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The envelope was still warm from his fingers when the matron's bark snapped the corridor in half.
"Darius! Common room. Now."
He slid the parchment into his pocket and picked up the broom. Revelation or not, dust had to be herded, bowls had to be scrubbed, and someone had to catch the blame when the floor stayed gritty. The orphanage didn't recognize miracles; it only recognized chores.
He stepped into the common room and put on the expression he had perfected across two lives: the look of a boy so unremarkable that the eye slipped off him. Average. It had been a survival trick in a gray office and it worked just as well under cracked plaster.
He'd just drawn the first line through the dust when the flock descended.
"Oi, Darius!" an older boy snickered, backing him toward the wall. "Heard you got a letter."
"From who?" a little girl asked, the question pure, the tone sharpened by the room.
He gave the safest answer in the world. "A prank."
Laughter burst like dropped crockery.
"Who'd bother with him?"
"Maybe it's from his imaginary girlfriend!"
He kept sweeping. Average men keep sweeping. In his old life, he'd learned that silence is a raincoat: it doesn't stop the storm, but it keeps you from drowning where everyone can see. He let the jeers patter off, eyes on the floor, counting the push and pull of the broom like breaths.
Average. The word had been his gravity. In a cubicle lit by tired fluorescents, average meant arriving before the clock and leaving after it. It meant nodding through meetings, stapling reports with correct margins, saying "No problem" when the weekend vanished under someone else's urgency. Average bought him rent and stale coffee. Average dulled the edges until even pain felt administrative.
Here, average meant smaller things: take the second bowl, not the first; if you finish early, don't look up; when donors visit, keep your hands folded and your eyes lowered. You could survive a long time by being easy to forget.
The flock eventually scattered, their laughter trailing into the corridor. He didn't reach for the envelope. He didn't need to. A new picture already sat behind his eyes: stone halls, candles guttering in drafts, a world where "special" had a syllabus.
He swept. The floor gave back its dull squeak. The broom handle stuck to his palm, tacky with years of impatience. The window by the far wall wore a jagged mouth of missing panes. He made a note—patch it with cardboard before evening. The matron hated the wind more than she hated hunger.
"Faster," she snapped when she passed, eyes skimming him and snagging on nothing. That was the trick working: be furniture that moves itself.
He was good at ordinary. Too good. He had built a life out of it once, brick by unobtrusive brick, until the structure was so sound it suffocated him. He remembered eating lunch alone at a desk, scrolling headlines for a life he didn't live. He remembered the praise that hurt—reliable, dependable, consistent—praise that meant no one would ever think to ask what he wanted.
By afternoon the chores rotated like a wheel he could have spun blindfolded: sweep, wash, fetch, return, apologize for the thing he hadn't done, do it anyway. The letter sat in his pocket like a second pulse. Each time his hand brushed it, the beat jumped.
He didn't take it out. Not in the hallway when the smell of boiled cabbage crawled along the ceiling. Not in the courtyard when the sky bruised toward evening. Not when he patched the window with a square of cardboard cut from a cereal box, hands numb from the outside air. He had learned another law of the average life: anything spoken aloud could be stolen. He would not give this to the room, or the matron, or the flock. He would not let the world mark it with greasy fingerprints.
At dinner, he ate quickly and neatly. Second bowl, not first. Eyes down. Spoon quiet against the tin. Someone bumped his shoulder hard enough to slop porridge over his knuckles. He dabbed it away with the cuff and said nothing. The matron's gaze swept the tables like a searchlight; he kept his profile small, his breath smaller.
When lights-out came, he lay on the thin mattress and watched the ceiling draw hairline cracks between shadows. The envelope rested on the bedside table within arm's reach. He didn't touch it. He thought instead about the iron comfort of the old rhythm and how it had almost been a kindness—no choices, no risk, a life narrow as a corridor where you could never get lost.
He also thought about the other thing: the way average eats dreams in small, polite bites until you notice only when your plate is gone.
He turned on his side and stared at the bunk frame above him. He heard snoring, a muffled argument down the hall, the low groan of the building settling into another tired night. He closed his eyes and told the panic to lie down. He told the hope to keep quiet. He told the world he would keep his head down, even if he walked through new doors. Blend first. Learn the air. Never be the tallest flame.
Sleep came in strips. He drifted, surfaced, sank.
Ting.
His eyes opened to a darkness that felt attentive.
Not a sound, exactly. More like the air inside his skull had tapped to see if he was home.
"What…?" He pushed up on his elbows. The dormitory lay unchanged: silhouettes of bunks, the smear of streetlight through the patched window, the soft hiss of someone's breath. The envelope sat where he'd left it, innocent as paper.
Ting.
It vibrated through him, a clean note struck on a glass nerve.
Then:
[System Initializing.]
The letters didn't appear in the room. They unfolded behind his eyes, crisp as frost.
His mouth went dry. "Who's there?"
[User Detected: Darius Kael.]
[Calibration… Complete.]
Light—not light—shimmered into a plane before him, translucent and sure. Lines of information mapped themselves across nothing.
[Welcome, Successor.]
[Nano Machine Activation: Complete.]
He stared, listening to the fast, practical thud of his own heart.
Average would have told him to scream for the matron, to drag other eyes into the room so that the strangeness would blur into consensus. Average would have shoved this under a bed and sat on the bed and pretended to be heavy enough to crush it.
He didn't move.
He had been good at being nobody. It had kept him alive. But nobody never got doors; nobody waited for doors to be held open by braver hands. The screen hovered, patient, as if it had time for him to decide what kind of person he was.
He let out a breath he hadn't known he was holding and felt the corners of his mouth twitch, then lift, a fragile curve made of fear and something bright trying to be born.
"Maybe this life," he whispered to the quiet, "won't be average."