Kai landed with rib-bruising impact, a cloud of displaced dust floating up into the still, hot night. He held in his cough for as long as he could, his diaphragm straining as he listened for any sign of alarm in the sudden silence. Slowly the insects resumed their nocturnal chorus, and he wheezed painfully into the crook of his arm. Jumping halfway around the world was never pleasant, but traveling between a moving van to a stationary ridge left him feeling uncomfortably inside out.
Still catching his breath, he dug his headset from the shallow grave where he’d left it, and gave it a quick blow and polish before wedging it into his ear.  “Phantom online,” he whispered, and the radio chirped immediately in response. Tao must have been lying in wait.
“What did you just do?!” Tao’s voice had that distinctive whine of existential despair, which meant he already knew something hadn’t gone to plan.
Staying flat on his belly, Kai inched forward, probing the sandy dirt around him with his fingertips, searching for his care package amongst the tall grass. “I’m busy.” He didn’t have time to explain all the bodies he’d just dropped, and Tao wouldn’t understand anyway. He was too much of a strategist, convinced he could scheme their way to a bloodless revolution.
“You changed something! Tell me what it was!” Tao was also a relentless nag. “Tell me!”
“You were all gloomy about Phoenix, wishing you could help. I helped,” Kai muttered as his fingers found fabric. “I changed his future. The end.” He switched to a silent channel before Tao’s spluttering gave way to something more coherent. 
Free of distractions, Kai worked quickly, unwrapping the satchel of gear the militia scout had left for him. He pulled out a tactical scope and pressed it to one eye, squinting at the fortified compound a hundred yards away. The compound was rectangular, with an L-shaped main house forming the corner closest to his hill. Single-story, windowless barracks topped with barbed wire completed the wall encircling the compound’s common area. He focused on the main house, watching as the pair of guards patrolling the roof were joined by two additional men, all wearing the ruby shoulder patch of Mbega’s private army. The first pair of guards saluted the newcomers with their rifles and exchanged a few words, then headed inside. Kai checked his watch— the changing of the guard was right on schedule.
“Phantom, check in.” The silent radio channel crackled to life as the militia’s mission command came online.
“Phantom in place.” Kai relaxed, just a little. He was always nervous that he’d be missed while off on his unsanctioned field trips for Tao, but as far as the militia knew, Kai had arrived to the ridge after a grueling ten mile trek from the drop-off point. They had no reason to suspect he’d teleported there in an instant after slaughtering a squad of his fellow militiamen six thousand miles away.
“Our Tanzanian host is anxious to wrap up this standoff,” the mission commander said, launching straight into the briefing. “In exchange for positive IDs of the rebel’s conspirators, our host has generously agreed to look the other way while we retrieve the passkeys for their offshore accounts. You have ninety minutes to get in, get the data, and get out. Minimal contact parameters.”
“That’s impossible,” Kai protested, sitting up on his elbows. “If you want the data, fine. You want me invisible, I need three hours, minimum.”
“Our host has no desire to explain the presence of a foreign actor to his superiors, and he has a party to kick off at sunrise, no matter which side of the wall you’re on. As such, the terms of this arrangement are nonnegotiable, soldier. Make it work.”
 Kai clawed furrows into the grass in frustration, imagining his commander’s broomstache curving infinitesimally upward in misery-loving satisfaction. “Sir yes sir,” he agreed through grinding teeth. “Found the fairy dust next to my lockpick, sir. Ninety minutes won’t be a problem, sir.  Over and out.”
 “Satellite link is active. Command out, you cocky smarta—” The radio channel went dark, cutting off his commander’s customary farewell and  the faint sounds of analysts laughing in the background.
Using small, minimalist motions, Kai put down the scope and fished his climbing gloves and tactical glasses out of the satchel. The glasses went on first, and he tapped the rim twice to initiate the heads-up display and activate his bodycam.  As he pulled on the climbing gloves,  little green dots overlaid on a map glowed in his peripheral vision, showing the position of the Tanzanian army unit lurking beyond the horizon. His generous hosts. A tap to the other side of the glasses replaced the map with the mission clock, already ticking down from ninety minutes. His generous, impatient hosts.
Kai retrieved the scope and scanned the windows of the main house. The ground floor was lit up and active as the rebel general entertained his guests. In contrast, the third, topmost floor was dark, without a single light. That was his way in. 
 Kai made one last check to ensure his gun would slide easily from the holster on his hip and his knife from the sheath attached to his thigh. In a perfect mission, he wouldn’t need to use either, but very few of the militia’s missions had been going perfectly lately. Granted, most of the failures were due to his or Tao’s interference, but it never hurt to be prepared. The rest of his gear was stashed on his toolbelt or in the satchel and buried under a layer of dirt. With his equipment readied, Kai raised himself off of the ground slightly, the toes of his boots digging into sandy dirt in a flattened sprinter’s stance. Precious seconds ticked by on the mission clock, but he waited until the opportune moment, when both guards had their backs turned to his approach.
He launched himself at the compound with everything he had, sprinting hard and silently, tiny tufts of grass kicked up by his boots the only evidence of his passing. He reached the building and slammed his back against the wall, hurriedly replaying the footage of the guards through his HUD to verify that he hadn’t been spotted. Then he was climbing, past the first floor and then the second, his practiced fingers and feet finding purchase in tiny imperfections and cracks in the rough stone wall. At the third floor, he paused, clinging to the window sill as he scanned the room with infrared. Confident that there was no-one inside, he climbed atop the window ledge, balancing precariously as he pulled a diamond tipped stylus from his belt. He dragged the point around the edge of the large window panes, then flipped the stylus around to place the suction cup at the other end against the pane. He gently popped the cut glass free and lowered it to the floor of the room before easing himself through the opening. Safely inside, he replaced the pane and sprayed a bit of instant glue around its edges. It wouldn’t hold if someone tapped the glass, but the flimsy seal only needed to last until sunrise. After that, this whole compound would be dust on the wind.
Kai noiselessly made his way to door and cracked it open so he could see the rest of the corridor with infrared. The Tanzanian army intel indicated that the compound had no automated security system, relying on the armed guards and  the valley’s relative isolation to deter threats. Yet, all previous attempts to attack or infiltrate the property had been mysteriously repelled, the perpetrators found dead of apparent suicide. Kai had no wish to end up like his ill-fated predecessors, and  verified that his route had no signs of life, before stealthily running from the room to the top of the curving stairwell.
A guard began climbing the stairs from a lower landing as Kai dashed down to the second floor. He slipped into the first empty room he found, holding the door nearly shut, but the guard’s footsteps faded as he left the stairwell and headed in the opposite direction, to the other wing of the main house. Once he was gone, Kai dipped back into the hallway, heading straight for the large vent that linked all of the vents in this wing, his miniaturized power drill in one hand. A few moments later, he was inside the ventilation ducts and wriggling towards his destination, leaving behind a dozen tiny screws piled unnoticeably inside the grate. Kai squirmed through progressively smaller ducts until he could only move by pulling himself with his outstretched fingers, the duct too narrow to allow him to bend his elbows or knees.  The grippy tips of his climbing gloves served him well, giving him purchase on the smooth steel surface, but sweat was dripping from his chin by the time he finally arrived at the vent serving Mbega’s study. With a quick glance, he confirmed that the room beyond was still empty, and shimmied further into the duct so that he could kick the grate out with the limited range of motion he had. The grate burst out of the wall and landed with a soft thud on the expensive carpet, and Kai oozed out the duct to land on top of it. It was a sweet relief to be able to move freely again, but he took no time to enjoy it. 
Kai popped open one of the latched pouches on his belt and pulled out a trio of sticky cams, stuck together like a cloverleaf.  Spinning hurriedly, he scanned the room for the places the thumbnail-sized cameras wouldn’t be noticed. One went high under the eave of the wall-length, ornate bookcase, pointing toward the door to capture the faces of everyone who entered. The second went into the branches of the ornamental fern overlooking the desk that dominated the room. If the gathering involved any documents, the analysts at mission command would have an unobstructed view of their contents. The cameras activated automatically as he pressed them into place, their live feeds forming a grid with his bodycam footage. The sound of approaching  conversation from the hall interrupted his placement of the last camera, and Kai dashed back to to the open vent. He wedged himself inside and hastily pulled the grate flushed to the wall as the first of the rebel conspirators entered the room, arguing loudly amongst themselves. 
Kai’s HUD flickered busily as the cameras went to work, facial recognition software matching names and faces. Predictably, most of the gathered men were arms dealers, but their mugshots were joined by profiles of a few prominent, well-regarded businessmen, even a national assemblyman. The last to enter was the owner of the compound, Kizo Mbega, the warlord’s dark, battered face and  wine-red uniform instantly recognizable from the Tanzanian’s intel. The chatter in the room stuttered away as he pulled the door shut behind him, and the small crowd parted as he strode to his desk, his cane thumping rhythmically against the floor.
He didn’t immediately turn when he reached his desk, but stood behind it, his back to the room, looking out of the window. “Go on. Say aloud what has been troubling your minds all night. ” 
The assemblyman stepped forward as spokesman, his face sour.  “You invite us to dinner to celebrate your victory in Parliament, but you failed to mention that the People’s Defense Force was camped on your doorstep. What have you done to protect our assets? How do you know they do not plan to attack us now that we are all gathered in one place?”
That was exactly what they planning. Kai was supposed to be raiding Mbega’s bedroom right now, breaking into the safe under the bed to get the passkeys for his fat, offshore accounts. Instead he was stuck in a vent too tight to wriggle backward, while precious seconds glowed and vanished in the corner of his vision, one after another. 
Mbega turned from the window, the corner of his mouth lifting in a derisive smirk. “They will try. Like hyenas they rush in, snapping and growling. But when the dust settles, it will be their corpses littering the valley, not ours. ”
“With all due respect, Jenerali, that’s madness.” The eldest in the group, one of the businessmen, pushed his way toward the desk. “There’s an entire artillery company out there.  Your men are too well-trained to be wasted as cannon fodder for your arrogance. You should be evacuating this compound!”
Mbega leaned forward on his cane. “An entire company,” he repeated, stressing the words. “Why not send a simple assassin, or a strike team to kill me? Why mobilize an entire company of our country’s army, when everything can be solved by killing one man?” Mbega straightened, holding out his hands. “I am not hiding.” His glare around the room turned challenging. “Even if my four hundred men were exceptionally trained, the army outside seems like overkill, no? It stinks of fear and desperation.”
The gathered men exchanged uneasy looks, and Kai shared their sudden misgivings. But the warlord was right, the math was all wrong.
“Jenerali,” the assemblyman pressed his hands against the desk, searching for words. “Perhaps if you explained the source of your confidence, we would all be able to share in it, instead of questioning it?”
Mbega settled into his throne-like desk chair with a sigh and laid his cane across the desk, steepling his fingers above it.
“When the chieftains banished me from my tribe thirty years ago, I was forced to wander the wilderness with no honor and no name. For more than a decade, I was a mindless animal, raising my machete to whoever and whatever crossed my path. You all know this,” he said as heads around nodded in familiarity with the story. “My shameful past has never been secret. But I rarely speak of my salvation, the priceless gift I didn’t recognize and nearly destroyed.” Mbega shook his head ruefully. “I mistook the silver-haired boy for a mere zeruzeru, and imagined only what I could gain from selling its parts.”
“Idiotic superstition,” the assemblyman muttered, but Mbega spread his hands in an accepting shrug. 
“And yet, before I could cut it apart, the witchcraft in its eyes took hold of my arm and my machete. Before I could comprehend my mistake, it taught it to me with a single downward cut.” He stretched his leg above the desk and let it fall heavily to the surface with decidedly inorganic thunk. With his cane, he pushed his pant leg upward to reveal the smooth grain of a wood prosthetic fitted into his shoe. “I paid for my ignorance with my flesh and bone. Since that day, my enemies have paid with their lives.”
Uproar predictably followed, but Kai stopped listening. Superstition reigned in this part of the country, and witchcraft neatly explained how Mbega’s compound was so well protected without giving his rivals an object to steal or his opponents a target to destroy. Not everyone would believe such a story, but clearly something had spooked the army into deploying the heavy artillery.  Why not a ghost? 
But Kai felt like the ghost story was more than just clever dissimulation. It was the story of an outlier. There was no record of vivus spreading this far into the African continent, but the suspicion explained why the militia had been so suddenly become so eager to play the mercenary way out in the middle of the savannah. This had never been about some petty warlord’s money hoard. Right on cue, a message scrolled across his vision. “Mission Override: Identify and Acquire ZeruZeru.” After a moment, the HUD translated the Swahili text. “Acquire Ghost. Confirm.” The words request dominated the HUD, obscuring his vision, demanding a response. 
Kai considered it. After his outing to the beach, the militia would be turning itself inside out searching for the traitor in their midst. Capturing an outlier on a live satellite feed would make him untouchable. It might even get him in the same room with the director himself. He glanced at the mission clock glowing in the corner of his eye, and dismissed the idea. Even if he wasn’t trapped in this vent, trying to find and kidnap an complete unknown while staying unseen in a compound of hundreds of trained soldiers was farfetched. Doing it before the daybreak rain of fire was a mushroom fantasy. Kai had to tap the HUD three times before it reject the mission and cleared his vision. In less than thirty minutes, Mbega, his stooges, and his ghost story would be dust. The Tanzanians had their pictures, Kai’s job was done. If the militia wanted the outlier so badly, they could sift through the ashes and dig out his bones.
Mbega argued his each of his followers to exhaustion, eating away at Kai’s escape window. When the room finally emptied, Kai dragged himself from the vent and joints crackling and popping gratefully after holding such a cramped position for so long. His exit plan called for him to leave by the same window he’d entered to take advantage of the low security and the gap in the guards’ patrol. Eyeing the ticking clock, he would much rather just use the front door than perform another dicey three-story climb in a time crunch, but without a squad to cover his back if things went south, he had to stick to the plan. At the very least, he could take the hallways instead of snaking through the vents. Kai slipped out of the study into the empty hall and booked it to the stairwell, his head on a swivel, ears peeled. Miraculously, he encountered noone until he heard voices at the stairwell itself. He cautiously poked his head over the landing, looking down to the main floor. The voices floated up from below, house staff discussing the arrangements for the overnight guests, apparently as unconcerned as their master about the artillery aimed their way.
Kai started upward,  taking the steps slowly, wary of creaky boards that could give away his position. He kept his back pressed to the wall so he couldn’t be seen from the other landings, and hoped the  third floor would still be as empty as when he’d come. He reached the third floor landing and peeked into the long hallway— just as he had hoped, not a soul. He stepped into the empty hall cautiously, feeling exposed in the bright lighting. The first room he passed was Mbega’s bedroom, and he paused. It wasn’t ideal, but with a little bit of luck, he could still complete his original mission and get the account passkeys. He reached for the doorknob, and his vision went pitch-black.
Huge white letters seared his retinas. Acquire Ghost.
Kai ripped the HUD from his head, staggering from the visual disorientation. He caught himself on the door jamb and pressed his back to it, trying to rub the fading afterimage from his eyes and double-check his surroundings. The split second of blindness hadn’t cost him anything, nothing had changed, still no guard… Kai froze. There was a dog at the top of the stairs.
 A small boyish part of him  rejoiced at the sight of the magnificent, 80-pound specimen watching him with head-tilted interest, one paw paused in the air.  The soldier in him simply noted that running from a Rhodesian Ridgeback at this distance would be zero percent effective, and his hand drifted to the knife on his leg. The dog growled low in its chest, hackles rising as its eyes followed the motion, and Kai shook himself mentally and let his hand relax. If the dog came after him, it was his own fault. He wouldn’t gut it for doing its job. With slow, smooth motions,Kai tucked the traitorous glasses into the front of his shirt and re-evaluated his exit strategy. He’d never make it all the way to the end of the hall to his exit, these dogs were bred to run down lions. Kai slithered backward, feeling the doorknob for Mbega’s bedroom dig into his back. If it was locked, he was dogfood.
With a deep-throated bark, the dog lunged, and Kai wrenched open the door, falling inside. He threw himself against the door to slam it shut just in time to feel it shudder from the dog’s kamikaze impact, followed by frenzied barking. Kai’s mission was officially over, no mission clock required. He needed to be out and gone before the guards came to investigate. He turned to dash to the window…
…except his legs didn’t move. He stared down as his mutinous limbs in disbelief, and tried again to take a step. Nothing. He could feel his legs, the command to Move, the muscles tensing, but the effort went nowhere, as if the air had turned to concrete.  It didn’t feel real. The stillness crept upward, locking his spine vertebrae by vertebrae. Kai started hyperventilating as his right arm started to move, possessed by a will that wasn’t his own.  The arm placed its hand over his knife, wrapping stiff fingers around the hilt. It tugged the knife free, the motion jerky and slow until the knife cleared the sheath. Then the hand rose smoothly until it was level with Kai’s wide eyes, and twisted sharply, aiming the sharp blade toward Kai’s throat. With the clarity borne from imminent death, Kai realized, This is Mbega’s Ghost. It was every nightmare he had ever had of being tied down, locked up, overpowered. The hand sliced downward, and  Kai Jumped, his fight or flight instinct overriding everything else. The mission, the militia watching through the HUD, it was all white noise next to the overpowering need to be Away. But there was no  familiar, freeing sensation of wind and weightlessness, no sudden heartskip of being there instead of here. Just the same dim room with a Presence behind him he couldn’t turn to see and a terrible pulled-muscle feeling in his head. The knife clattered to the floor, its edge glistening.
There was a stretch of silence, punctuated by Kai’s ragged breathing. He hadn’t gone anywhere, but still his muscles burned with exertion, sweat soaking through his shirt, caustic against the cut on his neck. There was a soft rustle of fabric as the Ghost stepped into view, silhouetted against the slowly brightening daylight in the window. Dark paint covered his face like a mask, haloed by his silver hair.  Ghost leaned closer, his head tilted to one side, and Kai felt his curiosity like a feather tickling inside his brain.
“You moved.” Ghost looked down the knife on the floor, then back up to Kai. “How?”
“We’re the same.” Kai gritted out through his locked jaw, still struggling against the invisible force. “I am what you are.”
Ghost’s eyes narrowed, but the cement will holding Kai in place softened slightly. “What am I?”
A glint of newborn sunlight against distant, airborne metal caught Kai’s eye, and urgency flooded his veins with last-gasp energy. “You’ll be dead in ten seconds if you don’t let me go right now. Look.” He strained his his chin toward the window, willing his captor to see what he saw. “Look!”
With a bemused expression, Ghost turned to face the window, and Kai collapsed to his knees as the locks on his joints dissolved like water.
Kai tried to stand, but his limbs trembled uncontrollably, like he’d sprinted a marathon uphill.
“Fireworks,” Ghost said , watching the shell split into multiple projectiles, all trailing smoke as they arced toward the compound. 
Five seconds. 
Kai half-jumped, half-staggered  into Ghost’s back, grabbing a fistful of his shirt, and Jumped toward the outside of the house.
Four. 
They landed in a heap on the main level of the compound, nowhere near where Kai intended to go, right at the feet of General Mbega and his cohorts. 
Three.
 The men stumbled backward in shock at their sudden appearance as Mbega shouted for his guards.
Two.
Kai clapped his hands over Ghost’s ears and pulled him underneath his chest.
One.
The artillery shell  tore through the front door, its detonation blotting out the world between one breath and the next.

The blast wave picked up everyone standing and hurled them screaming into the walls like ragdolls. Kai, wrapped around Ghost, flew across the floor until they smashed into something hard. Kai tasted blood as the impact snapped his head back, but he stayed curled on top of Ghost, hoping his body armor could take the worst of the inevitable damage. A second shell hit higher in the building rained heavy debris onto the main floor and thick, choking clouds of dust boiled through the air. The third shell hit something flammable, and the explosion rocked the foundation.  The entire building groaned with damage just as the ceiling caved into their room with a thunderous crash, dumping several floors worth of fiery, pulverized furniture, concrete, and steel on top of them. When they didn’t immediately die, Kai uncovered his head cautiously, and peeked over his shoulder.
The building was dying in spectacular fashion all around them, the metallic shrieking of the girders that were still intact rising above the rumble of collapsing floors. Fissures propagated through what was left of the walls, the racing cracks spitting plaster and splinters into the air. Yet, nothing touched them. Just a few feet away, one of the guards had been crushed by the falling debris, and his seeping blood had marked out a perfect semi-circle of untouched floor, centered on Kai and the Ghost. Kai relaxed his hold on the other man, and Ghost sat up stiffly, ruffling the dust from his hair as the house imploded around them.  He regarded Kai for a long, tense moment, his dark eyes unreadable, before he climbed to his feet. The circle of protection tightened as he stood, and followed him as he walked away. Kai hunched his shoulders against the sudden onslaught of debris from the disintegrating building, then scrambled to catch up to Ghost and his telekinetic umbrella. 
Fortunately for Kai’s wobbly legs, Ghost didn’t go far. He made a beeline for the collapsed wall and clambered over a precariously balanced fallen beam. He paused to peer closely at each of the faces of the people stacked up against the wall, their bodies bent and mangled. When he found the one he was looking for, he wilted to the ground, the circle of calm around him shrinking even further. He closed the warlord’s lifeless eyes with shaking fingers, tears streaking white through the ash and paint on his cheeks. Kai huddled in the shadow of the beam, tracking the weak shafts of daylight that began to filter into the darkness, waiting for Ghost to complete his vigil for the dead. 
Kai looked up when the sharp retort of gunfire filled the air, the sound of the army’s cleanup crew engaging the remnants of Mbega’s men. If the army was moving in, a quarantine team wouldn’t be far behind. With a start, he remembered his bodycam and ripped it off, swearing at the red light holding steady beside  the dust covered lens. His live feed had been cut when he lost his HUD in the initial explosion, but the camera was still on.  Footage of the entire exchange in Mbega’s room, the jump, and the Ghost’s miraculous bubble of protection was still uploading directly to a server in militia HQ. Briefly, Kai considered playing the good soldier, turning over Ghost to the quarantine agents when they arrived and passing off the jump as a glitch from the blast. Then he dropped the bodycam to the ground and stomped on it, the fragile electronics crunching under his boot heel. Even if the militia bought such a paper-thin story, the quarantine agents would strap him to a table to test him for cross-contamination. Better to burn his cover completely, and run while he still could.
 Kai grabbed onto the edge of the beam above him and hauled himself to his feet. His legs had the structural integrity of overcooked noodles, but he felt like he had enough juice to get them out of the army’s perimeter, back to the ridge where he’d left his satchel. From there they could hike to the airfield, and from there, disappear. Jumping without a passenger would be significantly easier, but if he was going to run from the quarantine zealots, he liked his chances of survival better with a bulletproof human shield. “Ghost, or Zeru, or whatever people call you, we need to go. Lots of people with guns heading our way, looking for you.”
Ghost didn’t move from his kneeling vigil in front of Mbega’s corpse. “I was sent by the ancestors to protect him,” he said tonelessly. “It was my purpose.”
“Whose ancestors? His? I don’t think they have much say in your purpose anymore.” Kai dropped into a painful crouch and gripped Ghost’s shoulders, turning him towards him. “What are you, Korean? Chinese?” 
 Ghost flinched away, his hands covering his face reflexively. “What I look like doesn’t matter.”
Kai pulled off his gloves, but when he reached out Ghost shrank back, still covering his face. Kai sighed, letting his hands fall to his knee. “I don’t know how things work down here, but where I come from, markings on your body are meant to reveal who you are, not hide it.” He slid his left sleeve back to his elbow, uncovering the small piece of calligraphy tattooed into his forearm, near to the vein.
Ghost leaned in hesitantly to get a better look. “What is it?” 
“It’s the name my parents gave me.They died so long ago I don’t remember them, but I got this to remind myself of who I am. Not Phantom, that’s just the mask I wear to survive. Not Kai, that’s just a word people use to get my attention.” Kai rubbed the letters with his thumb, feeling the faded scars underneath the ink. “They named me Jongin. I think they wanted me to be kind.”
Kai reached out again, and this time Ghost let him wipe the thick, smudged paint away from his eyes. “You have a name too, even if you don’t remember it.” He jerked a thumb toward the crushed warlord. “Mbega didn’t create you, he just found you and used you. You were just a tool to him, like his cane. He’s dead, but that doesn’t mean you have no purpose. You’re one of us.”
“Us?” Ghost asked, curiosity injecting life into his voice. “There are more like me? Like you?”
 Kai returned to his feet and held out his hand. “Come with me and find out.”
Ghost looked back at the corpse of his dead master, then up at the crumbling compound, and back to Kai’s hand. When he took hold, his hand was smaller than Kai expected, but his grip was crushingly strong. Kai took a breath and closed his eyes, imagining the ridge. The bottom fell out of his stomach as here became there in the space of a heartbeat, and he opened his eyes to the wide open grassland, the wind chafing his face. Ghost dropped his hand to run to the edge of the ridge, looking out at the now-distant figures locked in waning battle. He turned back to Kai as the sun peeked over the top of the ruined compound, his face alight.
“Lu Han. My mother named me Luhan.”