. His shoulders bowed under a weight she recognized from soldiers who had carried wounded comrades across miles of hostile terrain.

  He was holding synthetic flowers in one hand. A wrapped present in the other. Props for a normal father coming home to his family.

  The props looked like they were crushing him.

  The sidearm went back in its holster. The door opened.

  “Hey,” he said, voice rough as gravel.

  “Hey.”

  They stood there briefly. Two people who had loved each other through war and distance and a thousand unsaid things. Two soldiers who had learned to hide their fears behind blank expressions. Two parents facing a charge that neither of them had chosen and both of them would fight for. The moment stretched. Heavy with everything they could not say.

  Everything they would have to say eventually.

  Then Lyra’s voice rang from the living room: “Daddy!”

  The word tore from her throat, raw with joy, and the moment collapsed into beautiful chaos.

  The twins hit Drayven like enthusiastic missiles. He caught them, years of combat reflexes redirected toward the infinitely more important task of catching children, and lifted them both, one in each arm. They wrapped around him like small, determined octopuses, arms and legs everywhere, voices overlapping in an excited babble that made individual words impossible to distinguish.

  “Missed you so much,” and “Made a tower and it was this tall,” and “Kael said I was being too loud but I was not.” The words tumbled over each other in a breathless cascade until Lyra added, with perfect three-year-old indiscretion, “And then the table broke but Mama says we are not supposed to talk about that.”

  Drayven’s arms tightened around them both. His face, which had been a mask of exhausted control since the door opened, crumbled into something exposed and honest. He pressed his cheek against the top of Kael’s head, closed his eyes, and breathed them in like oxygen. His children. They smelled like soap and synthetic fruit snacks and warm from small bodies that had been playing hard all afternoon.

  “I missed you,” he whispered. “God. I missed you so much. Every day. Every single day.”

  “You were gone forever,” Lyra complained. “A million years.”

  “Three weeks.”

  “That’s what I said. A million years.” She pulled back to give him a stern examination. “Why do you look so tired? Are you sick? Mama gets that face when she is sick. Did you catch a cold? You should have hot soup. Soup fixes everything.”

  “I am not sick, sweetheart. Just tired. A lot of long days.”

  “Then you should sleep.” Lyra’s tone turned bossy in the way three-year-olds mastered effortlessly. “Right now. We will be quiet.

  Well, I will try to be quiet. Kael is already quiet, so he does not have to try.”

  Kael had not spoken since the initial greeting. He was studying his father with those too-old eyes, reading a truth in Drayven’s face that the words were not saying.

  “Daddy,” he said. “You know, do you not.”

  It was not a question.

  Drayven’s arms tightened fractionally. His eyes met Mira’s over the twins’ heads.

  We need to talk, his expression said.

  I know, hers said. Tonight. After they are asleep. I know.

  The evening passed in a fragile bubble of normalcy. Dinner together. All four of them at the table for the first time in weeks. Drayven told edited stories about his work, about “helping people understand things” that the twins did not need to know involved Tower research and Verathos energy and the government’s desperate attempts to weaponize forces that might be beyond human comprehension.

  The twins showed him their drawings. Their games. Their latest tower designs, explained with the passionate intensity of architects presenting to demanding clients.

  “And this part goes here,” Lyra demonstrated, pointing at a drawing that resembled modern art interpreted by a tornado. “And then the other part goes on top, and then it is tall enough to touch the ceiling.”

  “Very impressive engineering,” Drayven said, nodding with the gravity of a bridge inspector.

  “I know.” She beamed. “I’m going to be the best tower-builder in the world.”

  Kael’s drawing was different. More careful, more structured, with small annotations in a three-year-old’s approximation of handwriting. Shapes that resembled the shimmer zone. Patterns that could have been frequency readouts.

  Several seconds of study, his expression unreadable.

  “What is this?” he asked, pointing to a spiral shape in the corner.

  “The humming,” Kael said. “That is what it looks like when it is happy.”

  Tracking Drayven’s face. The muscle in his jaw tightening.

  Tracked a flash behind his eyes, something complicated. Recognition and fear and what might have been hope. He knew something. Had known for a long time, and tonight, finally, she would find out what.

  At 8 PM, the twins were bathed, storied, and tucked into bed. Lyra surrendered to exhaustion mid-sentence, her body giving up between one word and the next, as children did when they were safe enough to stop fighting. Kael lasted longer, his steady gaze finding his father’s in the dim glow of the nightlight.

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes, buddy?”

  “The thing that hums. Do you hear it too?”

  Drayven’s expression shifted. Something complicated moved through his face. Years spent watching, waiting, anticipating this moment while praying it would never come.

  “No,” he said, his voice low. “I do not hear it. I know it is there.”

  “How?”

  “Because I have spent a long time trying to understand it.” He brushed hair from Kael’s forehead. A gesture so tender it made Mira’s chest ache. “We will talk more tomorrow, okay? I promise.”

  “You always say that.”

  “I know. This time I mean it.”

  A kiss pressed to Kael’s forehead. “Sleep now. Your sister needs you to watch her dreams.”

  Kael’s eyes closed. Within minutes, his breathing had synchronized with Lyra’s. Two heartbeats falling into rhythm like they had been born to do.

  Drayven stayed kneeling by the bed for several seconds, staring at his children with wonder and grief warring openly on his face. Then he stood, walked past Mira without a word, and headed for the kitchen.

  The time for truth had come.

  The kitchen table bore two untouched cups of tea and fourteen years of unsaid things. Drayven sat across from Mira, his hands wrapped around the ceramic so tightly she saw the white of his knuckles through his skin.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “I knew before they were born.” The words came out flat. Rehearsed.

  Like he had practiced this confession a thousand times and still had not found a version that did not taste like betrayal. “The scans showed anomalies in the third trimester. Energy signatures that defied physics in utero. I ran secondary tests. Tertiary. All classified, all through back channels, all because I suspected our children were going to be unprecedented before they were even born.”

  A stare. Long. Measuring.

  “You thought they were Awakened. From the beginning.”

  “I hoped I was wrong. Told myself I was paranoid. That the scans were glitched, that our children would be normal, that I would not have to tell you any of this.” He stopped. Swallowed.

  “Do you know what the odds are? Two Awakened children from the same parents? It is not supposed to be possible. The genetic factors do not stack that way. The Towers synchronized the moment they were born, Mira. Every Tower on Earth started pulsing at the exact instant our children took their first breath. Two hundred and seven Towers, all responding to the same event. To them.”

  “What?”

  “I was monitoring the readings when your message came through. The synchronization event. We had never seen anything like it. Two hundred and seven Towers, all pulsing in unison, all matching the same frequency.” His hands wrapped around his untouched tea, knuckles white.

  “The timestamp matched their birth. To the second.”

  Mira’s mind raced. “What does that mean?”

  “I do not know. Nobody knows.” He laughed. A bitter sound without humor. “But I have spent three years trying to find out. That is what Project Resonance is about. Beyond studying the Towers. Studying what they are waiting for. What they are building toward, and Mira, I think our children are part of the answer.”

  A stop. His hand went to his uniform pocket and pulled out a small data chip. Placed it on the table between them.

  “Everything,” he said. “Everything I know about Project Resonance. Everything we have learned about Verathos and the Awakened. Everything the government does not want people to know about what is coming.”

  The chip was in her hand. It weighed next to nothing. It weighed everything.

  “Why now? Why not tell me before?”

  “Because knowing is dangerous.” His eyes met hers, the researcher’s eyes, carrying secrets that could destroy them all. “Because the people who know too much tend to disappear. Because I wanted to protect you by keeping you ignorant.”

  “And now?”

  “Now our son cracked military-grade polymer with his mind.” His voice dropped to barely a whisper. “Now we do not have ignorance as a luxury anymore.”

  Her fingers closed around the chip.

  “What do we do?”

  “We train them ourselves. We teach them to control it, to hide it, to survive.” He reached across the table and took her hands. His grip desperate, near painful. “And we pray it is enough. Because if the Compact finds out what they can do. What they might become.”

  “They will take them.”

  “They will use them.” His voice hardened. “The way they have used every Awakened child they have gotten their hands on. Weapons, Mira.

  They turn them into weapons, and our children are powerful enough that they will far more than conscript them. They will dissect them. Study them.

  Try to figure out why the Towers responded to their birth.”

  His hands pulled back. His eyes found the table.

  “I will not let that happen. I will tear apart the entire Compact before I let anyone touch our children.”

  Her husband, studied as she had assessed soldiers about to go into battle, as she had examined herself in mirrors before missions she might not survive. A man who had spent three years carrying unimaginable weight. Who had searched for signs of awakening in his children, hope and wonder warring openly on his face. Who had prepared for this moment even while praying it would never come.

  A father.

  “Then we train them,” she said. “Together. Whatever it takes.”

  Drayven’s shoulders sagged with relief. With exhaustion. With the release of secrets held too long.

  “Together,” he agreed. “Starting tomorrow.”

  Her hands fell free as he leaned back in his chair, the tension draining from him in visible increments. For an instant, in the dim light of their kitchen, he looked like the young researcher she had married.

  Before the Towers, before Project Resonance, before everything had gotten so complicated.

  “There is one more thing,” he said.

  “Of course there is.”

  “The synchronization event. When the Towers responded to the twins’ birth.” He paused, choosing his words carefully. “More than pulsing. The energy patterns formed something. A shape. A structure that repeated across all two hundred and seven Towers in the same instant.”

  His voice held something she had never heard in it before. Not fear. Not excitement. Something primal. A man who had spent his whole life asking questions and finally received an answer too large to hold.

  “What kind of shape?”

  “We do not know. The analysis is still ongoing. Some of the senior researchers. The ones who have been studying Verathos the longest. They think it might be a message. Or maybe a warning.”

  The words trailed into nothing.

  “Maybe what?”

  “Maybe a signal. Like something was being announced. Or someone was being announced.” His eyes met hers. “Our children did not merely awaken, Mira. They were heralded. Every Tower on Earth rang like a bell the moment they were born, and I do not know what that means, but I know it cannot be coincidence.”

  His words settled into her bones.

  “Do the other researchers know about the twins?”

  “No. The synchronization event is classified, and I have kept any connection to our family compartmentalized.” He smiled. A bitter expression. “One of the advantages of working in the most secretive program in the Compact. Nobody talks to anyone about anything. I could have discovered the meaning of life and half my colleagues would not know because their clearance does not cover my research partition.”

  “So we have time.”

  “We have time. As long as we are careful. As long as we teach them to hide what they can do. As long as we are together.” He stopped, something flickering across his face.

  “As long as what?”

  “As long as whatever the Towers are waiting for does not arrive before they are ready.” He stood, restless, moving to the window to stare at the distant shimmer. “The energy readings have been increasing for years, Mira. Slowly, steadily, building toward something, and when I study that data. When I really study it. I see a pattern. An acceleration curve. Like something is counting down.”

  “Counting down to what?”

  “I do not know.” He pressed his palm against the glass, the shimmer’s glow reflecting in his eyes. “But I think our children might be part of the answer, and I think that is why the Towers noticed them. Why they announced them.”

  They sat with the implication, with fear, with the terrible possibility that their children were not merely exceptional but significant in ways that went far beyond human understanding.

  “Then we make them ready,” Mira said, rising to stand beside him.

  “Whatever is coming, whatever the Towers want. We make sure Kael and Lyra can face it. On their terms. Not as weapons. Not as experiments. As themselves.”

  His eyes found her. His wife, his partner, the mother of his unthinkable children, and for the first time since he had arrived, a flicker of hope appeared in his expression.

  “On their terms,” he agreed. “Together.”

  Outside, the shimmer zone pulsed on the horizon. That distant glow of Tower energy, of Verathos, of the force that had touched their children before they were even born. Inside, two parents stood at a window and made plans to protect their children from a world that would try to use them.

  In the bedroom down the hall, two three-year-olds slept with their breathing synchronized, their dreams tangled together, their potential spreading out before them like a map of stars no one had learned to read yet. Kael’s hands twitched in his sleep. Faint traces of blue-gold light flickered across his palms. So subtle that anyone watching would have dismissed it as imagination. It was not imagination. It was power. Stripped and untrained and vast beyond measure.

  Somewhere deep beneath the world, the humming stirred. Kael pressed his hand flat against the hallway wall and listened. Not with his ears.

  With whatever lived behind his ribs that the humming had claimed as its own. The vibration traveled up through his palm, his wrist, his bones, settling in the place where fear and wonder had learned to share a room.

  He was three years old. He did not have words for what he felt. If he had, they would have been this: I am not the only one listening.