The plaza, once held in a sacred, hopeful silence, now simmered with a chaotic, overwhelming electricity.
Some people cried with joy, their faces illuminated by the fresh, crystalline light of their newly bonded Arkans. Others just cried, sinking to their knees as the realization of their rejection set in. All around me, the chosen celebrated. Families embraced, lifting their children into the air; friends screamed in disbelief, their skin still radiating the residual, divine warmth from heaven.
The glow I never received.
Then, a collective murmur rippled through the crowd, and hundreds of heads turned toward the night sky. A massive, corporate administration blimp drifted slowly into view above the plaza. Its colossal underscreen flickered, casting a harsh, artificial magenta and cyan light over the sea of upturned faces. Elegant neon lettering began to scroll across the display:
"CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL NEWLY THREADED! YOUR JOURNEY BEGINS NOW."
A stylized logo of the Upper Iris Administration pulsed beneath the text. To the city, this wasn't a spiritual miracle; it was an administrative triumph. A fresh batch of assets had been unlocked.
The crowd erupted in a fresh wave of cheers, the artificial neon light drowning out the fading majesty of the moon. I just stood there, my shoes glued to the cold stone, staring up at that scrolling text. I wondered what it meant to the administration—what it meant to the world—that I wasn't among them. I wasn't an asset. A blank space.
Beside me, Yinoh fidgeted awkwardly, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.
He didn't know what to say. Of course, he didn't. How could he? He hummed with a soft, breathtaking silver radiance that pulsed gently with his heartbeat. He belonged to the future now. I belonged to the dirt.
I forced my mouth to move, pinning a fake smile onto my face even as something deep inside my chest felt like it was folding in on itself, collapsing like a dying star.
"I'm really happy for you, Yinoh," I said. The words sat heavy and wrong on my tongue—bitter, metallic, like swallowing copper. I was happy for him. A part of me, the part that loved him like a brother, was relieved he was chosen. But the rest of me... the rest of me just clawed at my insides. It hurt. It hurt so much I could barely breathe.
Yinoh looked at me, his bright eyes clouding with an agonizing pity. "Thanks, Hashy."
I tried to chuckle to break the suffocating tension, but the sound slipped out thin and cracked, like brittle glass under a heavy boot. "Hey, cheer up!" I said, my voice rising a shade too light, a note too desperate. "It's fine. Really. I'll just—uh—give it another shot next year. If there's any leftover thread in the sky by then."
"Yeah…" he replied, his voice barely a whisper. He looked away, unable to hold my gaze. Even he didn't sound like he believed it. The administration didn't care about leftovers.
We walked home without speaking.
The city around us was alive with celebration, but a dead zone of absolute silence seemed to follow the two of us. Our footsteps fell into sync out of sheer habit—left, right, left, right—echoing against the pavement of Upper Iris. But nothing about the rhythm felt familiar anymore. The space between us, usually filled with endless stories, banter, and shared dreams, had stretched into an impassable chasm. Every time his arm brushed mine, the residual heat of his Arkan singed my skin, a physical reminder of where I had been left behind.
At the iron gate of my house, I stopped. I couldn't drag him into my wreckage, and I couldn't bear to stand in his light for another second.
"Well… see you tomorrow," I said, keeping my hands shoved deep into the pockets of my oversized hoodie. I tried to flash that easy, casual smile again, but my facial muscles refused to cooperate.
"S-sure," Yinoh replied. He raised a hand to wave, but it was half-hearted, heavy with a shared grief he didn't know how to carry.
I turned my back and watched him walk away through the gap in the gate. Even in the dimming streetlights, the silver glow clung to his silhouette like a royal cloak. A reward for a purpose fulfilled.
And me? All I had left was the exhausting, suffocating duty to pretend I wasn't entirely broken.
The moment I stepped through the front gate, my pace slowed to a crawl. The disappointment hadn't just hit me; it had been creeping under my skin for the last three miles, a slow-acting poison. Now, in the privacy of the front yard, it was choking me. It was a physical mass crawling up my throat, cutting off my air.
The front door creaked softly as I turned the brass knob, praying the house would be empty and dark.
When I stepped into the foyer, my heart stopped.
The living room light was still casting a dim, amber glow. Dad was fast asleep on the couch, entirely exhausted. His trusted briefcase sat upright on the floor beside him. Data sheets, research papers, and schematics from the lab were scattered across the coffee table, and his reading glasses were still perched precariously on the bridge of his nose.
He had stayed up waiting for me. He had wanted to be the first to see my Arkan. He had wanted to celebrate his hero.
A strange, terrifying kind of relief washed over me, immediately followed by a wave of intense guilt. He was asleep. I didn't have to explain the emptiness to him. I didn't have to watch the unblinking hope drain from his face. Not yet.
I tiptoed toward the stairs, each step slower and softer than the last, terrified that a single creaking floorboard would wake him and force the confrontation. I felt like a thief in my own home, stealing away into the dark with my failure.
Reaching the landing, I slipped into my room, shut the door with an agonizingly slow click, and turned the lock.
The moment the lock clicked, my knees gave out. I collapsed onto the mattress, not even bothering to take off my sneakers.
I stared blindly at the ceiling. No sound. No light. Just the quiet. But the quiet wasn't peaceful; it was heavy, dense, and full of teeth.
And then, the dam broke. The tears came—hot, aching, and silent, tracking down my temples and soaking into the fabric of the pillow.
"Mom…" I whispered into the empty, dark room, the syllable fracturing on my lips. If she were here, would the sky have looked at me differently? Would she have found something in me worth taking?
The night didn't end; it just grew heavier, solidifying into a prison.
I stared at the pale outline of the ceiling until my vision blurred into a static mess, counting ragged breaths I couldn't seem to steady. Every time I dared to close my eyes, the phantom ghost of Yinoh's brilliant silver glow burned against the back of my eyelids—mocked by the distant, fading laughter of the chosen echoing from the streets below. My own silence wasn't just the absence of sound; it was a physical weight, the loudest, most suffocating thing in the room. Time stopped moving forward. It just pooled around my bed, stagnant, cold, and drowning.
When sleep finally claimed me near dawn, it was thin and frayed, offering absolutely no refuge from the reality of the dark.
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Next day
A sliver of light eventually cut through the darkness, sharp and uninvited.
Sunlight clawed its way through the gap in the curtains, painting a bright, linear gash across my bedroom floor. It should have felt like a new day. A fresh start. A clean slate. But the warmth of the sun on my skin felt entirely unearned, a mockery of the cold reality sitting in my gut.
Everything had changed, yet nothing had.
The normal, mundane sounds of the house began to filter through the cracks of my door: the sharp, clinical clatter of plates in the kitchen, the heavy, familiar thud of Dad's footsteps down the hallway, the distant, muffled hum of Upper Iris's morning traffic. A world that hadn't stopped spinning.
It was unbearable in its normalcy. How could the breakfast plates rattle so casually? How could the automated transit lines run on time? The entire world had smoothly transitioned into the future, leaving me entirely behind, suspended forever in the exact shadow where the moonlight had rejected me.
I dragged myself up and sat on the edge of the mattress, my hands trembling violently as I stared at the wood grain of the floor. My eyes were entirely dry now, yet they felt like blocks of lead weighing down my skull.
The sun continued to rise, completely indifferent to the one boy left behind in the dark. The world moved forward with an exhausting, mechanical precision.
But I... I remained exactly where the heavens had searched me and found nothing.