My Infinite System.

The roof of the Drifting Leaf was cool and quiet, a world away from the packed common room below. The air up here was clearer, carrying the faint, sweet scent of the inn’s blooming outer walls. Lucian sat on the edge, his legs dangling over the side, watching the endless stream of air-cars weave between the neon-lit spires of Varros Prime. The lights were beautiful, but they felt empty.

The soft crunch of a boot on moss behind him didn’t make him turn. He knew the step.

Marc settled down beside him, his large frame making the organic structure creak in protest. For a few minutes, they just sat in silence, two brothers under a foreign sky.

”Thinking about something?” Marc asked, his voice a low rumble that fit the night.

”Yeah,” Lucian said, the word quiet. He wasn’t one for sharing, but the weight of the last few days, of Kaela’s visit, of the title ’Omega’ now floating in the air, pressed down on him. It all felt so far from where they started.

”It’s funny,” Lucian began, his eyes fixed on the distant, blinking lights of a spaceport. ”We’re here, playing guardians for a whole planet, getting mixed up in corporate wars... and we only came to this rock to find a shipping manifest.”

He let out a soft, tired breath. ”I was thinking about Lucy.”

Marc didn’t reply, just listened. His own memories of their sister were hazy, fractured by time and Eron’s poison.

”After the gate raid... after our parents were gone,” Lucian continued, his voice dropping. ”It was just us. I was, what, eight? She was sixteen.” A faint, painful smile touched his lips. ”She tried to be everything. A mother, making sure I ate, patching up my clothes. A father, teaching me how to throw a punch, how to read people’s tells. A big sister, letting me sneak into her bed when the nightmares got too bad.”

He remembered the small, cramped apartment they’d been assigned. He remembered Lucy coming home from back-breaking dock work, her hands raw, but she’d still sit with him and help with his homework. She’d use her first paycheck to buy him a data-slate for school, going hungry for a week to do it.

”She was all I had,” Lucian whispered, the confession feeling both heavy and relieving. ”And I was all she had. She gave up everything for me. Her friends, her own life... any chance she had at being anything other than my keeper.” He shook his head. ”She never complained. Not once. She’d just ruffle my hair and tell me we were Valtairs, and Valtairs don’t break.”

The memory was as clear as the city lights below. Lucy, her face smudged with grease from a broken heater she was trying to fix, grinning at him. ”Come on, Lucian. We got this. Just you and me against the universe, remember?”

”And now...” Lucian’s voice hardened, laced with a guilt that never left him. ”Now she’s gone. And where are we? We’re saving strangers. We’re becoming heroes for a cause. We’re letting a little girl look at us like we’re the answer to all her problems.” He finally turned to look at Marc, his eyes shadowed. ”And our sister? Our real problem? She’s god knows where. Maybe hurt. Maybe worse. And we’re getting further away from her with every fire we put out for someone else.”

The frustration and guilt he’d been bottling up finally seeped into his tone. They had lost their way. The mission had been corrupted by other people’s wars.

Marc was quiet for so long that Lucian thought he might not speak at all. When he did, his voice was rough with his own ghosts.

”I didn’t have that,” Marc said, staring straight ahead at the traffic. ”I didn’t have a big or a little sister making burnt dinners.”

Lucian glanced at him. Marc’s past was a dark, painful thing they rarely touched.

”After Eron’s men took me... it was different.” Marc’s jaw tightened. ”They didn’t raise me. They... built me. Like a weapon. They filled my head with hate. Told me my family abandoned me, that they were weak. That you were weak. They trained me to be a puppet. To break things for them. And for a long time, that’s all I was. A mindless thing that hit what they pointed at.”

He flexed his massive hands, the hands that could crumple steel. ”I didn’t even know I had a sister named Lucy until a few weeks ago. I had no one to miss. No memories to hold onto. Just the next mission. The next target.”

He turned his head, and his eyes, usually so hard, were filled with a raw, simple honesty. ”So you thinking about her? That’s a good thing, Lucian. It means you had something worth losing. It means we have something real to find.”

The two brothers sat in the wake of his words. The gulf between their childhoods was vast—one defined by a fierce, protective love, the other by a cold, engineered hatred. Yet here they were, on the same roof, pulled back together by the ghost of the same sister.

”We’ll find her,” Marc said, his voice leaving no room for doubt. It wasn’t a hope. It was a statement of fact. ”This... all this,” he waved a hand at the city, at the mess they were in, ”it’s just noise. A detour. She’s the mission. Always has been.”

Lucian nodded slowly, some of the tightness in his chest easing. Marc was right. They had gotten sidetracked, swept up in the current of other people’s tragedies. But their own tragedy was still waiting for them.

”These people down there,” Lucian said, looking back at the city. ”Lira, Midas... they need help. And we’ll give it. It’s who we are. It’s who Lucy raised me to be.” He took a deep breath. ”But we’re not signing on for a war. We’re not joining anyone’s crusade. We get Lira and her uncle to a safe place, we tie up our loose ends here, and then we get back on track. We find our sister.”

A determined calm settled over him. The path was clear again.

Marc grunted in agreement. ”Alright then. So what’s the next move?”

Lucian stood up, the night air cool against his skin. ”We use the tools we have. Reia can dig deeper, see if she can find a trace of Lucy in all the chaos we just stirred up. That data leak has every system in the sector buzzing. Maybe our ghost left a ripple in it.” He looked down at Marc. ”And you? You keep doing what you do. Be the unstoppable force. It seems to be working for you.”

A ghost of a smile, the first real one in days, touched Lucian’s lips. ”Just try not to teleport any more CEOs into our living room.”

Marc stood up, a matching smirk on his face. ”No promises.”

Together, they turned from the glittering, distracting city and headed back inside. The galaxy could wait. They had a sister to find.