The alarm that woke Violet felt less like sound and more like an old promise snapping taut.
It threaded through the dormitory in soft, surgical pulses — not the harsh bell of a school, not the roaring klaxon of a warship, but something old and patient that belonged to places where time itself had been measured and then folded back into pockets.
Violet sat up before the second beat finished. Her hand went to the rune-etched medallion around her neck out of habit. The metal was cold, as if struck by time itself — like the inside of a tomb she'd once dreamed of and then learned to ignore.
Outside, Shenzhen burned through its rain. The night was a collage of steel reflections — holograms bleeding into puddles, neon slicing the mist into ribbons. The city didn't sleep; it shimmered, layered with electric noise and the quiet hum of surveillance. There were cameras that blinked like insects, satellites that whispered coordinates, and an invisible network of scanners designed for Specialists.
Violet heard them all — the code, the chatter, the pulse of systems pretending to be asleep.
She swung her legs off the narrow bed. The floorboards were warped, swollen from years of monsoon and neglect. Paint peeled from the ceiling like dead skin, revealing hints of older colors beneath — a dozen histories, half-forgotten. Her hostel room sat on the fifth floor of a dying building in the Longhua District, where cheap rent bought silence and the walls kept secrets better than people.
The other tenants didn't ask questions. They were ghosts of the city's overflow — programmers on the run from contracts, old factory workers, students who'd stopped attending school but hadn't told anyone yet.
Violet fit right in.
She rubbed her face and exhaled into the darkness. The air smelled faintly of rain and old circuitry. Somewhere down the hall, someone coughed, then cursed. Someone else laughed into their phone. The city's rhythm was familiar now — unpredictable but constant, like a heartbeat that refused to quit.
And still, she felt it — the residue of the dream clinging to her like static.
A place where clocks grew like trees, their hands moving backward until they split the horizon.
A marble the color of moonlight, rolling down a river that read the future.
A laugh that wasn't hers.
A face half-shaded by an impossible hat.
The memory had weight — too much to be just a dream. It pulsed in her palm like something that once belonged there.
Not that she would tell anyone that.
No one needed to know the Arms that had found her when she was small — the first one, light as breath and sharp as the tick of a second; the second, darker, deeper, and never meant for her. No one needed to know that sometimes, when she blinked too long, she saw fragments of lives she hadn't lived yet — faces, names, places she hadn't touched but somehow remembered.
She'd seen one who controlled ice like an arc to a soul — his reflection cast in a puddle that wasn't hers.
She'd seen a lined, cyber maniac , not caring about his fate — laughing under broken glass skies.
She'd seen a palace made of mirrors and blood.
And every time she woke, the same whisper threaded through her skull:
"You're not late. You're early."
Violet had learned the second truth early: secrets were tools.
Some people sharpened them into weapons.
Some buried them.
She had learned to do both.
She rose and crossed the room to the window. Below, the rain painted veins across the city. The skyline flickered between worlds — digital and real, solid and spectral. She pressed her palm to the glass and watched the reflections distort into constellations she didn't recognize.
Her medallion pulsed once, faintly — a quiet heartbeat beneath the city's roar.
There were surveillance drones passing over the alley again, their beams sweeping for unauthorized signals. Violet killed the small interface on her wrist. No use being noticed. Not yet.
She still had time.
Her next step wasn't here — not in this city, not in this life. But the path was already opening, piece by piece. And in the back of her mind, she could feel something — someone — moving toward her. Four presences. Bright. Distant. Familiar.
She didn't know their names, but she'd seen their eyes.
She didn't know their stories, but she'd dreamed their endings.
So she waited.
Waited for the pulse in the medallion to become a voice.
Waited for the city's hum to crack open into meaning.
Waited for the call that would tear her quiet existence apart.
Outside, thunder rolled over Shenzhen like a promise.
Violet smiled faintly, eyes still fixed on the horizon.
"Alright then," she murmured to the rain. "Let's begin."