Derek woke to the small chaos of his dorm room—clothes slung over a chair, a stack of engineering printouts teetering on the corner of his desk, and the half-empty bottle of Sprite sweating beads of condensation on the table. A thin slice of sunlight cut across the rumpled bed like an accusation.
He lay there for a moment, feeling the unfamiliar lightness of youth in his bones. The body was scrawny and underfed, wrists too thin to hide the veins, collarbones visible beneath a loose T-shirt. Jet-black hair fell into his face; when he pushed it back, his green eyes—sharp, curious, too vivid—stared up at the ceiling.
At least he didn't have a roommate to complain about the mess.
A small mercy. A small victory. A perk of that full-ride scholarship he'd fought tooth and nail for.
He rummaged in the fridge and found breakfast: a cold leftover burger and the last of the Sprite. Not exactly gourmet, but it would keep him alive until lunch. He ate mechanically, more from habit than hunger, and shoved the wrapper into a trash bin overflowing with other students' detritus.
Second semester. First year. Engineering.
He should have been excited—new classes, new problems to solve, new opportunities. Instead he felt a low, constant throb of dissatisfaction. Engineering 154, Principles of Engineering, was underway in the lecture hall downstairs. It was remedial, a course aimed at students who'd never so much as cracked an actual machine outside of lab hours.
He sat in the middle row out of habit, a neutral place from which to observe. The professor scratched on the board, talking in slow loops about basic statics and definitions Derek had internalized years ago. Students around him whispered, scrolled their phones, doodled.
Fifteen minutes in, boredom became insult.
Without thinking, Derek closed his notebook, slid his backpack over his shoulder, and stood. Heads turned. Whispers spread. He ignored them and walked out, the door murmuring shut behind him like a punctuation mark.
Outside, the campus air was crisp. He walked with no destination, letting memory carry him away.
Back to the life before this one.
---
In his first life, Derek had been born into precision: beds perfectly made, shoes aligned at strict thirty-degree angles, early morning runs, and lesson plans disguised as play. His father's job in the CIA was a secret even to most of the family's servants; his mother served in JSOC, one of the rare women who could move through classified operations with the ease of someone born to it.
From the moment he could toddle, training arrived in neat, unrelenting doses. Physical conditioning before breakfast. Observation drills disguised as games. Intelligence doctrine folded into bedtime stories. Mossad tradecraft, SVR counterintelligence, MI6 surveillance avoidance—names and lessons that meant nothing to other children—were routine to him. They weren't raising a son; they were engineering an asset.
He rebelled in the only way he could: he stopped building a body for war and built a mind for peace. Books replaced pull-ups; equations replaced drills. He walked out of the life they'd mapped for him and sought refuge in academia.
And then, after a life of brilliance and betrayal, he'd died.
Now he had another chance.
In this Earth, however, the saving hand of privilege never reached him. He had been left at a church as a toddler, bounced between group homes and foster families whose interest in him often lasted only as long as the stipend check. Most who endured that path fell into easy traps—crime, gangs, quick money. Derek had done the unexpected: he'd studied. He'd made books his armor.
He'd been bullied—skinny, weak, "easy to push around"—but he kept his head down and studied anyway. That stubbornness had earned him a full scholarship to Harvard when the rest of the world assumed he had none.
For a while, the scholarship felt like salvation.
Until Veronica Sanders.
Veronica was an emblem of everything the freshman year swarmed around: blonde hair that caught sunlight like polished glass, a smile that disarmed, and eyes that always seemed to be evaluating the purchase price of everything she touched. She'd attached herself to Derek when it was convenient—intelligent study partner, reliable A-grade source, a warm presence she could steer as she pleased.
They kissed sometimes. Small, practiced gestures that warmed the cold places in him and made him believe in permission again. But she was practical. When athletes, rich kids, and men with more money than conscience came into play, Derek's usefulness evaporated. He was no longer compatible with her lifestyle.
He remembered the way she'd said it—cool, almost bored.
"We're not compatible, Derek. I need someone who fits my life."
He had felt small—stupid—for loving a comfort that had been conditional from the start. In the quiet after she left, the lesson came back to him like a bruise: being good for goodness' sake had never protected him. Waiting for a world to reciprocate had always ended with him on the losing side.
He thought about Plato, about how philosophy had always loved paradoxes. In his head he repeated the line he'd once muttered in a darker life: "If a truly righteous man showed himself to the world, he would be persecuted, mocked, and eventually crucified." The words tasted like salt and iron.
He'd already seen that truth twice.
Righteousness without reward was self-inflicted weakness.
Derek pressed his palm against the dorm door, feeling the cool metal under his fingers. For the first time since waking, a new pattern of thought emerged—one not of hope for others, but for himself.
No more altruism that left him empty.
No more generosity that others weaponized.
No more waiting for justice that never arrived.
He would be deliberate. He would be strategic. He would become something they could not ignore.
The training his parents had hammered into him—the surveillance tradecraft, the cold discipline—no longer felt like a past he'd abandoned. It felt like an instrument he could pick up and use on his own terms.
He would repurpose every lesson. This time, the intelligence wouldn't be for someone else's war; it would be for his climb.
He pulled out his phone and opened a blank note. The first line he typed, slow and careful, was not an apology or a promise to be kind. It was a plan.
Step one: survive, quietly.
Step two: gather resources.
Step three: never be dependent again.
Outside, life continued with the usual student hustle—footsteps, laughter, a bike bell clanging somewhere down the walk. Inside, Derek felt something cold and certain unfurl: not malice, but method. He had been given a second ledger of life. He would write on it not the virtues that others stole, but the equation of his power.
He shoved the cold burger into his backpack—food and fuel for a day of small, necessary calculations—and walked out, green eyes set on the campus as if he were measuring angles no one else could see.
This time, he would build himself into an answer no one could ignore.