The bass hit the walls like a second heartbeat.
Eli stood at the edge of it all — the noise, the heat, the press of bodies — nursing a cup of something too fluorescent to be safe. He'd been in America for six weeks and still hadn't figured out how to leave a party without seeming rude, so instead he watched. That was fine. Watching was something he was good at.
"Eli! You have to try this!" Sarah materialized out of the crowd, bright-eyed and slightly unsteady, thrusting a fresh drink toward him with the enthusiasm of someone delivering great news.
He took it. Set it down the moment she looked away.
The music shifted — something with more bass, less melody — and Sarah grabbed his wrist and pulled him into the crowd before he could object. He let her. Moving was easier than talking, and for a few minutes he almost relaxed into it, almost forgot that he was a twenty-one-year-old from Luleå who had never quite belonged anywhere, let alone here.
Then the glass shattered.
It came from across the room — a sharp, percussive crack beneath the music — and Eli turned in time to see a guy in a dark hoodie catch himself against the wall, teeth bared, eyes scanning the room like he was looking for something to hit. The energy around him changed. Eli felt it before he understood it: a drop in temperature, a tightening in the chest, the body's old warning system firing before the brain caught up.
Something's wrong.
And then he saw it.
Above the guy's head — floating there, perfectly still, faintly luminous — a red icon. Like a file waiting to be opened. BRUTE STRENGTH blinked in sharp block letters, and Eli blinked back.
He looked away. Looked at Sarah. Above her head, a soft blue glow: SOCIAL CHARISMA. He looked at the guy nearest the speaker: RHYTHM. The girl laughing by the window: PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY.
"Eli." Sarah's voice was careful now. "Your face is doing something weird."
"I'm fine," he said, which was a lie so obvious she didn't even bother responding to it.
He wasn't seeing things. He was sure he wasn't seeing things — the room was too loud, too real, the sticky floor and the reek of cheap cologne too immediate for any of this to be a dream. But that meant the icons were real. Which meant something had fundamentally changed about the way he saw the world, and he had no idea when or how or why.
The guy in the hoodie moved.
It wasn't subtle. He cut through the crowd with his shoulder lowered, eyes fixed, and Eli had just enough time to register he's coming this way before Sarah grabbed his arm and yanked.
"Eli — move —"
Instinct took over. He turned, and without thinking — without deciding, exactly — he felt his attention snap to that red icon like a magnet. Something inside him reached for it. It felt like grabbing a live wire: a full-body jolt, a rush of heat from his sternum outward, and then—
The icon flickered. Went dark. Vanished.
The guy stumbled mid-lunge as if something had been taken from him — because something had — and Eli caught him by the collar and shoved, hard, harder than he should have been able to, and the guy crashed into the wall and slid down it with a look of pure bewilderment on his face.
The room erupted.
Screaming. The shuffle of feet. Someone killed the music by accident, and in the sudden quiet, Eli could hear his own breathing — ragged, too fast — and the thud of his pulse in his ears.
"What," Sarah said, "was that."
It wasn't really a question. Eli looked at his hands. They felt the same. He felt the same. But something had settled into him — into his muscles, his bones — like a program quietly finishing its install.
"I don't know," he said. "We need to go."
Outside, the night was cold and still, and the noise from the apartment faded quickly, swallowed by the street. Sarah kept glancing at him sideways. He didn't blame her.
"You threw him into a wall," she said finally.
"I know."
"You threw him. He's twice your size."
"I know, Sarah."
She was quiet for a moment. Then: "So what are you?"
Eli looked up at the sky — clear, sharp, a handful of stars punching through the light pollution — and thought about Luleå, and his mother's kitchen, and the very ordinary life he'd had until approximately forty minutes ago.
"I don't know yet," he said. "But I think I'm going to find out."