February 12th. Cael couldn't sleep.
This wasn't unusual—he hadn't slept well since the Fall, averaging four to five hours of fractured rest punctuated by dreams he could never quite remember but that left residual weight in his chest, as if his sleeping self experienced things his waking self wasn't permitted to know. But tonight was different. Tonight, the vibration behind his sternum had evolved from a pulse into a voice, and the voice wouldn't stop.
Thirteen.
It said it once every few seconds, with the regularity of a metronome. Not loud—more like a whisper pressed directly against the inside of his ribcage, intimate and inescapable. He rolled onto his side, pressed his face into the pillow, and tried to smother it with the mundane weight of physical sensation. The pillow was thin. The sheets were rough. The mattress sagged in the center. These were real things. The whisper was not.
Thirteen.
"Stop," he said into the pillow. His voice was hoarse, stripped of authority. Talking to the inside of your own chest at two in the morning was not a sign of robust mental health. Then again, robust mental health was a luxury reserved for people who hadn't watched their parents fold into light at the age of six.
He got up. The apartment was dark except for the faint orange bleed of the streetlamp outside his window, which painted a stripe across the wall like a wound that refused to close. He went to the bathroom, ran cold water, and splashed his face. The mirror showed him what mirrors always showed him: gray eyes, angular face, the registration number on his undershirt visible through the wet fabric.
Something moved in the reflection.
Cael froze. The movement was behind him—not in the bathroom, but in the mirror, as if the reflection contained a depth the room itself lacked. A shadow, darker than the ambient dark, rippled across the glass and settled behind his reflected shoulder like a cloak draped by invisible hands.
His Sight orbit activated involuntarily—a spike of perception that lit up the mirror's emotional weight. The glass was neutral: manufactured, inert, carrying no history beyond its own production. But the shadow had weight. Not the weight of matter or emotion—something else. Something that his Sight orbit couldn't classify, couldn't measure, couldn't contain. A density that existed outside the categories his damaged Core had learned to recognize.
The shadow flickered. For a fraction of a second, Cael saw movement within it—orbiting shapes, dark against dark, rotating around a center that was darker still. Thirteen shapes. He counted them in the instant before they vanished, because counting was instinct, because his Sight orbit measured everything it perceived, even the impossible.
Twelve orbits, small and swift.
One orbit, larger than the rest, slower, heavier.
Looking at him.
Then the mirror was just a mirror, and the bathroom was just a bathroom, and Cael was just a boy with wet hands and a racing heart standing in the orange-striped dark of a Dwarf apartment.
He didn't go back to bed. He sat at his table, facing the cracked photograph of his parents, and waited for morning.
The day passed in the gray routine of pre-shift preparation. Cael ate breakfast—the last of his weekly ration: stale bread, synthetic butter, a cup of tea made from leaves he'd reused three times. He showered in cold water (the hot water was a morning-only luxury and he'd missed the window). He dressed in clean coveralls, checked his registration badge, and left the apartment at 5:15 AM.
The streets were empty at this hour—too early for Dwarf commuters, too late for the night-shift enforcers who patrolled the district between midnight and four. Cael walked in silence broken only by his footsteps and the distant hum of the city's gravitational infrastructure: the transit lines warming up, the tower's gravity recyclers cycling through their dawn calibration, the faint pulse of scanner arrays sweeping the streets for Unregistered signatures.
Tomorrow was his birthday. February 13th. Seventeen.
He tried to remember his last birthday with his parents. He would have been five—February 13th, 2011, one year before the Fall. His mother had baked a cake. He remembered the smell: vanilla and something else, a warmth that wasn't temperature but presence, the gravitational impression of a home that contained people who loved you. His father had carved him a new set of blocks—these ones shaped like celestial bodies. A sphere for a planet. A smaller sphere for a moon. An irregularly shaped lump for an asteroid. "Everything orbits something, Cael," Marcus had said. "Moons orbit planets. Planets orbit stars. And stars orbit the center of the galaxy. Even the biggest things in the universe are held in place by something bigger."
"What holds the galaxy?"
"Something we can't see. Something so heavy it bends everything around it. They call it a singularity."
"Is that like an Orbiter?"
Marcus had laughed—a warm, heavy sound that Cael could still hear if he concentrated, though the memory was fading, worn thin by eleven years of replaying. "Maybe. Maybe Orbiters are just little singularities, pulling the world into orbit around themselves."
Cael walked through the empty streets and pressed his hand to his chest. The vibration pulsed steadily, patiently, a singularity trapped behind scar tissue and OA classification codes.
Thirteen.
Tomorrow.
The tower was quiet when he arrived. The skeleton crew—night-shift enforcers, automated systems, the handful of researchers who kept laboratory experiments running through the off-hours—occupied the building like ghosts in a cathedral. Cael clocked in, loaded his cart, and took the service elevator to the thirtieth floor.
The work was mechanical: sweep, mop, scrub, polish, move on. His body performed the routine while his mind circled the same questions it had been circling for days. The girl in chains—Lyra—who'd seen something in him that sophisticated OA assessment arrays had missed. The file in Sera Kane's office describing someone with thirteen orbital channels. The whisper that had started as vibration and become a voice.
He thought about what the Hermit had said—the man in the legends his father used to tell, the old Orbiter who'd tried to reach the thirteenth orbit and lost everything. Marcus had told the story as a fable: the Hermit who climbed too high and fell, who reached for the stars and burned. "There are limits, Cael," Marcus would say, tucking him into bed. "Twelve orbits is plenty. Thirteen is greed."
But what if it wasn't greed? What if it was just what you were?
Cael mopped the thirtieth floor corridor and felt the vibration in his chest pulse in time with his strokes. Left, right, left, right. Thirteen, thirteen, thirteen, thirteen.
A cleaning rhythm and a cosmic number, synchronized in the body of a janitor who might be something more.
He finished the floor and moved to the next. Tomorrow, he would be seventeen. No one would remember. No one would know.
But something inside him would. Something was counting down.
And tomorrow, the count would reach zero.