Chapter 2 — The Body I Didn't Know
Lucien woke to silence.
Not the comforting silence of his home—
No hum of air purifiers.
No distant laughter.
No soft footsteps from his parents.
This silence was empty.
Heavy.
Crushing.
Like the absence of all sound could squeeze the air from his lungs.
His eyes snapped open.
Pain bloomed in his skull, pulsing like something had pounded on it from the inside.
The light was unbearable.
Not the warm, gentle sun he knew—
But a blistering glare that burned straight through his skin.
The sky was a white haze.
Endless.
Blinding.
Beneath him, the ground cracked like shattered bone.
Dry. Colorless. Dead.
A desert.
A barren wasteland stretching farther than his eyes could see.
No trees.
No buildings.
No roads.
Only sand. Rock. Heat.
And the screaming silence of a colorless sky.
He scrambled to his feet.
His breath came sharp and ragged.
Every limb felt wrong.
Heavy. Foreign.
Lucien wasn't thirteen anymore.
He looked down.
His hands—
Too big.
Rough. Scarred.
His arms thick with muscle.
His fingers calloused.
The clothes on his back were coarse and worn.
Tattered leather and cloth.
The kind a soldier might wear.
He was twice the size he remembered.
Broad. Tall.
A man's frame.
Panic surged.
Fast. Loud. Clawing up his throat.
He tried to breathe, tried to focus, but the dizziness came first.
Disorientation followed.
His thoughts raced, tripping over each other like a dam breaking open.
How?
Where am I?
Why am I here?
He had never been anywhere dangerous. Not really.
His world was sterile. Clean.
Safe.
His parents had made sure of it.
Even the Containment Facility had been a cage of glass and order—
Bodies sealed behind stasis and steel.
He was never supposed to be here.
Not like this.
Not in it.
Now he was alone.
Exposed.
Utterly unprepared.
Lucien stumbled forward.
Every step sank into the sand like it wanted to swallow him whole.
His breathing came fast and shallow.
The sun pressed in like a wall of flame.
There had to be something.
Shelter.
Water.
Anything.
But the desert stretched in every direction.
Empty. Endless.
A graveyard of heat and silence.
His knees gave out.
He dropped to the ground.
Hands scraping across the cracked earth.
Desperate for anything solid.
Anything real.
His new body felt like a prison—
A stranger's weight he hadn't earned.
A life two sizes too big.
Then—
Fragments.
Fleeting memories that didn't belong.
This wasn't his life.
This wasn't his body.
Someone older.
Someone stronger.
Someone who had walked outside the safety of glass and steel.
Whose body is this?
He searched for a name.
A face.
A single truth.
But the memories slipped through him like water.
Each one vanishing before it could settle.
All that remained was the echo.
And fear.
Real fear.
The kind he'd only heard about.
The kind that made your heartbeat a war drum.
The kind that told you—
You're not ready.
Lucien sat down hard, the breath gone from him.
The horizon shimmered in every direction.
No sign of life.
No sound.
No time.
Just the sun.
And the sand.
And a Trial that refused to explain itself.
He closed his eyes.
Tried to remember home.
Tried to hear his mother's laugh.
To feel his father's hand on his shoulder.
But that world was gone.
Distant.
Unreachable.
He was alone.
And the Trial had only just begun.