Klaus sighed as he stared around the room he'd woken up in. Honestly, he preferred the dream. At least there, nothing smelled like sour milk and regret.
Here, the air was thick with the mingled cries of at least three infants, the low murmur of an overworked caretaker, and a smell he'd decided, very firmly, not to investigate.
"What shall I do on this fine, hopeful day," he murmured, swinging his legs off the little cot and dropping onto the floor with all the grace of someone who had definitely not been walking on these legs for very long.
A bookshelf sat crooked against the far wall, half its shelves sagging under the weight of picture books. Curiosity won out over the growing suspicion that his legs weren't going to cooperate, and he shuffled toward it, using the wall for balance.
The spines read like a fever dream. About Our World. Oh Look What Bob Found. Kitty Tales and Other Nonsense. He pulled About Our World free, along with Oh Look What Bob Found for good measure — one book to actually read, one to hold up like a shield if anyone glanced his way.
He looked over his shoulder. The teacher — if that's what she was — stood a few feet off, coaxing a wailing toddler into something resembling silence. Good. Distracted. He grabbed the juice box someone had left balanced on the shelf's edge, cracked it open with the practiced innocence of a child who wanted juice and nothing more, and settled cross-legged on the floor with both books open in front of him. One for show. One for real.
About Our World began simply enough — too simply, for something with this much information packed into crayon-bright illustrations. There was an energy called qi, it explained, running through everything: the air, the water, the dirt beneath their feet, and — apparently — through people, if they knew how to reach for it. Qi was strength. Qi was the difference between an ordinary life and something more.
Pretty unsettling thing to put in a toddler's picture book, if you asked him. Nobody had.
He kept reading. The book laid out stages, neat and orderly, like rungs on a ladder someone expected every child in this room to eventually climb:
Body Refining — nine stages.
Qi Gathering — nine stages.
Foundation Establishment — nine stages.
The list ended there, the next page torn away — whether by a careless hand or a curious one, he couldn't say. A small note beneath the diagram informed him, in cheerful looping font, that at age five, every child would be tested for their affinity. Mandatory. No exceptions listed, which somehow felt more ominous than if there had been a dozen.
He turned the page and nearly closed the book on reflex.
The illustration was crude, clearly meant to soften something that shouldn't have been softened at all — but even simplified, even drawn in flat cartoon colors for an audience that still napped twice a day, it managed to turn his stomach. Tall. Taller than any door in this room. Its arms hung too long, scaled, ending not in hands but in a writhing mass of tendrils that looked like they'd never stopped growing. A human shape, more or less, if you didn't look too closely at the head — four eyes, unblinking, stacked in a way no skull should allow, and a mouth splitting nearly ear to ear, packed edge to edge with teeth that didn't belong to anything that ate with manners. A long tail curled behind it, tipped in something jagged.
The caption underneath, still in that same cheerful font, called it a Hollow. Said they came from beyond this world. Said nothing else, as if that single fact was supposed to be reassuring rather than the opposite.
He sat with that for a long moment, juice box forgotten in his hand, condensation dripping onto his knee.
Where does the qi come from? he wondered. Energy like that didn't just exist — it had to come from somewhere, be tied to something, obey some rule nobody had bothered writing down for the five-year-olds who'd soon be tested for it. And the Hollows — if they came from beyond this world, what was on the other side of that door? What had cracked it open in the first place, and why did it keep letting things like that through?
Questions stacked on questions, each one a little colder than the last.
Somewhere behind him, the teacher's voice rose in pitch — one crying baby joined by a second, then a third, a chain reaction he'd apparently slept through the start of. He closed About Our World gently, tucking it half-behind Oh Look What Bob Found in case anyone came looking, and let his eyes drift back to the crooked bookshelf, the sagging picture books, the ordinary little room that had just quietly told him the world outside it was anything but.
Whatever this place was, whatever he was now — he had a feeling the dream had been the safer place to stay