The tablet was showing episode fourteen.
He had watched it three times already — the whole series, start to finish — but fourteen was the one he came back to. The one where the protagonist finally figured out the rules of the world he'd been thrown into. The animation was nothing special. The music was the same looping string arrangement the studio used for everything. It didn't matter. He liked it anyway, and he was alone in his room at nine in the evening with nowhere to be and nothing pressing, which was the only condition required for the watching to feel correct.
The tablet rested against his raised knees. The ceiling above him was the same water-stained white it had always been. His desk chair sat empty because he'd never once used it to watch anything, and at some point he'd stopped pretending he would. The room was small. The light was dim. Everything was exactly where it always was.
On screen, the title card appeared between scenes.
— Restart from Zero. —
He read it the way he always did. Without thinking anything in particular about it. Then the next episode began, and he shifted his weight slightly, and settled back in.
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The room was gone.
Not gradually. Not with any warning he could point to afterward. One moment the ceiling. The next: stone. Cold air. The smell of something chemical and faintly burnt. Shadows at the edges of a chamber he had never seen before, and in the middle of it — him, standing, upright, with his heart already going too fast for any thought to keep pace with it.
His tablet was on the floor at his feet, screen still lit.
He stared at it. Fourteen seconds, maybe. It was the only thing in the room he recognized.
The figures in the shadows had been watching him the entire time. He became aware of them the way you become aware of something you have been looking at without seeing — all at once, and with the particular unpleasantness of realizing you should have noticed sooner. There were seven of them. Eight. He couldn't hold the count. His hands were shaking and he hadn't told them to.
One of them stepped forward.
"Welcome to Gaia."
No preamble. No explanation attached. Just the words, delivered to him the way you tell someone which floor they're on.
He opened his mouth.
Nothing came out.
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They gave him a card. White plastic, temporary, his name printed on it in a font that looked like it had been chosen by committee. A man in a grey uniform told him the city outside was called Maar, that it was a transit district, that the card would get him through checkpoints, that someone would contact him within seventy-two hours with further instructions. He asked what kind of instructions. The man said someone would contact him. He asked what he was supposed to do until then. The man said the card would cover expenses. Then the man left, and a door opened at the far end of the corridor, and the light beyond it was the low gold of a city afternoon.
He stood at the threshold for a moment before he walked out.
It looked like a city. That was the first thing — the thing his brain reached for and held onto because it was the thing that made sense. Towers. Traffic. Sidewalks with people on them. A vendor on the corner with a cart of something that smelled like roasted grain. Ordinary. Recognizable. He exhaled.
Then the details resolved.
An elf was adjusting her hair at a bus stop — silver, long, brushed back carefully over ears that narrowed to a point — while scrolling her tablet with the same absent focus as anyone waiting for anything. An orc at a shop counter was arguing with the owner, gesturing broadly, apparently furious about a price discrepancy. At the crosswalk: a demon. Humanoid. Blue-grey skin, small curved horns barely visible above his collar, checking his phone with the expression of a man who had somewhere to be twenty minutes ago and had already accepted he wasn't going to make it.
Nobody looked at any of this.
Nobody looked at each other. Nobody adjusted. Nobody processed. A woman with an elf at her side walked through the crowd the way people walk through crowds they've walked through a thousand times, and beside her on a short leash a small scaled creature waddled along with the determined energy of something that had its own agenda and was being temporarily overruled by the leash.
He stood very still on the sidewalk.
Nobody else finds this strange.
The city moved around him like water around a stone. Eventually he started walking too, because standing still was becoming its own kind of visible, and he'd already had enough of being looked at today.
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The library was on the second floor of a building that also contained a post office and a document processing center, which struck him as efficient in the way of places that expected to be visited out of necessity rather than preference. The terminals were clean. Nobody else was using them at this hour. He sat down, pulled the keyboard toward him, and started reading.
The history of Gaia loaded in sections. He read through the index first, then drilled down.
Earthians: the term for humans summoned from Earth. He'd already figured that part out. What he hadn't figured out was the timeline — the first Earthians had been summoned centuries ago, brought over as labor, valued for their knowledge, denied rights, denied names, denied anything resembling the words written in the documents they'd helped build. They had eventually fought for those rights. The conflict had become a war. The war had become the thing they called the Great Revolutionary War now, in the same careful official voice that names things after they're safe enough to call history.
After the war, the Earthians had rebuilt Gaia from the inside out. Technology and magic fused together, cities restructured, infrastructure redesigned around the logic of a world that people from Earth already understood intuitively. The cities he'd seen outside made sense now, in the way things make sense when you understand what they were built to replace.
So they took people from Earth, used them, and then the people they took rebuilt the world that had taken them.
That's one way to write a history.
He scrolled further. A news feed at the bottom of the page: a press announcement from the Gaian government. An initiative. A partnership. Earthians with expertise in AI development were being invited — the word used was 'invited' — to contribute to Gaia's technological advancement. The program had been running for six months. Results were described as promising.
He read it twice.
Invited.
He thought about the stone chamber. He thought about the grey uniform and the seventy-two hours and the card in his pocket. He thought about the way the man had answered his questions by not answering them.
Something about this didn't sit right.
He couldn't name it. Not yet. But it was there — the specific wrongness of information that is technically accurate and somehow completely false at the same time. He closed the terminal, put his hands in his pockets, and went back outside.
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He walked for an hour before he noticed the alley.
It wasn't the alley itself. It was the man who turned into it — the particular quality of his movement. Not hurried. Something more deliberate than hurried. The careful non-urgency of someone who didn't want to look like they were being careful. He'd been ahead of him on the street for most of a block and then between one step and the next he was gone, turned sideways into a gap between buildings that most people walking the main street probably never registered as being there.
He stood at the mouth of the alley.
Don't.
But curiosity won. It usually did.
The alley narrowed as he went deeper, the sounds of the street pulling away behind him the way sound does when a wall gets between you and it. His footsteps were loud. He tried to make them quieter and succeeded in making them sound deliberate instead, which was worse. The light dropped.
He didn't see it coming.
Something dropped over his head — cloth, thick, the smell of canvas — and hands caught him from both sides before he could process enough to react. He tried to pull away. The grip held. His elbow connected with something and a man made a sound and it didn't matter because the hands were already pulling him forward and the world had shrunk to the inside of a bag and the sound of his own breathing.
◇◇◇
The cloth came away.
He was seated in a chair in a dim room that smelled like old stone and something faintly electronic. Rope, or something like it, against his wrists. Around him: faces. Human, elf, orc, demon, all watching him with the careful attention of people trying to determine whether he was going to be a problem. One of them held up a hand in what was presumably meant to be a calming gesture.
"Relax. We're not going to hurt you."
— one of them said.
He considered explaining that telling someone to relax while they're tied to a chair in an unknown location has never once caused anyone to relax, but held it back. He looked at them instead. Waited.
They told him.
The official story — the AI initiative, the invitation, the program — was a cover. Had been from the beginning. The government wasn't interested in AI development. It was interested in the summoning ritual. The specific, classified, heavily researched version of the summoning ritual that didn't produce an ordinary Earthian. That produced something else.
A hero. Someone born with magic already living inside their body. No equipment required. No training to access it. Just — already there, from the first breath they took in Gaia. The government had been refining the method for years. Getting closer. The AI summoning program existed to fund the research and provide plausible cover for the number of people coming through.
They were close now. That was what the resistance had learned. Close enough that they were escalating. And when they succeeded —
The person who said it next was a human. Young. She'd been quiet until this moment, and when she spoke the room went quiet too, the way rooms do when someone says the thing everyone already knows but no one has wanted to say out loud.
"What they are building toward will make the Revolutionary War look like a border skirmish."
— she said.
Nobody in the room disagreed.
He sat with that for a moment. The rope against his wrists. The dim light. The faces around him — frightened people, he understood now. Not dangerous ones. Frightened people telling him something true in the only way they'd been able to arrange.
They think I can help.
They brought me here because they think I can do something.
They're looking at me like I already understand what that is.
He didn't. But he nodded, slowly, because denying that he understood seemed, in this moment, like the wrong kind of honesty.
◇◇◇
The door opened.
Not the way doors open when someone knocks. The way doors open when the hinges give out on the wrong side and the wood hits the wall and everyone in the room turns at the sound because there isn't time to do anything else.
A man stood in the frame. Tall. Something in the way he held himself that the boy registered immediately as authority — not the grey-uniform kind, the kind that didn't need a uniform. He scanned the room once, and then his face did something. Color left it. His eyes went to the boy in the chair and stayed there, and the boy watched him understand something the boy had no idea about yet.
The man's jaw tightened.
YOU PEOPLE JUST GAVE AWAY OUR LOCATION.
The door came off its second hinge before the sentence was finished.
Soldiers. Four. Six. Eight. The room was too small to count correctly. Rifles up before anyone in the room had moved. A woman near the left wall opened her mouth to say something and the first shot happened and she didn't.
He did not close his eyes.
He didn't know why, later. Reflex worked in strange directions. But he sat in the chair with the rope on his wrists and he watched it happen — the human near the window, the elf who had told him to relax, the orc who had never spoken, the demon standing by the far wall who had been the quietest person in the room and died that way too, quietly, between one breath and the next.
The soldiers made no distinctions. That was the thing he would remember. Every species in that room. Same caliber. Same result.
Thirty seconds. Maybe less.
Then the room was silent, and he was the only one still breathing, and the smoke from the rifles was drifting through the dim light in slow curling patterns that had nothing to do with any of this.
◇◇◇
A different man entered. Not a soldier. His coat was pressed. His hands were clean. He walked through the room without looking at the floor and stopped in front of the boy with the composed attention of someone concluding a scheduled meeting.
He spoke without raising his voice.
"You've been a great help to us today."
— the man said.
The boy blinked. Something that might have been relief started to form — the automatic response to being told you've done something right, the thing the body does before the mind catches up.
"You served your country well."
The man turned slightly. Not quite toward the door. Not quite away
.
"Your bravery will be remembered for a long time."
The boy's mouth opened.
"The country will remember that you didn't give up until the very end."
Something went wrong in his chest.
Not fear, exactly. Something colder. The specific sensation of a sentence that means something other than its words, arriving before the translation does.
"You will be mourned."
He understood, then.
All of it, at once, in the way you understand things when they arrive a second too late to be useful. He opened his mouth. He had something to say. He didn't know what it was yet but it was there, forming, pressing against the inside of his teeth.
The man turned toward the door.
"Thank you for your service."
He walked out. He did not look back. The boy watched the empty doorway and heard his own voice start to say something and then a soldier stepped into the frame and the boy's voice stopped forming words and started forming sounds instead, short and sudden, a sound that had no word attached to it.
He was still looking for an explanation.
He was still looking for it when the world went dark.
BANG—
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"If you're enjoying this, Volume 1 is available on Amazon Kindle."