The final bell rang, and the whole school seemed to exhale at once, chairs scraping, voices rising, the particular chaos of two hundred kids remembering all at the same time that they were finally free.
Adrian packed his bag without any real hurry. There was no one waiting on him to move faster. He slung the strap over one shoulder and made his way out through the crowd, weaving around clusters of classmates already breaking off into their usual groups, laughing about something that had happened in third period, making plans for the evening he wasn't a part of. Marie caught his eye once across the hallway and gave him a small wave, but her friends were already pulling her toward the front gates, and he lifted a hand back just in time to watch her disappear into the crowd with them.
He didn't mind, mostly. He'd stopped minding a long time ago, or told himself he had.
The walk to his usual restaurant was the same as always, familiar enough that his feet carried him there without much thought. It was the one part of his day that felt entirely his, no one to answer to, no one to perform for. He liked that. He liked the noise of it too, oddly, the clatter of dishes and overlapping conversation that belonged to other people's lives, filling up the space around him without ever actually including him in it.
The restaurant was busier than usual when he pushed through the door, and he scanned the room out of habit, looking for a table near the window, the one he always tried for.
That was when the voice reached him.
Calm. Unhurried. Pitched just low enough to feel private even in a crowded room, and somehow it cut clean through every other sound around it, like it had been aimed specifically at him.
"Greetings, Adrian Blackbell."
Adrian's whole body went still.
He turned, slowly, and found a man standing a few feet away, tall, composed, an umbrella resting easily against his shoulder, inclining his head in something between a nod and a bow. The man was smiling. It should have been reassuring. It wasn't.
"I'm guessing your sister Lily is doing well," the man continued, pleasant, conversational, as though he were commenting on the weather, "and that your parents are keeping fine in Egypt."
For a moment, Adrian couldn't process a single word of it.
His mind blanked entirely, then rushed back in all at once, too fast, too loud. This was a stranger. A stranger he had never seen before in his life, standing in the middle of a restaurant, saying his full name like it was nothing, like it belonged to him to say. Lily's name. His parents, and where they currently were, information Adrian hadn't told anyone outside his immediate family in weeks.
His stomach dropped somewhere below the floor.
How does he know that? How does he know any of that?
His pulse had picked up without his permission, a tight, fast drumming behind his ribs, and his hand found the strap of his backpack and gripped it hard enough that his knuckles went pale. Every instinct he had was screaming the same single message, clear and simple: something was wrong here, badly wrong, and the smartest thing he could do right now was turn around and run, find an adult, find anyone, put distance between himself and whatever this was.
He didn't move.
He wanted to. He genuinely, urgently wanted to, and some small, rational part of his brain kept insisting that this was exactly the moment every safety lesson he'd ever been taught was built for. And yet his feet stayed rooted to the floor, his breath caught somewhere shallow in his chest, and he found himself simply staring instead, held in place by something he couldn't name and didn't like not being able to name.
Maybe it was the man's face. There was something almost unnatural about how composed it was, how perfectly the light seemed to fall across it, his smile easy and warm in a way that felt engineered rather than accidental. His eyes were a bright, striking blue, catching the afternoon sun spilling through the restaurant windows until they looked less like eyes and more like something polished, gem-cut, deliberately beautiful. Adrian felt something in his chest loosen slightly just looking into them, some of the sharp edge of his fear dulling despite every instinct telling him it shouldn't.
He hated that it was working. He hated it, and it kept working anyway.
"Who... who are you?" Adrian finally managed, his voice smaller than he wanted it to be, cracking slightly around the edges. "How do you know my sister's name? How do you know where my parents are?"
The question came out half accusation, half plea, and even as he asked it, some traitorous, quiet part of him was already leaning toward believing whatever answer this stranger was about to give him.
"My name is Mike Jackson. I'm a freelance journalist." He lowered his umbrella from his shoulder, closed it, and gave a small, formal bow. "I've been asked to pass along some information, and something else besides. Would you spare me a few minutes?"
Everything about him seemed deliberate somehow, the way his hand moved, the way his mouth shaped each word, even the unhurried blink of his eyes. Adrian found himself staring longer than he meant to, some distant part of his brain quietly wondering if this was what people meant when they said someone was too handsome to be real. A couple at a nearby table had turned to look too, their conversation forgotten mid-sentence.
Mike shifted the umbrella to his other hand and started toward a small café down the street. Adrian followed without being asked to, and without questioning why he was following. Whatever wariness he'd been holding onto a minute ago had already thinned considerably, replaced by something closer to trust, the kind he didn't remember choosing to give. He'd felt something like this once before, he realized distantly, the day a clown had handed him a strange invitation outside the school gates. That memory surfaced and slipped away again just as fast, tucked aside for some later version of himself to deal with.
They settled at a small round table outside the café, facing each other. Mike ordered a coffee. Adrian didn't order anything, his stomach still too knotted for food.
"I'd rather no one else hear this conversation," Mike said, his gaze drifting somewhere just past Adrian's shoulder, unfocused. He murmured something too quiet to catch, and a faint shimmer of pink briefly rippled through the air around them before fading into nothing.
Adrian blinked, uncertain what he'd just seen, if he'd seen anything at all. He said nothing.
"There. No one will hear us now," Mike said simply, as though he'd just adjusted a napkin.
He leaned back into his chair, crossing one leg over the other, and folded his hands together on the table, resting his chin lightly against them. A faint, knowing smile touched his mouth as he studied Adrian.
"So," Eric said, "how are things at home?"
Adrian didn't hesitate, the question landing somewhere he clearly hadn't been asked to visit in a while. "Nothing special, honestly. If I had to pick one word, boring. It's quiet at night, which I actually like, but there's only so long you can sit in silence before it starts feeling less like peace and more like nothing at all. My sister Lily and I don't really get along; our interests don't line up at all. Sometimes I wonder how we're even related."
He kept his eyes down on the table as he said it, the words coming easier than they should have for a stranger he'd known less than twenty minutes.
Eric listened without interrupting, filing the answer away with quiet satisfaction. Truth was proving remarkably efficient. It had taken barely any time at all for its passive pull to settle over the boy, this openness, this willingness to hand over more than anyone reasonably would to someone he'd just met. Adrian trusted too easily, clearly, more a product of youth and inexperience than anything unusual. Still, there was something almost amusing about it, having someone answer every question without so much as blinking, like the truth simply fell out of him whenever asked for.
"No friends, then?" Eric asked, gentler now, his voice dropping into something warmer.
Adrian shook his head. "I'm not really the type people warm up to after one conversation. Quiet, mostly. Bad mood in the mornings too, so people assume I've got an attitude, and then I don't talk much either, which doesn't help. There's really only one person who bothers with me. I think it's mostly pity, honestly. I don't really know why she does it."
Something conflicted crossed his face as he said it, a boy who clearly wanted connection and had learned, somewhere along the way, not to trust it even when it was offered.
So, He struggles socially? Noted.
Eric already had a rough sketch of Adrian from what Edward had passed along, but there was a difference between a file and a person, between secondhand facts and hearing someone describe their own loneliness out loud, unprompted. He kept the conversation going a while longer, steering it through a few more questions, gathering what he could, though he wasn't in any particular hurry. This was only their first meeting. There would be time for the rest later.
For now, something else needed doing.
His easy, amused expression sobered as he settled his gaze fully on Adrian. "I have a question for you," he said. "Just yes or no is fine. Would you like to become an Aura user?"
"An aura what?" Adrian repeated, brow furrowing in genuine confusion. His mind scrambled briefly for context, wondering if this was some strange joke, one of those sigma-aura memes that occasionally floated across his feed. But Eric's expression hadn't shifted even slightly, still calm, still entirely serious, and whatever half-formed laugh had been building in Adrian's chest died before it reached his throat.
"Aura users," Eric said. "Some call them Walkers, depending on where you're from. I won't be able to explain much more than the basics right now, not because I want to keep you in the dark, but because certain knowledge is genuinely dangerous before you've actually become one. In simple terms, we're people who can wield a power called Aura. Superhuman, in every sense that matters. Living alongside the world you know, mostly unseen by it." He paused, letting that settle. "I'm one myself. Let me show you."
He'd finished his coffee some time ago, the empty cup sitting forgotten near his elbow throughout the conversation. He picked it up now, almost casually, and tossed it straight up into the air.
Adrian's eyes followed it on instinct, bracing for the inevitable crash, the shatter of ceramic against pavement.
It never came.
The cup fell most of the way, and then, a hand's width from the ground, it simply stopped, hovering there in open defiance of everything Adrian understood about how the world was supposed to work. Eric reached out and caught it without any real urgency, setting it back down on the table as though nothing unusual had happened at all, his eyes flicking briefly around them to make sure no one else had caught the moment.
Adrian's mouth had fallen open somewhere in the middle of it, and it stayed that way for several long seconds, his mind visibly struggling to process what his eyes had just shown him.
"If we were somewhere more private," Eric said, a faint, amused smile tugging at his mouth, "I'd have had it float straight back into my hand instead. Bit more theatrical."
Adrian didn't laugh. He couldn't have, even if some part of him understood the joke. A small, stubborn corner of his brain was still hunting for the trick, the wire, the sleight of hand, some rational explanation that would let the world make sense again. But he found himself circling back to the same conclusion each time. He didn't think this man was lying to him. He hadn't thought that once, not from the very first sentence out of his mouth, and even faced with something this impossible, that certainty hadn't wavered.
"Will I get something like that too?" The words burst out of him louder than he'd meant, his earlier fear entirely swallowed now by something bright and urgent and desperately hopeful. He'd spent years imagining this exact moment without ever really believing it would come, curled up on his bed re-reading comics, watching heroes leap between buildings and bend the impossible to their will. Superman. Spider-Man. All the ones who used what they'd been given to protect people, to matter, to be more than just another quiet kid nobody noticed in a crowded hallway. He'd promised himself once, half-joking, half-serious, that if he ever got powers of his own, he'd become exactly that. Someone people could count on.
Eric looked at him for a long moment, at the wide, unguarded excitement written across Adrian's face, and something in his own expression quietly folded inward. He glanced away first, down at his hands resting on the table, and when he spoke again, his voice had lost some of its earlier polish.
He remembered his own beginning too well for comfort. Before the powers, before any of it, there had just been him and Max, two kids finding their way through a life that hadn't been kind to either of them. He remembered the day his own Aura had first stirred to life, the disbelief, the joy, the same wide-eyed hope currently written all over Adrian's face. He'd felt invincible that day. Chosen, even.
Years had worn all of that down since. He understood now, in ways he wished he still didn't have to, exactly what this power actually cost the people who carried it, and understood the weight it left behind long after the initial thrill faded. He'd grown around that pain the way a tree grows around a nail driven too deep to remove, and grown was the only honest word for it, because there had been no way through it that didn't hurt.
And here was this boy in front of him, thrilled, hopeful, already imagining himself soaring between rooftops, saving people, becoming someone the world could look up to. Eric didn't need to ask to know exactly what Adrian was picturing. He'd pictured the same things once, at roughly the same age, with roughly the same naive certainty that power and goodness simply arrived together as a package deal.
He could already picture it, in some vague way, the years this boy had ahead of him, the slow erosion of everything bright currently sitting behind his eyes. It felt, for a moment, like theft. Like he was about to take something from Adrian that could never be given back.
He had no choice in it anyway.
Eric let the thought pass and looked up again, smiling faintly. "Sit," he said, and Adrian dropped back into his chair immediately, obedient, almost eager not to disappoint him.
"I know you're eager," Eric said. "It's your destiny, in a way. But I want to be honest with you first. The path ahead of you won't be easy. There will be trials at every turn. You could die at nearly any point along it. You'll be asked to do things that go against everything you currently believe about yourself, and you'll suffer for it, physically, mentally, in every way a person can suffer." He let the last word sit there, heavy, deliberate.
His gaze didn't waver as he said it, and something about the weight behind it pressed down on Adrian almost physically. Adrian swallowed hard, throat suddenly dry, fear flickering behind his eyes even as his jaw set with resolve.
"I already figured everything has a price," he said. "I'm ready for that. But what did you mean, destined?"
Eric leaned back, arms folding loosely across his chest, eyes never leaving Adrian's. "Everyone's born carrying a destiny they'll eventually walk into, whether they mean to or not. You. Me. Everyone." He paused. "Do you think the choices you make are really your own?"
Adrian didn't answer, unsure if the question wanted one.
"I used to think so too," Eric continued. "I still like believing it, honestly, mostly because the alternative is uncomfortable. But underneath that comfort, I think we're closer to puppets than we'd like to admit. Strings of fate. Chains we didn't choose." He shrugged slightly. "Even if I walked away right now and left you here, you'd become an Aura user eventually. One way or another."
None of that landed the way Eric probably meant it to. Adrian's mind had already moved past the philosophy, fixed entirely on the one part that actually mattered to him.
Eric noticed, and didn't push the rest of it any further. There wasn't much point.
He reached into his pocket and drew out a small ring case, the one Edward had sent along with his note, and set it on the table between them. He opened it and slid it across.
Inside sat a ring, its surface layered in something that looked less like metal and more like poured shadow.
"Is this what gives me powers?" Adrian asked, staring at it. Some part of his brain immediately supplied an image from a cartoon he used to watch, characters pulling powers from enchanted jewelry, and he almost smiled at the comparison despite everything. He wanted to reach for it, examine it properly, but held himself back. It felt rude, somehow, to grab at something that wasn't his yet.
"Just touch it," Eric said, resting both hands on his knee, voice gentle. "Let it happen naturally. Try not to think too hard, and don't let fear get in the way."
Adrian reached for the case with both hands and drew it toward himself. His fingers hovered over the ring, trembling, refusing to close the last inch of distance.
"Okay," he whispered to himself, more breath than voice. "Okay. You can do this."
He inhaled once, held it, and pressed his fingers against the cold, black surface of the ring.
Everything stopped.
Not slowed. Stopped completely. The couple at the next table sat frozen mid-laugh, mouths still open around a joke that would never finish. A bird overhead hung suspended in the air as though pinned there by something invisible. Mike remained exactly as he'd been a second earlier, unmoving, unblinking, and even the wind had died entirely, leaving behind a silence so total that Adrian could hear his own heartbeat pounding in his ears.
Color began bleeding into the world around him, blue and black and deep, saturated red, joined by shades he had no name for at all, colors his mind insisted shouldn't exist.
"What is this?" Adrian breathed, turning his head slowly, trying to make sense of any of it. "What's happening to me?"
No one answered. There was no one left to answer.
The pain arrived a second later, sudden and blinding, like something driving straight through the center of his skull, over and over, with no rhythm and no mercy. "Aghhh!" His hands flew to his head, fingers digging hard into his own hair as his whole body curled forward around the agony. He couldn't think past it. He couldn't do anything but endure it and wait for it to pass.
Slowly, it did.
When Adrian opened his eyes again, the café was gone.
He was still seated, technically, positioned exactly as he had been moments before, except now there was nothing around him at all. No tables. No street. No Mike. Only an endless black expanse stretching in every direction, his own body frozen inside it, refusing every command he tried to give it.
"Hello?" he called out, voice cracking. "Is anyone there? Mike?"
Nothing answered that either.
He tried to stand and failed. He tried to turn his head fully and managed only a fraction of the motion, enough to tilt his face upward.
The sky above him was not the sky he had known his entire life.
It had fractured into distinct regions of color, each one held apart from its neighbors by some boundary he couldn't see but could somehow feel, the way a person senses a wall in a pitch-dark room before their hand ever touches it. A few smaller regions had no boundary at all, bleeding freely into whatever sat beside them.
One region glowed white, and from it hung long strings tangled together with black chains, descending slowly toward the ground in coiled loops. Somewhere within that tangle, Adrian thought he could hear music, faint and impossibly distant.
Another region pulsed a deep green, and inside it time itself seemed to be doing several contradictory things at once, starting, stopping, looping endlessly back on itself, an image his mind flatly refused to process no matter how long he stared.
A third region burned red, and from somewhere deep within it came sound, screaming, the distant thunder of running feet, an army charging toward something he couldn't see and didn't want to.
"This isn't real," Adrian said, though his voice shook too badly to sound convincing, even to himself. "This isn't real, this isn't real—"
The sky seemed to notice him the moment he spoke. It rippled and shuddered, roaring without a single mouth to roar from, and Adrian felt that attention settle over him like physical weight pressing down against his chest. Fear climbed straight up his throat and lodged there, choking off whatever scream might have followed.
Then something moved.
A single thread of purple light stretched out from a boundless region far across the horizon, closing an impossible distance in an instant, and before Adrian could even process what he was seeing, it struck him directly in the chest.
He flinched hard, bracing for pain that never came.
Instead, there was warmth, a quiet, humming sense of connection settling behind his ribs, tethering him to that distant purple expanse.
"What... what is this?" he whispered, staring down at his own chest in disbelief.
It didn't last long enough for him to understand it.
Three threads of white light shot forward without warning, wrapping tightly around the purple strand, and the purple region let out a furious, helpless roar, too weak to resist whatever was happening to it. The white threads pulled and twisted, severing the connection in one sharp, decisive motion, cutting Adrian free.
"Wait," Adrian said, panic flooding his voice now. "Wait, no, what are you doing, stop—"
The three white threads ignored him entirely, winding around each other until they merged into a single strand. One end settled directly into Adrian's chest, exactly where the purple had just been torn away. The other stretched out toward a different region entirely.
Black and Bounded, unlike most of the others around it.
The instant Adrian's eyes landed on it, something inside him understood, wordlessly, immediately, that this region meant an ending. Not metaphorically. An actual, literal ending, the kind that swallowed everything whole and left nothing behind to mourn it.
"No," Adrian said, barely audible now, his whole body going rigid with dread. "No, no, please, not that one, please—"
The white thread darkened as it touched the region, staining slowly black from one end to the other, and a moment later a pulse of black light traveled the length of it and sank directly into Adrian's chest.
The black light hit him, and the world tore open.
Smoke first, thick and black, choking the sky above a city he barely recognized as Paris, its streets folded and cracked like something enormous had stepped on it and kept walking. Fires burned along the horizon in a dozen places at once, and the air itself carried a smell he'd never smelled before, copper and ash and something underneath both that made his stomach turn without knowing why.
Then he saw her.
Lily was lying on the ground a few feet away, small and still, her body twisted at an angle no living person's body would ever settle into on its own. A dark pool spread out beneath her, soaking into the cracked pavement, still spreading even as he watched. Her eyes were open. They weren't looking at anything. They weren't looking at all.
"Lily—"
His voice broke apart before her name even finished leaving his mouth.
He turned, desperate for anything else to look at, and found something worse. Marie hung suspended above the street, strung up against the side of a building that no longer had a roof, and where her head should have been there was only a ragged stump, blood still falling from it in a slow, steady rhythm, drop after drop after drop, landing on something small and pale sitting directly beneath her.
A baby. Sitting in the wreckage, tilting its face upward to catch each falling drop on its tongue, its eyes fixed and calm and utterly without feeling as it drank.
Adrian's knees buckled, though there was no ground beneath him to actually fall onto, only the endless black that had swallowed everything else. He turned in every direction and found the same thing waiting no matter where he looked. Bodies. Rubble. People he recognized and people he didn't, all of them equally still, equally gone, and himself standing in the middle of it, whole, untouched, the only thing left breathing in a world that had stopped.
"AHHH!"
The scream tore out of him raw and unfiltered, ripped from somewhere far below conscious thought, and it went absolutely nowhere. No one turned. No one flinched. The silence around him swallowed the sound whole and gave nothing back, and somewhere underneath the panic he understood, distantly, that this was still the barrier Mike had raised earlier, still holding, still keeping the world outside from hearing a single second of this.
His hands found his own face, pressing hard against his cheeks as though that alone might anchor him to something real. His skin was slick with sweat, cold and clammy, his hair plastered flat against his forehead, his breath coming in short, useless gasps that weren't pulling in enough air no matter how many times he tried.
And then, without warning, he started to laugh.
It came up through his chest before he could stop it, cracked and wrong, twisting halfway into something closer to a sob before curling back into laughter again, an ugly, broken sound that had no business existing in the same body. He'd wanted this. An hour ago he'd sat across from a stranger and practically begged for this, imagining capes and rooftops and grand, easy heroism, some bright future where power simply meant the ability to help. He'd been so stupid. So unbelievably, embarrassingly stupid, and the realization of exactly how stupid struck him as unbearably, horrifyingly funny even as tears began spilling freely down his face, dropping onto hands he couldn't stop shaking.
He laughed, and he cried, and for a long moment he couldn't have said which one was actually happening, only that both were tearing out of him at once, uncontrollable, endless, his whole body shaking with the effort of containing something that refused to be contained.
Slowly, unwillingly, it began to ease.
When Adrian finally lifted his head, he found Mike watching him. Still seated exactly as before. Still silent. His expression had gone cold, unreadable, giving nothing away, and he made no move to comfort him, no move to explain, only watched, waiting, as though this part had to be endured alone before anything else could happen.
Adrian became aware, slowly, of the colors around him sharpening. The black deepened into something richer, heavier. The faint traces of blue scattered through the void grew more vivid, more saturated, until looking at them felt different somehow, like his eyes had been seeing everything slightly out of focus his entire life without realizing it.
Something shifted inside his chest. Low, and deep, and entirely unfamiliar, something that had apparently been asleep inside him for years, uncoiling now for the first time.
He looked down at his own hands. They looked the same. However, they didn't feel the same anymore.
He felt lighter than he had any right to feel after everything he'd just witnessed, some strange, humming energy moving just beneath his skin, patient and enormous, waiting to be used. He thought, absurdly, that he could have walked across the surface of a river right now without sinking. That he could have put his fist through a mountainside and felt nothing but the impact. The thought should have scared him. Instead, it settled into him like something he'd been missing his whole life without knowing it was gone.
His mind felt sharper too, clearer, like a layer of fog he'd never noticed clinging to his thoughts had simply lifted away all at once.
The sound of clapping reached him first, slow and deliberate, cutting through the last fog still clinging to his thoughts.
Adrian blinked, and the café was there again. The street. The couple at the next table, unfrozen now, laughing at whatever joke they'd been mid-sentence on. The world had simply resumed, as though it had never stopped at all, as though none of what he'd just lived through had taken any time whatsoever.
Mike was on his feet, applauding softly, that same warm smile back in place, his eyes catching the afternoon light in a way that still made something in Adrian's chest ease despite everything he'd just witnessed. He extended his hand.
Adrian stared at it for a moment. His own hand was still trembling slightly when he finally reached out to take it, his palm damp, his fingers unsteady, and yet something about the contact settled him anyway, grounding him in a way he couldn't have explained if asked.
"Congratulations," Mike said, and there was something almost gentle in the way he said it, softer than the moment probably called for. "You're an Aura user now."
Adrian opened his mouth, meaning to ask about the bodies, the smoke, Lily lying still on cracked pavement, Marie's head gone, the baby with its calm, empty eyes. The questions piled up behind his teeth, too many at once, none of them able to force their way out first.
Mike seemed to read the attempt anyway, and something in his expression shifted, not quite sympathy, not quite anything Adrian could name, before it smoothed back into practiced calm.
"There'll be time for all of that," he said. "For now, let's start with your history lesson. There's a great deal you'll need to understand, and very little of it will be simple."
He let go of Adrian's hand and gestured toward the empty seat across from him, as easy and unhurried as if he were inviting him to sit down for nothing more than a second cup of coffee.
Adrian sat, slowly, his legs still not entirely steady beneath him, the image of that pale, blood-drinking child refusing to fully let go of the back of his mind. Whatever had just happened to him, whatever he'd just become, he understood without needing to be told that there was no walking any of it back now.