Macon walked home that night.
Not because it was a good idea. Just because the metro after a bad day at work is still a bad day at work, and walking through Paris at night emptied his head better than anything else. Unfinished report. American client sending emails at midnight like time zones don't exist. All that.
He took a small street to avoid the boulevard crowd.
That's when he saw her.
Leaning against a wall between two streetlights. A girl. Maybe twenty. Purple hair falling anywhere on her shoulders. A jacket too big for her. Hands in pockets.
Macon looked at her for a second while passing.
And stopped.
Her eyes.
They were purple too. Like her hair. But that wasn't the problem. The problem was they were empty. Not empty like someone tired or sad. Really empty. Like someone had removed what was supposed to be inside.
She said something. Too quiet.
Macon moved one step closer.
"Sorry?"
She repeated. Still too quiet. He made another step to hear better and at that moment she raised her hand and put two fingers on his forehead.
Macon tried to step back.
His body didn't move.
Two seconds exactly.
Then something crossed through his head from left to right, like ice cold water under pressure, and his knees gave out at once.
He found himself on all fours on the sidewalk. His palms hit the concrete. He heard the sound but barely felt it yet.
When he managed to lift his head, the street was empty.
The girl was gone. No sound of footsteps. Just the normal street, normal streetlights, normal silence.
He stayed there without moving for a good minute.
And then something appeared in front of his eyes.
A screen. Not a vision, not a dream. Something fixed, sharp, that only him could see. An interface with text fields. Most gray, unreadable, like a file you try to open with the wrong program. Name. Unreadable. Title. Unreadable. Statistics. Unreadable. Abilities. Unreadable.
Except one field. Bottom right.
That one was readable.
Unique Ability.
Below it, in english, in a different font from the others, thinner:
Death Sight.
Macon looked at that for a good ten seconds. He closed his eyes hard. Opened them. The interface was still there. He tried again. It didn't disappear.
He got up. He brushed off his hands.
He went home because he really didn't know what else to do.
He didn't sleep that night.
Not because of the right knee which hurt a bit. Because of the images in his head. The girl. The interface. The words Death Sight. And something else, blurry stuff he couldn't identify, like something new had installed itself in there without asking.
At three in the morning he got up, went to get water, looked out the window.
A neighbor was walking her dog below.
Above her head, a white number was floating in the air.
31%
Macon put his glass on the windowsill.
The neighbor turned around the corner. The number disappeared with her.
He didn't go back to bed. He sat on the couch and waited for morning.
Next morning, everyone had a number.
In the metro, on the platform, in the street. Above every head. Most low. 8%, 12%, 19%. People saw nothing, heard nothing, continued their lives.
Him he couldn't look at anyone anymore without seeing the thing floating up there.
He got out of the metro and saw the man.
Gray suit. Black briefcase. Mid-forties. The look of someone with a meeting in twenty minutes and already thinking about it. Waiting to cross at a red light.
Above his head: 97%
Macon stopped cold.
Someone walked into him from behind and kept going without apologizing. Macon didn't move. He was looking at the 97% above this man and he didn't know what to do with that information. He didn't know what it really meant. Not yet.
The light turned green. The man crossed.
Macon watched him until he disappeared into the crowd.
He arrived at the office twenty minutes late. In the elevator he opened the interface mentally. He focused on it, tried to make it respond. The Unique Ability field answered.
Death Sight. See the probability of imminent death in others.
That was it. No explanation. No instructions.
At five in the afternoon, his phone vibrated.
Local news alert. Serious incident on rue de Rennes. Pedestrian hit by a hit-and-run vehicle. Life-threatening condition.
He searched for photos.
Gray suit. Black briefcase tipped over on the asphalt.
Macon put the phone on the desk.
He had seen the 97% this morning. He had done nothing. Because he didn't know what to do. Because he was still trying to tell himself it wasn't real.
And now the guy was maybe dying in a hospital somewhere.
He stayed at his desk until seven. He didn't work.
On the metro home, he took his phone and took a selfie.
To check.
He looked at the photo.
Above his own head.
101%
He lowered the phone.
He didn't know the rules of this system yet. But he knew that 100 was supposed to be the maximum.