He was six when the sky broke open.
It started as light. Not sunlight—this was sharper, whiter, the kind of light that had weight to it, that pressed against the windows of their apartment like a hand testing the glass. Cael was sitting on the kitchen floor, building a tower from wooden blocks his father had carved for him. Each block was a different shape—sphere, cube, pyramid, cylinder—and his father had taught him to stack them by weight, heaviest at the bottom, lightest at the top. "Everything follows gravity, Cael," Marcus Vane would say, adjusting a tilting block with fingers that smelled of sawdust. "Even us."
Marcus was a carpenter. Five orbits—enough to enhance his Touch for working with wood, to feel the grain's direction, the density of knots, the hidden tensions in a plank that would cause it to warp or split. He wasn't powerful. He wasn't important. He was a man who made things with his hands and came home every evening smelling of pine resin and gravitite polish, swinging Cael onto his shoulders and pretending to stagger under the weight. "You're getting heavy, star. Must be growing your orbits."
Elena Vane had six orbits—one more than her husband, a fact she teased him about gently. She worked at the district's medical clinic, using her Touch orbit to diagnose patients by pressing her palm to their chests and feeling the density of illness. Cael remembered her hands: warm, always warm, smelling of the antiseptic soap the clinic required. She'd come home and wash them three times before touching him, scrubbing away the day's accumulated weight of other people's pain.
"What are you building, love?" she asked from the kitchen counter, where she was chopping vegetables for dinner. The radio played something soft—an old song about stars that Cael couldn't remember the name of but could still hum the melody to, even now, eleven years later.
"A tower," he said. "Like Daddy's tower." He meant the Authority building, where his father occasionally did contract carpentry work—installing wooden panels in offices that wanted warmth between their gravitite walls.
"That's a beautiful tower." She turned to check the stove. The light through the window shifted. Brightened.
Marcus came out of the bedroom, where he'd been changing out of his work clothes. He stopped at the window. "Elena."
She looked up. The light was intense now—not painful but impossible to ignore, like looking at the sun reflected in still water. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, from the sky and from the ground, from inside the walls and from inside Cael's chest.
"Is it an exercise?" Elena asked. The OA occasionally conducted large-scale gravitational drills—coordinated orbital demonstrations designed to test the city's resonance tolerance. They were announced in advance, accompanied by public advisories. There had been no advisory.
"No." Marcus pressed his hand to the glass. His Touch orbit—stronger than Cael's would ever be—read the window's vibration, the building's tremor, the fundamental frequency of whatever was happening outside. His face changed. The expression Cael would see in nightmares for eleven years: not fear, exactly, but understanding. The face of a man who felt the grain of catastrophe and knew which way it would split.
"Take Cael," he said quietly. "Get under the table."
"Marcus—"
"Now."
Elena scooped Cael off the floor. His block tower toppled—sphere, cube, pyramid, cylinder, scattering across the kitchen tile. She carried him to the dining table and pushed him under it, crouching beside him, her warm hands on his face. "Stay here, love. Don't come out until I say."
"What's happening?"
"I don't know. Stay here."
She stood up. Through the gap between the table leg and the floor, Cael watched his parents move to the window together. The light was blinding now, pouring through the glass like water through a crack. But it wasn't ordinary light—it had gravity. Cael could feel it, even with his undeveloped Core, even at six years old. The light was pulling.
People were walking.
Through the window, Cael could see their neighbors emerging from the apartment building across the street. The Hasani family from 4B. Old Mr. Coram, who gave Cael candy on festival days. The young couple from the top floor whose names he didn't know. They walked toward the light with calm, measured steps, their faces blank, their orbits flickering erratically—not orbiting anymore but stretching, elongating, reaching toward the source like iron filings toward a magnet.
"They're pulling," Marcus whispered. "It's pulling their Cores—"
Elena took a step toward the door.
"Don't." Marcus grabbed her arm. "Elena, don't."
"The patients at the clinic—I have to—"
"If you go out there, it will take you."
She looked at him. At the door. At Cael under the table, watching with eyes he didn't know were already gray. She took another step. The light pulsed, and her orbits—all six of them—flared outward, stretching toward the window.
"Mama?"
She shuddered. Looked down at her hands. Looked at Marcus. "I can feel them," she said. "My patients. The children in the ward. I can feel them being pulled. Marcus, I can feel them—"
Something shifted in the air. The pulling intensified. The apartment building groaned. Cael's wooden blocks slid across the floor toward the window as if the glass were a drain and the apartment were emptying into it.
Marcus's face changed again—the understanding deepening into certainty. "Elena. Stay. For Cael."
She looked at the door. At her son. At her husband. Her orbits stretched and stretched, pulled by something beyond the sky, and Cael saw—even at six, even with his barely-formed Sight—the weight of the decision crushing her. The weight of the patients she could feel dying. The weight of the child she couldn't leave.
"I'll come back," she said.
She kissed Marcus. She crouched and pressed her warm hand to Cael's cheek through the gap beneath the table. "Stay here, love. I'll come back."
She opened the door and walked into the light.
Marcus followed her.
Cael never understood why. Had the pull taken him too? Had he chosen to follow his wife, knowing what would happen? Had he believed, in that last moment, that he could bring her back?
He watched through the window. His parents walked across the courtyard, hand in hand, their orbits blazing—brighter than Cael had ever seen them, bright as stars. The light swallowed them in stages: feet first, then legs, then torsos, then hands. Marcus's hand was the last thing to disappear. It was reaching back toward the apartment. Toward Cael.
Then they folded. That was the only word for it. They folded—collapsing inward along invisible seams, their bodies crumpling like paper in a fist, their orbits shrieking as the gravitational bonds that held their matter together were overwhelmed and reversed. They became smaller and denser and brighter until they were points of light no larger than the wooden blocks on Cael's kitchen floor, and then they were nothing.
The shockwave hit three seconds later.
It was gravity—raw, unstructured, catastrophic. Not a wave of force but a wave of weight, as if the atmosphere itself had been compressed to the density of stone. It slammed through the building, shattering every window simultaneously. The table Cael hid under cracked but held. The floor buckled. The walls screamed.
And inside Cael's chest, where his Core had been forming in the slow, natural way of childhood development—where his first orbits had been budding like seeds in spring—something broke. Not broke—cracked. A fracture running through the center of his gravitational self, splitting his potential down the middle like Marcus splitting a plank along the grain.
He screamed. The sound was swallowed by the shockwave. The world went white, then black, then nothing.
He woke in a hospital bed eight days later.
A woman in an OA medical uniform sat beside him, making notes on a tablet. She had kind eyes and an orbital count badge that read "7." When she saw him stir, she set the tablet down and leaned forward.
"Caelus? Can you hear me?"
His voice was gravel. "Where are my parents?"
The woman's kind eyes changed. The weight of what she had to say pressed her mouth into a line that Cael would see on a thousand faces in the years that followed—the line of someone deciding how to say the unsayable to a child.
"There was an event," she said carefully. "A gravitational event. Do you remember?"
He remembered light. He remembered his parents walking. He remembered folding.
"Where are my parents?"
"Caelus..." She touched his hand. Her Touch orbit was strong—he could feel it, even through the haze of medication and shock. She was reading him: his vitals, his emotional state, the fracture in his Core that she could probably feel like a crack in a bone. "Your parents were among those affected by the event. They... they didn't come back."
Six hundred and eighteen thousand, four hundred and twelve people didn't come back. Cael wouldn't learn the number until years later. At six, the only number that mattered was two.
"Your Core sustained significant damage," the doctor continued, her voice professional now, wrapping clinical language around the devastation like gauze around a wound. "Grade-three fracture. We've stabilized it, but the damage is permanent. You'll develop some orbital capacity—sensory orbits, likely—but full martial or conceptual development is... unlikely."
She paused. Cael stared at the ceiling.
"We're classifying you as Dwarf," she said gently. "It's not—it doesn't mean you can't live a full life. There are programs, assistance, community—"
"I want my mom."
The doctor's hand tightened on his. Her Touch orbit trembled—she was absorbing his pain, he realized later. Taking a fraction of it into herself so he could breathe. It was the kindest thing anyone would do for him for eleven years.
"I know, sweetheart. I know."
Cael opened his eyes in the dark of his apartment. The memory clung to him like sweat—not remembered but relived, replayed in perfect sensory detail by his damaged Sight orbit, which couldn't see the present clearly but projected the past in merciless resolution.
He pressed his hand to his sternum. The vibration was there—stronger tonight, almost rhythmic. Pulsing like a heart. Like an orbit trying to spin.
Behind his ribs, in the cracked center of his damaged Core, something larger than four orbits stirred in its sleep.
He lay in the dark and listened to it breathe.