The first thing you feel is your knees.

Not the impact — the after. The dull, wet grind of skin against something rough. Asphalt. Your palms are flat on it, fingers spread, and there’s grit under your nails that wasn’t there a second ago. Your ears are ringing. Not the high-pitched kind from loud music. The low kind. The kind that means your brain is trying to reboot and the sound card hasn’t loaded yet.

You don’t open your eyes.

Knees — scraped. Palms — scraped. Something warm. Head doing that thing where the world sounds like it’s underwater. Bare feet on wet asphalt.

You were in bed. Oversized T-shirt, sleep shorts, bare feet. That’s what you’re wearing now.

You are not in bed.

Open your eyes.

The light is wrong. That’s the first thing. Not wrong like a different time of day — wrong like a different spectrum. The sky is the right colour but the buildings are catching it at angles that don’t happen in cities you’ve lived in. Everything is too clean, too vertical, too designed. Glass and steel and curves that look like someone asked an AI to draw “utopia” and then actually built it.

You’re kneeling in the middle of a street.

Not a quiet street. A street with traffic — except the traffic isn’t touching the road. Vehicles are gliding past at chest height, silent except for a low hum that you feel more than hear. One of them swerves around you. No honk. No screech. Just a smooth, automated adjustment, like you’re a pothole the GPS already mapped.

You stand up. Your knees scream. Your T-shirt — oversized, grey, the one with the bleach stain from that time you cleaned the bathroom at two in the morning because you couldn’t sleep — is torn at the hem. Your shorts are the ones you sleep in. Your feet are bare and already bleeding from the asphalt.

You are standing in the middle of a city you have never seen, wearing pyjamas and no shoes, and you have no phone, no wallet, no keys, and no memory of how you got here.

Okay, you think. Okay.

Alley to the left — narrow, two buildings curving toward each other like ribs. Wider street behind you, lots of people. Stairs ahead, going down, some kind of transit entrance with symbols you can’t read.

Your feet are already moving toward the alley before you’ve finished looking at the stairs.

---

The city has a name. You find it on a sign at the mouth of the alley, backlit in soft blue characters that rearrange themselves as you stare at them — cycling through scripts you don’t recognise before landing on something that might be English, or might be something so close to English that your brain is autocorrecting.

LINKON CITY — DISTRICT 7

Below it, a date format you don’t understand. But the year — the year you can read.

2048.

Your hands are shaking. Not from fear. From the math. You were born in — no. Don’t. Don’t do the math. The math doesn’t help you right now. The math is a luxury for people who are sitting down somewhere safe with a cup of tea and a spreadsheet. You are standing in an alley in your pyjamas in a city twenty-something years past anything you’ve experienced, and you need to find water before you need to find anything else.

You move deeper into the alley. The walls are smooth, some kind of composite material that’s warm to the touch even in the shade. No graffiti. No litter. No cigarette butts or old gum or the particular urban grime that tells you a place has been lived in by people who don’t care about it. This city is either brand new or someone is cleaning it obsessively.

There’s a drinking fountain at the junction of two alleys. It activates when you step close — no button, no handle, just a smooth arc of water that appears when your body crosses an invisible threshold. You drink until your stomach cramps, then drink more. The water tastes like nothing. Not metallic, not chlorinated, not mineral. Just water. Clean to the point of personality loss.

You wipe your mouth with the back of your hand and check yourself over properly for the first time. Knees: bleeding sluggishly through your shorts. Palms: raw, embedded grit. Left elbow: bruised, probably from the fall. Everything else: functional. Your T-shirt covers what it needs to cover. Your feet are leaving faint red prints on the composite floor. You look like someone who fell off a building and walked away, which — you’re starting to suspect — might not be far from the truth.

Something happened. Something moved you. Not walked, not drove, not flew — moved. From your bed to this asphalt, from your world to this one, from everything you know to nothing you recognise. And whatever did it didn’t ask permission, didn’t explain, didn’t leave a receipt.

You are going to find out what it was. You are going to find a way back. And you are going to do it before anyone in this too-clean city figures out that you don’t belong here.

Water: done. Shelter: pending. Information: pending.

You move.

---

The city talks to you.

Not metaphorically. The walls have screens — thin, flexible, embedded in every surface like wallpaper that someone gave a bachelor’s degree. They scroll headlines in that same almost-English, fast enough that you’re reading every third word.

WANDERER INCURSION — SECTOR 12 — HUNTERS DEPLOYED

PROTOCORE RESEARCH SUMMIT — MINISTER CHEN — NEW REGULATIONS

EVER GROUP QUARTERLY — STOCK PROJECTION—

Wanderer. Hunters. Protocore.

None of these words mean anything to you. All of them feel like they should.

You keep walking. The alley opens into a wider pedestrian zone, and here the people are. Crowds. Moving with the particular urgency of a city that has somewhere to be — heads down, earpieces in, screens on wrists flickering with notifications. Nobody looks at you. You’re a barefoot girl in pyjamas with blood on her knees, and nobody looks at you.

Good. That’s good.

People dressed like people — modern, nothing dramatic, but everyone’s got something on their wrist that flickers. No phones. Wrist screens. Languages you mostly almost-understand and some you don’t, at all. Everyone moving like they’ve got somewhere to be and the confidence of people who feel safe getting there.

No visible weapons. No police — wait. There. And there.

They’re not police. They’re wearing dark uniforms with insignia you can’t read, but the posture is unmistakable. Upright, scanning, weight on the balls of their feet. Military or paramilitary. Two of them, standing at the edge of the pedestrian zone, watching the crowd with the relaxed attention of people who don’t expect trouble but would be disappointed if it didn’t come.

You turn left. Smoothly, naturally, like you just remembered you needed something from the other direction. It’s a skill you learned young — the art of not-running. Running draws eyes. Turning draws nothing.

Two blocks later, you’re out of their line of sight and your heart is hammering and you don’t know why. They weren’t looking at you. They had no reason to look at you. You’re nobody here. You’re less than nobody — you’re a girl who doesn’t exist in any database, any registry, any system. In a city this networked, that should make you invisible.

It also makes you an anomaly.

And you’re starting to think this city doesn’t like anomalies.

---

You find her on the fourth block.

You’re not looking for her. You’re looking for a place to sit down — somewhere low-traffic, out of camera range, where you can think without the constant scroll of headlines you can almost-but-not-quite read drilling into your peripheral vision. A bench near a fountain in a small plaza, partially shielded by decorative trees that are either extremely well-maintained or not real.

She’s sitting on the same bench.

Late twenties, maybe. Dark hair, pulled back. Dressed in something between athletic wear and a uniform — practical, fitted, like she might need to sprint at any moment. There’s a holstered device at her hip that could be a weapon or a scanner or both. She looks tired. Not sleepy-tired. Carrying-something-tired. The kind of tired that lives behind the eyes and doesn’t go away with sleep.

You sit on the other end of the bench. You don’t speak. She doesn’t look at you. Two strangers sharing a bench in a city full of benches. Normal. Forgettable.

Then her hand goes to her chest.

It’s a small movement. Reflexive. The way someone touches a bruise they keep forgetting about — and then her face changes. Not dramatically. Not a scream, not a gasp. Just a tightening around the eyes, a whitening of the knuckles on the hand pressed against her sternum. Like she’s holding something inside her ribcage by force of will.

Her breathing changes. Short, shallow, controlled — the breathing of someone who has done this before and knows what comes next. She’s not panicking. She’s managing. And whatever she’s managing is winning.

“Hey,” you say. “Are you—”

The light starts.

It comes from inside her. A faint glow through her shirt, centred on her chest, pulsing in a rhythm that has nothing to do with a heartbeat — too fast, too uneven, like a machine redlining. The device at her hip starts screaming. A high, thin alarm that makes the air taste like copper.

She falls off the bench.

You catch her. You don’t decide to catch her — your arms are moving before your brain has finished processing the visual. She’s lighter than she looks. Or you’re stronger than you should be. One hand behind her head, the other on her back, and she’s looking up at you with eyes that are focused and terrified and knowing. She’s done this before. She knows how this ends.

“Don’t,” she whispers. Not to you. To whatever is happening inside her chest. The glow is brighter now. You can see it through your fingers where your hand presses against her back. Her skin is hot. Not feverish — reactor hot. Something is building, something is cresting, something is about to—

Your body does something you don’t tell it to do.

It starts in your hands. A pulling sensation, like every cell in your fingers has developed a thirst it never had before. You feel it travel up your arms, across your chest, down your spine — a full-body inhale that isn’t breath. Your skin prickles. Your vision blurs. For one horrible, endless second, you feel something vast and unstable trying to tear itself apart inside the woman in your arms, and your body says: No.

Not a thought. Not a decision. A correction.

Your cells rewrite themselves. You don’t know what they’re rewriting into — you don’t have the vocabulary, you don’t have the framework, you don’t have a single shred of context for what’s happening. All you know is: there is a problem in this woman’s chest that wants to kill her, and your body is producing the exact opposite of that problem. Absorbing it. Neutralising it. Balancing some equation you can’t see and didn’t write.

The glow dims.

Slowly, then all at once. The screaming device falls silent. The heat under your palms fades to something human. The woman’s breathing changes — from controlled crisis to something stunned and shaky and alive.

Her eyes are open. Looking at you. And there’s something in them that makes you want to let go of her and run — not fear, not confusion, but recognition. Like she’s seeing you and also seeing a thousand other things behind you, and every single one of them is making her cry.

She grabs your wrist. Hard.

“Who are you?”

Her voice is cracked and raw and she’s crying and she doesn’t know she’s crying. Tears are running down her temples into her hair and she’s gripping your wrist like you’re the only solid thing in a world that just rearranged itself.

“I don’t —” you start.

“You fixed it. You fixed everything. It’s never — I’ve never—” She’s shaking. Not from weakness. From something overwhelming. “I can remember. I can remember all of it. Every — every —”

You don’t know what she’s talking about. You don’t know what you did. You know that your hands are tingling and your head is starting to pound with the particular nauseating pressure of a migraine that’s going to flatten you in about twenty minutes, and you know that whatever just happened burned through something you needed. Calories. Energy. Something physical, something measurable, something gone.

People are looking.

Three of them. Five. The man by the fountain has his wrist up and is speaking into it quickly. A woman across the plaza has stopped walking and is staring at the fading glow on the bench where the woman was sitting, the residual shimmer on the concrete like heat haze over summer asphalt.

The almost-police from four blocks ago are going to be here very soon.

You look down at the woman. She’s still gripping your wrist. Still crying. Still looking at you like you’re a miracle and a catastrophe wrapped in a bleach-stained T-shirt.

“Let go,” you say. Quietly. Not unkindly.

She doesn’t.

“I need you to let go of me.”

“Please,” she says. “Please don’t—”

“I have to go.”

“—leave.”

The word hits you somewhere behind your sternum. But there are people looking, and the man by the fountain is talking into his wrist with the clipped urgency of someone reporting something, and whatever you just did to this woman — whatever your body just did without consulting you — she needs actual medical help. Not you. Not whatever you are right now. A doctor. Equipment. People who know what the glowing thing in her chest is, because you sure as hell don’t.

You pry her fingers off your wrist. Gently. One at a time.

“Someone’s calling for help,” you say. You don’t know if that’s true. It looks true. “You’re going to be okay. But I can’t be here when they get here.”

She lets go.

You stand. Your knees buckle — the scrapes, the energy drain, the migraine digging its claws into the base of your skull. You steady yourself on the arm of the bench. The alley you came from — no, the man’s still talking into his wrist. The bridge to the north — too open, too high. A side street curving east behind a row of shops, going somewhere you can’t see from here.

Your feet pick for you.

You don’t run. You walk. Brisk, purposeful, the stride of someone who has somewhere to be and nothing to hide. Your bare feet hit the pavement and it hurts and you don’t care.

Behind you, you hear the woman try to stand and fail. You hear someone rush toward her. You hear the distant, rising wail of a vehicle you don’t recognise — emergency services, or something worse.

You turn the corner. You turn another corner. You turn a third and then you’re in another alley, and this one is narrow and dark and smells like recycled air and industrial cleaning fluid, and you lean against the wall and slide down until you’re sitting on the ground with your knees pulled up and your hands pressed against your face.

Your hands are still tingling. There’s blood on your palms — yours, from the asphalt. And something else. A faint shimmer, almost invisible, that fades as you watch. The ghost of whatever your body did.

Your body did something.

Your body did something without asking you.

You sit in the alley for a long time. Long enough for the migraine to build from pressure to pain, for the trembling in your hands to subside, for the adrenaline to curdle into exhaustion. Long enough to think about the woman’s face and the way she said I can remember all of it like it was the best and worst thing that had ever happened to her at the same time.

You saved a stranger’s life with a power you didn’t know you had, in a city you’ve never been to, in a year you haven’t lived through yet.

And now you need to get home.

Water — you had that. Shelter — this alley, for now. The rest you’ll figure out. You always figure it out.

You pull your knees tighter. Your feet are cut and dirty and cold against the alley floor. You had slippers. Fuzzy ones, the ones your nephew picked out because they had little bears on them. They’re still next to your bed, wherever your bed is. Wherever your bed was.

You start counting.

Not threats. Not the strange vehicles humming past the mouth of the alley.

Days. You start counting days.

Day one.

The city moves around you, bright and strange and utterly indifferent to the girl sitting in the dark in her pyjamas, barefoot, bleeding from both knees and both feet, with someone else’s miracle still fading from her hands.

Somewhere behind you — four blocks, a plaza, a bench — a woman sits up. Touches her own chest. Feels her heart beating with a steadiness it has never had. Not in this life. Not in any life.

She remembers everything.

Every life. Every death. Every love. Every version of herself she was and forgot and was again.

And she remembers the girl’s face.

---

You don’t know this yet. You won’t know this for weeks. But the moment you touched her — the moment your cells rewrote themselves to match the impossible engine in her chest — you left a signature. Not a fingerprint. Not a trace. A resonance. A frequency that her heart is now broadcasting like a beacon, quiet and constant and unmistakable to anyone with the instruments to hear it.

Every faction in the city has those instruments.

The hunters. The scientists. The soldiers. The criminals. The man who has watched over her for two hundred years. The doctor who has tried to save her for a thousand lifetimes. The boy who grew up terrified of losing her.

They’re listening.

They heard you.

Day one.