A gaunt young man sat hunched on a battered bench beneath a flickering streetlight, the city's late noise a distant, indifferent hum. His skin was the color of old paper, his hair unwashed and stringy, and the hollows under his eyes were the kind of permanent shadows only people who never sleep learn to wear. He cupped something between both hands like it might blow away — a porcelain cup, steam coiling from its rim in thin, nervous ribbons.
Not the powder sacks the slums traded in. Not the chalky, nutrient-washed muck everyone called "coffee." This was the real thing. Ground, pressed, and poured with the kind of care the higher tiers reserved for guests and officials. He had pawed the last of his savings together for it, counting every credit until his palms hurt. It had felt obscene then, like borrowing someone else's life for an hour. Now, as he pressed his lips to the rim, it felt like an apology to himself.
He took a tiny sip and made a face. The taste was clean and bitter, a slap of foreign earth. He barked a half-laugh that was more hurt than amusement.
"Of course," he muttered. "Even the good things hate me."
He sipped again, slower this time. He wasn't savoring the flavor so much as the fact of it — that he could do this one small, ridiculous, extravagant thing before the world finished him off. The bench squeaked as a drunk staggered by, and the neon sign from the police station across the lane buzzed in a way that made his teeth ache.
Rafi — that was the name the social workers had scribbled on his file once, when he was fourteen and thin enough to slip through the cracks — settled his shoulders. He'd decided, sometime last night, that he would not run anymore. Not from the ledger men, not from the clinic escorts, not from the men who sent notes with plain handwriting and simple threats. He had a plan: one last job, one last hustle, then a flight to the outskirts and enough credits to last until winter. That flight existed in the shape of a few measly credits and a head full of wishful thinking.
"Pamper myself," he told the cup. "One last indulgence for the soon-to-be-dead."
He should've bought meat, he thought. Real meat — the kind that made you forget hunger for a week. But meat called for a kitchen and plates and a chair that wasn't rusting through. A cup could be had in the street, at least for a while. He swallowed, and the bitterness scraped down his throat like a truth he hadn't expected.
He felt ridiculous, but the ridiculousness held a fragile warmth. For one breath, the city outside the slums felt like a distant planet.
Then the air above the lane trembled.
At first it was only a shimmer, like heat over asphalt. Then it rushed outward in a ripple that made the steam from his cup fold back on itself. A faint humming pressure pressed in his ears as if a storm were approaching from underground. Rafi's hands tightened on the porcelain until his knuckles whitened.
Something flashed at the edge of his vision — a smear of color that shouldn't have been possible at night. He blinked; the bench seemed to shudder. Words, or images of words, slid behind his eyeballs in slow, obscene clarity. They weren't in any script he'd learned at the orphanage or on patrol posters; they were like shards pressed into the inside of his skull.
—Chosen.
His first thought was that someone had stepped on his coffee cup. The porcelain slipped, clacking against concrete. It shattered and a dark crescent of coffee spread like a stain across the gutter. Rafi shoved his hands out reflexively to catch the pieces and found his palms empty, flat against wet pavement.
Then the world turned inside out.
It felt like falling and being held at the same time, as if gravity had forgotten its own laws. The streetlight stretched into a blade of white, the neon outside the police station dissolved into a smear, and the distant hum of traffic bent into a chord that pushed into his ribs. Everything tilted, then ceased to be. Rafi's last normal breath inhaled the bitter whiff of coffee; the next inhalation tasted of iron and wind and something like thunder.
When he opened his eyes again, he had been moved. The bench was gone. The street was gone. He lay on broken flagstones beneath a sky the color of bruised metal.
Around him the world vomited noise — sharp, alien cries, the crack of something tearing through stone, the chorus of other people gasping and cursing. Shapes moved in the periphery: a woman with hair like braided rope vomiting into a shallow pool, a boy trembling on his knees, a man with a jaw like a chisel staring at his hands as if they were unfamiliar tools. They all wore the same stunned blankness on their faces. A few screamed and then were silenced by the sudden proximity of something monstrous.
Rafi pushed himself up. The cold cut through his sleeves. He expected to smell the city — trash, oil, the metallic tang of machine grease. Instead the air was thick with the burnt, sweet scent of rot and ozone. Ragged towers leaned at impossible angles, glass hanging like teeth. Far off, something huge moved, blotting out part of the sky as it passed.
He tasted pain in his temples that wasn't just the aftershock. Bits of something — memory, maybe — had been scraped raw during the transit. He could remember the cup, the bench, the plan for escape. But where the ledger men fit into that plan — who had sent those plain threats — those lines were frayed, like rope that had been chewed. The world shifted as if someone had erased marginalia from a notebook and not bothered to write neat.
"Hey!" a voice snapped. Sharp and frightened. A woman, maybe thirty, had found footing and was pointing toward the horizon where the shadows writhed. "Don't just stand there. Stay back!"
People around them gathered in a shaky semicircle, faces washed pale by adrenaline. A young man with a shaved scalp and a long scar across his eyebrow had found a piece of rebar and waved it. A girl two years younger than Rafi clutched a stuffed thing that looked ridiculous and awful and comfortingly familiar — a relic from a life none of them could reach.
The ground vibrated. A scream split the air and Rafi's heart forgot how to measure itself properly.
From between two collapsed towers, something slithered. It was a mass of teeth and jointed limbs, black and slick, with eyes like lanterns. When it moved it left frost on the broken stone. Its mouth — a wide, sucking maw — opened and closed like a cavern hungry for sound. A stench of iron washed over them.
Someone screamed and a body went forward. The creature lunged. The sharp noise of bone snapping echoed and then another sound: an echo that did not belong to anything they had heard before, like a bell struck in a cave with no walls. The thing recoiled, wounded by something invisible, and a jet of light sliced the air where its flank had been. Then it wheeled and struck again with a speed that made helmets rattle and hands go numb.
"Awakened," a voice breathed next to Rafi. It was the man with the scar. He had seen the light too. "Another one. They're firing from the ridge."
Rafi squinted toward the sound and saw them: silhouettes on the far ridge, human-shaped, standing with weapons that glowed. Energy lanced out from their hands and forms, cutting the beasts as if the air itself had teeth. The attackers — the Awakened — moved with a terrifying grace. Every strike unmade something wrong in the world.
And they were fighting others like them.
A jagged cry ripped through the field as a broad-shouldered man, mid-thirties, collided with another figure at the center of the melee. For a split second the figures locked — eyes that weren't eyes meeting — and then one of them detonated in a bloom of ash and light, collapsing in a shower of sparks. The man with the scar staggered, face white.
"They're not just fighting the beasts," he said. "They're fighting each other. Recruiters. Raiders. The Awakened turn on each other every time the boundary forms. It's a free-for-all."
Rafi's mouth went dry. "Boundary?" he asked, though he wasn't sure he wanted the answer.
The young girl who'd been holding the stuffed thing began to sob without sound. The woman who had warned them earlier crouched and checked the pulse of a bleeding man. Rafi's hands were trembling now, not from the chill but from some deeper, building current — a charge humming under his skin like a wasp's nest.
He didn't feel special. He felt like an empty pocket. He had nothing to give the world and, for the first time since he could remember, nothing to hide.
A flare of heat blinked at the edge of his vision. Without thinking, he moved. That movement — a small, automatic step forward to shove someone out of the way — felt wrong and right at once. The world narrowed. He heard not sound but meaning: the exact place a creature would strike, the width of its maw, the angle of its elbow. A hand gripped his forearm from behind — the scarred man — and shoved him into a roll that landed Rafi on his feet facing a creature no bigger than a dog but with the head of some nightmare bird, eyes bright as coal.
Rafi's mind, which had the training of years spent watching, hiding, and surviving, fired in jagged clarity. He ducked. He shoved his right palm forward out of habit — as if he were basing a lie with a practiced hand — and something answered.
It wasn't a shout. It wasn't a raised weapon. It was a low, humming pressure that gathered in his sternum and pushed out through his hand like a pulse. The air in front of his palm stilled. A seam of light snapped in the space between him and the beast, and where light met flesh the creature screamed and slumped, smoke curling from a charred patch along its side.
Rafi fell back on reflex. The scarred man swore loudly and grabbed his face as if he'd burned him. "What—?" the man mouthed, eyes wide.
Rafi's fingers tingled. The sensation in his sternum was not entirely pleasant; it felt like a small bar of white heat had been shoved into his chest and then pulled out in quick, painless lurches. He tasted metal, and for a moment the world narrowed to the rhythm of his heartbeat.
"You did that," the girl whispered, pointing at his hand, then at him. Her eyes were huge.
He stared at his palm as if it belonged to someone else. A faint, iridescent mark lay across the back of his hand — a line that looked like a hair of light. It wasn't there a second ago.
"Chosen," someone behind them said, voice flat as a postcard. The woman who'd warned them peered at Rafi like a baker inspecting bread. "You have the Sigil."
Rafi swallowed. Words tried to fit into his mouth, but his throat had gone dry. He remembered the flash before — the [You have been Chosen] that had landed inside his skull with the same inevitability as a verdict. The cup — the bench — the plan to run. The pieces of him that had been steady were shaking.
"Welcome to the Cut," the scarred man muttered. "If you survive the opening, you go to the gates. If you piss off the wrong person, you don't get past."
Someone else — a tall, angular woman with a braid spitting sparks when she moved — pushed up from where she'd been rolling in the dust. She fixed him with eyes like flint. "Control it," she said. "Manage the output. If your gift chews through you, no one will want you."
"Chews through—?" Rafi began.
The woman's lips thinned. "Every power has a price. The Eclipsera doesn't give without taking. Maybe it burns time, or blood, or sight. Maybe it shaves a piece of your heart off each time you push. We won't know until it chews a little."
Rafi swallowed again. In the same instant that someone else's hand pressed against a torn sleeve, he felt something else: a thin, cold burn across his temple. He reached up and his hand came away with a smear of something dark. For a moment he thought it was soot; then he saw that the hair at his temple had turned pale, a streak the color of moonlight. It hadn't been there before. He frowned and, for the first time, the taste of coffee — the bitter sip on the bench — flashed back and tasted like ash.
A life ledger counting down. A price. Little things, he thought. Little things that cut.
"Listen," the scarred man said, voice lower, urgent. "We move. Boundaries don't hold. Keep your eyes on the ridge, and don't do anything flashy unless you want a buyer to notice."
Rafi wanted to ask what a buyer was. He wanted to know if there was any chance the ledger men could find him here, in this torn, dying place. He wanted to ask whether the old plan — the small escape that had been everything and nothing — still meant anything. Instead he kept his mouth closed. He checked the mark on the back of his hand. It flickered like a living thing, then settled into thin, moonlit ink.
A cluster of shapes moved down the slope toward them. They were not the beasts that had come first. They were humans, or close enough to it — armor patched together from car wrecks and scaffolding, weapons that had been welded from pipe. Their faces were painted with streaks of white and red. They moved like wolves.
"We're bait now," the woman with the braid said. She readied herself. "Make your first move count. Save your breath for the noise."
Rafi steadied his shoulders. The fear in his gut tasted like metal, old and raw. The bitter coffee that had started his day felt like a memory from another life. He thought of the porcelain breaking on the concrete, the steam lost in a city that had decided he was expendable.
He had not asked for being chosen. Nobody did. But the world had given him a mark and, like it or not, he had a way to cut.
The first of the raiders burst through their ring like a cork popping. The scarred man charged, hitting the raider hard enough to spill a cloud of dust. The girl screamed and shoved someone aside. The creature of metal and cloth lunged.
Rafi didn't think. He reached, and the same pressure rose in his sternum and poured out of him like a tide. This time, the effect was different — less of a flash and more of a coil. The air around the raider shivered and then froze, like a caught breath. He smelled something like old bread burning; the raider's shoulder buckled and his weapon clattered to the stone. The raider fell, twitching, smoke curling from the place where the light had touched him.
Rafi felt each use like a pinch, then a deeper ache that pressed behind his eyes. When the first wave of raiders fell back, they looked at him like he'd robbed them of a future. The woman with the braid nodded at him once, short and sharp.
But when Rafi reached up to rub his chest, his fingers came away sticky with something that wasn't blood — or it was and he just couldn't tell, the color dull and strange. He tasted metallic, and for an instant a memory flickered — a small window he had kept shut: the laugh of a boy who'd stolen a pocketed coin, a dog that had once followed him for a day. The memory slotted away from him as if it had been borrowed and not returned.
He pressed both hands to his sternum and felt the slow, implacable beat of his heart. Each beat seemed to count down like a clock that had begun to run only once you'd noticed it.
Someone behind him hissed. "You okay?"
Rafi managed a laugh that tasted of smoke. "Peachy," he said.
It was a lie. The mark on his hand warmed like an ember, a bright, insignificant thing that promised to glow and eat if fed. He had been given a tool — a gift, possibly divine, or at least dangerous — and a debt had been stamped across his skin.
He swallowed hard. The city he'd left on a bench with a cup of expensive coffee felt impossibly far away, and yet a splinter of it remained: the memory of bitter warmth on his tongue, a porcelain cup breaking on hard concrete. He felt that cup as if it were a talisman — something that meant his life before and after.
As the raiders skirmished and the Awakened on the ridge settled into lethal calm, one thought burned brighter than fear: survival. Not escape, not riches, but the raw, animal insistence to live. Maybe he could bargain. Maybe he could sell what the mark could make him into. Maybe the ledger men would care about the price of the divine. Or maybe each use would carve more out of him until he was a husk.
He slid a trembling hand into his pocket and found a scrap of paper with the last of his plan scrawled on it. The words were smudged, but he could still read enough to know it had once meant something. He folded the paper back into his palm and tucked it away.
Somewhere above, the sky churned. A thunderclap like a curse cracked across the broken towers and a glittering rain began to fall — not water, but ash that stung the eyes. The Awakened on the ridge shifted like predators testing the wind. Watchers, the woman with the braid said under her breath — buyers, raiders, recruiters. Everything had eyes now.
Rafi stood. Around him, the ring of survivors braced, ready to move again. The mark on his hand pulsed faintly, like a heartbeat he could not yet name. He felt hollow and full all at once, like something waiting to be fed.
He thought of the cup. He thought of the bitter, expensive coffee warming his hands on a bench that would never belong to him. He imagined the porcelain in his fingers — fragile, white, perfect — and the way it had shattered into pieces on the concrete.
"Figures," he said softly, the words lost beneath the roar of the world. "My last cup, and now this."
The woman with the braid glanced at him, something that might have been pity, or a calculation, flickering across her face. She gripped her weapon and nodded toward the ridge. "Move," she said. "If you want to live, you learn fast."
Rafi sucked in a breath that tasted of ash and iron and the ghost of coffee. He flexed his fingers until the mark throbbed like a living thing. Then, keeping his eyes on the ridge and his chest ready to push the light whenever it counted, he followed the others into the broken city — into the Cut, into whatever bargain the Eclipsera had designed.
Behind him, the ruined street he had known, the porcelain shards, the memory of the bench — they were small things now. Yet he held them close in his mind like a coin you keep in a pocket because it remembers your name.
He didn't know how much the mark would take, or what it would cost in the long ledger of a life. But for the first time since he'd counted his last credits, something else stirred: not hope, not exactly, but a stubborn, scabbed insistence that he would not disappear quietly.
The sky flared. The boundary shifted. The Cut swallowed another breath of the world and spat out a new kind of hunger.
Rafi tightened his grip on the scrap of paper in his pocket, on the memory of bitter coffee and porcelain, and marched forward.
The last cup was broken. The rest would have to be earned.