When the burn line struck the earth, the world fractured into light.
It wasn’t the violent, blistering fire of old Malibu blaze seasons.
It was softer — eerily gentle — like the sky was trying to apologize while setting reality on fire.
A golden shockwave rolled through the canyon, bending eucalyptus leaves backward, scattering ash that wasn’t ash, and lifting every bird into the air as if gravity had temporarily resigned.
The ground hummed beneath us.
Kellerman shielded his eyes, shouting something about
“photonic aftershocks”
and
“phase reversals,”
But his voice sounded underwater.
All I could hear — truly hear — was him.
My secret lover stood inches from me, his hair still glimmering in the impossible light, his sunglasses reflecting the burning sky as if he’d been born from it. He pressed his palm against my chest—hard enough to anchor me, gentle enough to break me.
“I didn’t want to say this here,” he murmured,
“but Circle Three forces the truth out. That’s what it does. It takes the things we hide and drags them into the open.”
My throat tightened.
“What truth?”
He hesitated. A tremor passed through him, subtle but unmistakable.
“The night in Big Sur… the one they photographed.”
I nodded.
“Our night.”
“It wasn’t an accident we ended up there.”
The golden light around us bent, tightening like a halo collapsing inward. The air shimmered, and all the birds suspended midair began to drift in slow circles over our heads, forming a pattern—an orbit.
My heart pounded.
“What do you mean it wasn’t an accident?”
He inhaled a thin, trembling breath.
“They sent me to you,” he said.
“Before the circles. Before Malibu. Before everything.”
The world froze.
Even the light seemed to hesitate.
“I was supposed to watch you,” he continued quietly.
“Document you.
Report on you.”
He closed his eyes.
“I was meant to keep you close enough to monitor, but far enough not to matter.”
The words hit harder than any skyquake.
“Who sent you?” I asked, my voice cracking open like dry earth.
He didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he reached into his bag and pulled out a small, battered envelope — the kind that once held a badge or a directive or a regret.
“My employer,” he finally said.
“The same people who built Circle One and Circle Two.
The same people who predicted your movements months before you made them.”
Government.
Private intel.
Some hybrid outfit operating in the grey spaces beneath Washington and above Malibu’s canyon fog.
I didn’t know yet.
But I understood enough to feel sick.
“So everything between us was surveillance?” I asked.
“No,” he said sharply.
That single word cut through the glow like a clean blade.
His eyes softened — real, raw, unguarded for the first time.
“That’s the truth I was afraid to tell you,” he whispered.
“It started as surveillance. But it didn’t stay that way.”
The birds above us spiraled tighter.
The canyon floor trembled again — a slower, deeper quake, as if listening.
“I stopped filing reports.
I stopped communicating.
I started… choosing you.”
His voice broke.
“You were never supposed to matter.
But you did.
And now they’re hunting both of us, because I crossed the line that Circle Three measures.”
The light around us pulsed.
Kellerman shouted something behind us, but it came through as a distant echo. The skyquake was intensifying again, forming a second flare along the burning horizon.
I reached for his face.
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“Because they were watching,” he said.
“And because I didn’t know whether you cared — or whether you were just another traveler chasing strange skies.”
I pulled him closer as the canyon roared.
“I wouldn’t be here,” I said quietly,
“if I didn’t care.”
He let out a breath he had been holding for years.
But before he could respond — before the confession could settle — the skyflare above us cracked like a whip.
A shockwave burst outward.
Kellerman screamed:
“THE SKY IS FALLING BACK IN—RUN!”
But we couldn’t move.
Because the truth had opened something bigger than Circle Three.
Something is watching us.
Something ancient.
Something is orchestrating the entire pattern.
The light dimmed, condensed into a single point overhead…
…and the next circle began to form.