Ash had been in the back training yard for six minutes before Leon arrived.

He knew because he’d counted. Not anxiously, but just because the part of his brain that refused to idle needed something to do. So Ash let it do what it wanted. In this case it wanted to count. Cracks in the concrete. Students crossing the far courtyard. Clouds moving northeast at whatever pace clouds moved.

The counting wasn’t meaningful. It just filled the space.

Leon’s entourage arranged themselves in their usual semicircle. Ash watched them settle into position like they were ducklings following their mother.

"Still here," Leon said.

He said it every time. The delivery changed. The meaning never did. Ash had long since figured out that responding, or not responding, produced approximately the same result, so he generally chose silence on the grounds that silence required less upkeep.

The shove came. Ash took a step back, steadied, returned to his original position. His bag strap caught his shoulder and he adjusted it. Someone behind Leon laughed.

Three years of this.

He’d been doing it since fifteen, since the Threshold rewrote the world and forgot to include him. Everyone in his class had Awakened. Everyone in the academy. Statistically, everyone everywhere—99.7% of the global population over twelve, flooded with power born from whatever truth they’d been hiding from. The boy who secretly resented his family. The woman with thirty years of buried anger. The man who’d spent a decade pretending he didn’t want to watch everything burn.

All of them got something.

Ash’s translucent blue screen had read:

[ DOMINION: NULL ] 𝒻𝓇𝑒𝘦𝘸𝑒𝒷𝓃ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝒸ℴ𝘮

[ RANK: — ]

[ DESCRIPTION: — ]

Three dashes where his name should have been. No power. No Shade integration. No explanation. Just the quiet understanding that in a world where even the most mediocre person had something, he was the kind of exception that didn’t even get to be interesting.

"You’re not listening." Leon’s voice carried a note of genuine offense.

Ash looked at him.

He was, technically, listening. He had heard the last forty seconds of Leon’s monologue and could have played it back accurately. He just hadn’t been in the mood to.

"I was," Ash said.

"Then what did I say?"

Ash weighed whether he should answer correctly versus going quiet.

He chose the latter.

Leon shoved him harder. Ash’s back hit the wall. The impact traveled up his spine in a way that would ache tomorrow. He saw a smear his elbow had just picked up from the concrete. Gray, centered on the left sleeve, probably fixable in the block C washing machines.

He thought those had been repaired. Someone had mentioned it last week. He was fairly sure of it.

At least, he hoped they’d been repaired.

Leon’s face appeared in his field of vision, now uncomfortably close.

That was new.

He’d never done the proximity thing before. Ash adjusted his expectation of how the next few minutes would go. New behavior usually meant escalation. He’d have to decide if this became the kind of situation where actually trying to leave was worth the extended effort of being followed.

Leon crouched, bringing himself down to where Ash was half-leaning against the wall, and took hold of his chin between two fingers.

He forced his face to look up at him.

His expression was almost gentle. That was significantly worse than everything else.

"You know what’s sad?" he asked.

Ash waited.

"You’re still here. Three years. An awakened with zero power. Everyone hates you. Everyone wants you gone. And you still show up every day."

He tilted his head slightly, like the question was a genuine one.

"What are you hoping for?"

The back of Ash’s throat went dry.

He opened his mouth. He wanted to say something neutral, something that closed the loop, something that let him stand up and walk back across the courtyard and eat whatever the mess hall had left and go to sleep.

He had the shape of the next four hours clearly in his head. He just needed to get from here to there.

Except the thing he’d spent three years keeping at a manageable volume didn’t wait.

It said, from somewhere below his ribs:

I want to be someone.

He didn’t mean to think it. It surfaced how old injuries do. Not from anything dramatic, just from an angle of pressure in the wrong place.

He hadn’t meant to mean it. But it was there, fully formed, with a weight behind it that had been accumulating since before the Threshold, since before the academy, since before he had words for the hollow space where a self was supposed to be.

I want to be someone I want to be someone I WANT TO BE—

The world inverted.

No sound. No light. No sensation of movement. One second he was in his body, feeling the ache between his shoulder blades. Then something inside him that had been facing the wrong direction for eighteen years turned around all at once.

He felt it like something starving recognizing a smell.

The training yard was gone.

The space that replaced it had the same walls. Same dimensions. Same chain-link fence along the south edge, same eastern light coming from the same angle. Every physical detail of the training yard, present and accounted for.

All of it was wrong.

The colors bled at the edges. The gray concrete softened at the corners into something almost blue, then washed out entirely before the wall met the sky. The chain-link left faint copper traces in the air where it caught the light, color seeping past its boundaries like something wet. Hard lines dissolved when Ash didn’t look at them directly. The shadows pooled slow and deliberate, flowing how ink spreads in still water, and they followed logic that almost held but didn’t quite.

He looked down at his hands. His skin looked like his skin. But the creases in his palms were too dark, like someone had drawn them in after the fact.

He was inside something.

Leon stood ten feet away, frozen mid-expression. Chest rising, falling, at a rhythm just slightly too slow to be natural. His eyes still open.

Something behind the pause in the world was watching. Ash could feel that much. Present and aware and completely unable to move.

At the far end of the yard, something else was watching back.

It had Leon’s height, Leon’s build, Leon’s uniform pressed to regulation precision, every button in place. But the face at this distance wasn’t quite right. The eyes were wider than they should be and wet with something Ash couldn’t name, and underneath the surface expression there was nothing that resembled cruelty.

It looked like something that had been frightened for a very long time and had learned to keep its posture while it happened.

Ash had no powers. No weapon. No understanding of where he was, or how he’d gotten here. He wasn’t quite sure whether leaving was something he was allowed to choose. The air smelled like chalk dust and old concrete, which was somehow the most unsettling part of all of it. Even the wrong version of a place should smell different.

The thing wearing Leon’s face opened its mouth.

He only loves me when I make someone bleed.

The voice was smaller than Leon’s. Less constructed.

The watercolor light flickered. A slow, sourceless shift, like a page turning in another room. The shadows at the yard’s edge spread another inch outward. At the boundary where the concrete blurred into nothing, the air changed pressure in a way Ash felt behind his eyes.

Then the hunger opened in his chest.

Not a metaphor. A physical event. An absence in the center of his ribs, a hollow that had been there his whole life and had just, for the first time, decided it was done waiting. It wanted to be filled. It had always wanted to be filled. It had simply been too quiet for him to hear until now, when something had turned the volume up all the way at once.

More, said the voice that lived in the hollow.

Ash’s back straightened on its own.

He noted, with distant interest, that he was not afraid.

He took a step forward.