The worst part was not that Harry couldn't prove what he knew.
It was that he couldn't disprove it either.
He noticed the distinction one afternoon in the science wing, standing outside a lab he wasn't permitted to enter. The door was unlocked—someone had simply stepped away—but the rule existed anyway, invisible and absolute. Authorized personnel only. The sign was old, the lettering faded, but it might as well have been carved into the wall.
Inside, equipment sat idle. Benches cleared between uses. Instruments calibrated and waiting.
Harry stood there longer than necessary, aware of how easily he could step inside—and how decisively that would change things.
He didn't move.
—
In class, discussion had turned speculative. The teacher encouraged it—hypotheticals were safe. Students proposed solutions with confidence born of distance. When someone asked how a particular approach could be tested, the teacher smiled and deflected.
"That would require facilities," he said. "Which we don't have."
The conversation moved on.
Harry felt the familiar tightening in his chest—not pain yet, but the onset of it. The frustration wasn't intellectual. It was procedural. Knowledge without method wasn't incomplete; it was unverifiable. It existed only as assertion.
And assertions, he was learning, were easy to dismiss.
—
After school, he walked home instead of taking the bus, needing the time the way some people needed air. The streets were loud with late‑afternoon traffic, but his thoughts were louder still.
He could describe the theory.
He could trace the logic.
He could articulate the risks.
He could not show any of it.
There were no experiments to run. No data to gather. No failure modes to observe firsthand. Everything he understood remained trapped behind language, and language—he was discovering—was a weak currency when unbacked by demonstration.
By the time he reached the house, the frustration had settled into something heavier.
—
Howard was home early.
Harry found him in the study, the door open but the room clearly occupied. Papers lay arranged with deliberate care, the way they always did when something sensitive was being handled.
Harry hesitated in the doorway.
"Do you ever feel like you're holding something you can't touch?" he asked.
Howard looked up slowly. "Often."
"How do you know it's real, then?"
Howard considered the question. "Because it resists," he said. "Because it refuses to behave the way easier answers do."
Harry nodded. "What if you're wrong?"
"Then the work collapses," Howard said. "Eventually. The difference is whether it collapses quietly or takes people with it."
The answer wasn't comforting.
—
That night, the dream was merciless.
Harry stood in a room filled with tools—every one of them familiar, every one just out of reach. The floor between him and the benches was marked with the same lines he'd seen before, boundaries layered on top of each other until they were impossible to step over without choosing which rule to break.
He reached forward.
The pain came instantly, tearing and absolute, driving him awake with a cry he didn't recognize as his own. His heart raced, breath shallow, hands shaking as if they'd been forced back by something physical.
He sat on the edge of the bed afterward, head in his hands, waiting for the sensation to fade.
When it did, something worse took its place.
Grief.
Not for loss, but for incapacity.
—
In the days that followed, the feeling didn't leave.
At school, people talked about preparation as if it were action. About readiness as if it were proof. Harry listened and felt the gap widen between knowing and being allowed to know.
He began to notice how often authority used uncertainty as cover.
"We can't be sure."
"It hasn't been demonstrated."
"There's no data."
All true.
All unassailable.
Without tools, without access, without the means to test even the most cautious hypothesis, Harry's understanding was indistinguishable from speculation. He could be right—and it would make no difference.
That realization hurt in ways pain could not.
—
Lena noticed.
"You're angry," she said one evening, as they sat on the steps outside the school.
"I'm not," Harry replied.
She shook her head. "You're not loud. That's different."
He considered that. "I'm tired of being theoretical."
She laughed softly. "Welcome to school."
"That's not what I mean," he said. "I mean… it doesn't matter how careful I am if I can't act. Or refuse to act. I'm just… guessing."
Lena studied him, then said, "Maybe that's what they want."
"Who?"
"Everyone who keeps telling you to wait," she said.
The thought lodged painfully.
—
That night, Harry sat at his desk and opened his notebook.
He wrote down everything he couldn't do.
Couldn't test.
Couldn't verify.
Couldn't falsify.
Couldn't fail safely.
The list grew longer than he expected.
When he finished, he closed the notebook and leaned back, staring at the ceiling until his eyes burned.
Powerlessness, he realized, wasn't the absence of strength.
It was the absence of permission to be wrong.
Without the ability to try, to fail, to learn through consequence, knowledge calcified. It became something fragile, easy to dismiss, easy to contain.
Harry lay back on his bed, the ache in his head a dull companion rather than a sharp warning.
He understood now why eligibility mattered. Why selection came before instruction. Why some doors stayed closed even when the rooms behind them were empty.
It wasn't to keep people out.
It was to keep uncertainty manageable.
Harry closed his eyes, breathing slowly, forcing the frustration to settle without letting it turn into resolve he couldn't act on.
He had no hands yet.
Only sight.
And the waiting was beginning to hurt more than the pain ever had.