When the world tore away, I fell into the ocean again—but this time the sea did not behave like water. It vibrated, spun, and then converged into a single, impossibly large whirlpool with me at its eye. The wall of water rose and turned white; it wrapped itself around me, pouring itself into my hands and chest until I could feel it sinking into every hollow of me. The sea gave itself up, and I took it.
Then the empty land opened beneath me—dry, cracked, and ten thousand miles of nothing. Above, the sky thrummed with lightning without a single star. I inhaled the air and drank the sky itself until my chest felt hollow and barren. The ground beneath me began to rupture and groan, then the world snapped, and I woke.
Suddenly, Mai's father hovered before me. Instinct made me drop him; he thudded back to earth. The villagers scattered like birds, terror widening their eyes. I bolted into the woods, adrenaline clinging to my ribs. Rain came down hard, a sheet that turned the path slick. I tripped over a root and slammed my chest against a tree. Pain flared, raw and hot—then, bizarrely, the wounds knit closed. The sting faded into a hollow calm.
I kept moving, led by a single thought: control. I needed to use what had woken in me, not let it use me. At the waterfall, I stood above the black mouth of the lake, hands raised. I jumped and hit the water hard, sinking until the world muffled into blue. Floating on my back, I closed my eyes and felt the ocean fold into that same inner space—a place that smelled of salt and static and sharp, bright light.
There, the light stood before me again. "What do you want?" I asked, voice small against that endless hush. The light moved, and with it came a reflection—a towering version of me. It stepped forward until the light pressed into my face and then shoved its hands on my shoulders and screamed. Paralysis locked my limbs. I shoved until my arms shook and knocked the light's hands free; it plunged beneath the surface.
The water began to buck and heave like a living thing. A hulking form rose from the swell—an abomination of luminescence and teeth of wave. Seaweed wrapped around my legs, pulling. I ripped the vines like thread and, reflexive, I gathered the lake into a knife of water. Compressed and honed, it drove into the beast and shoved it back beneath the skin of the lake. It surged up again and thrust a thin filament of energy into me, clawing for the helm of my mind. I caught that thread and wrestled.
At one point, the spirit wore a face I knew: Amoi. "You let me die, Goshi," it said, and a tear I couldn't stop slid from my cheek and vanished on my skin. Rage and grief pulled like tides. I strained, and with everything I had, I wrenched the filament back into myself. It broke. The ocean folded into itself, and I broke the surface, coughing rain and lake into my mouth.
Something had changed. The lake no longer overwhelmed me; it held me up. I stood on the water like it was solid ground and walked ashore as the rain kept tapping the grass. My limbs thrummed with a new, terrifying clarity. I raised a hand and made a portal—slow at first, a sphere of sparks that coalesced into an oval ripple, then stretched. When I slipped my fingers through, the other side bit like fire, and I knew where it led: home. I heard the distant noise of my street—the rallying shouts, engines, life.
I risked it. I stepped through the heat and pain and came out raw on the other side. The alley smelled like smoke and oil; my shorts were ash by the time I stumbled into the lane. I crouched for a heartbeat, vulnerable and exposed, then forced myself toward the front door. No ladder. No time.
A familiar face crossed the block—one of the girls from school. She looked at me, and something hard and frightened passed over her face, and I knew she knew me. I burst through the apartment door and sprinted up the stairs. My mother opened the bedroom door half a beat behind me, eyes glazed but alert by instinct. "Hann?" she said—my father's name—because she was always two heartbeats behind real life. She leaned in the doorway and, for reasons I didn't have the patience to parse, told me, "I guess you're your father's son."
I shut the door, locked it, pulled on the only clothes I had, and the city's normal rattle tried to reassert itself. A gunshot cracked the air, and something heavy thudded in the street. I moved to the window and looked down: my neighbor, an enhanced man, lay still in the road. ETU—Enhanced Termination Unit—soldiers in black clustered around the body. The system that had already cost my family everything had just added another name to its list.
I paused in front of my mirror. White hair framed a white face: brows, eyelashes, even the fine hairs on my arms had gone pale. The Yang mark sat beneath my shoulder blade like a brand I could not hide. I left the room and paused in the hall; the smell of needles and cheap liquor sifted from my mother's doorway. She sat slumped, pipe in hand, blinking at me like she didn't know I'd come back. I watched her and said, the words raw, "You're going to die one day, you know that, right?" She had no answer.
Outside, ETU patrols moved like vultures. Two of them passed me, and one shoved at my back and called me a freak. I kept walking until the shove turned into a tossed bit of trash at the back of my head. That was stupid enough to make me turn. I bent, picked the wrapper up, and placed it near his boot. "You dropped this, sir," I said, like a joke I didn't mean.
The officer scowled and shoved me. "What was that, boy?" he asked, hand drifting to his holster. I looked him in the face. "Why did you throw trash at me?" I asked, voice steady despite the tremor in my gut. "Why mess with me?" He pulled his gun, and his finger eased onto the trigger.
Everything in me narrowed to a single, urgent note: Do not let him decide when it ends. The world held its breath.
A shot split the street.