The second body hit the pavement at exactly 6:03AM, and this time, it was someone I knew.
I also know of this piece of information because my mom was the first one to see it. She had gone for her daily jogging down the road when she saw the old lady who used to leave the biggest pieces of candy on Halloween just for me, fall to her death. And no, it wasn't suicide. Apparently she accidentally fell.
I do miss the old lady, she had a wonderful smile. She refused to get modifications or undergo surgery to take any microchips that would enable her to grow her teeth back but she still had a wonderful smile. Oh who am I kidding. Her smile was awful! Whenever she did it looked like a dark void was staring back at me. Sheesh!
I honestly found it so hard to sleep through the night. I couldn't stop thinking about the weird stuff that happened yesterday. I don't know how to feel about it. Is this the part of my life where something amazing happens to me and changes my life forever? Am I the main character?
I glare at the holo-mirror, its surface shimmering like liquid mercury. "Alright, let's do the whole 'self-reflection' garbage the neuro-feeds keep shoving at me." The mirror's AI chirps: "Shall I activate Inspirational Affirmations Mode?"
"No," I snap. "Just… exist."
My reflection stares back—curly hair spiraling in zero-gravity defiance, like a nebula got stuck on my head. Mom says it's a "legacy trait," whatever that means.
Most kids at Neo-London Academy have genetically polished silk-straight strands. Me? I look like a vintage supernova. Skin's a pale brown with a rusty undertone. Eyes? Standard-issue brown, but with a flicker of old-Earth amber that glows under UV lights. Not terrible. But the freckles? Ugh. They're everywhere. Tiny gold specks, like someone shot me with a nanobot glitter gun during the Collapse Wars.
Jiro says they're "retro-chic," but retro's just a nice way of saying "your DNA missed the aesthetic memo."
"Freckles indicate ancestral resilience!" the mirror AI chimes, scanning my face. "Shall I project societal beauty standards for comparison?" "Shut up." I swipe the holo-controls, morphing the mirror into a gen-scan overlay. My freckles pulse with bioluminescent markers—turns out Great-Grandma spliced stardust into our lineage for "cosmic flavor." Cool.
I poke a curl. It bounces back. Defiant little wormhole. "You're staring at your reflection for 4.7 minutes longer than average," the AI says. "Shall I prescribe a serotonin patch?"
"Prescribe yourself a mute button." The freckles shimmer. I sigh.
At least they're not Procainamide-yellow.
***
A robot is busy cooking breakfast this morning, my Mom is on the phone as usual with her clients. She's a lawyer. She specializes in Neuro-Ethics, a field addressing the legal and moral implications of neural enhancements, AI sentience, and genetic modifications. Her work often pits her against megacorporations exploiting loopholes in interstellar law.
Mom's hair is out today, I can barely see her face. She has an extremely full and large 4b hair. An insane amount of curls, I must add. I got my curls from my Dad though, a Welsh man with much looser curls.
My mom signals to me to come to her so she can give me a kiss on the cheek. I internally groan. I'm not a kid anymore, she needs to stop this.
Ending her call, she checks my eyelids as if looking for something seriously important. Mom's Blessing is Veritas Pulse. It makes her sense the 'emotional truth' behind words. When someone speaks, she perceives a faint, color-coded aura around them. It's like living with a human lie detector who moonlights as a therapist. I can't even fake a stomach ache to ditch school.
" You look pale, " she starts, raising her afro really high so I can see her eyes. Mom has Heterochromia iridum. It's a condition whereby one has multicoloured eyes. One eye is blue while the other is brown. My Mom literally looks like a model. I really wish I took her looks, other than just a tiny tint of her skin colour, I look nothing like her.
My mom's skin is as dark as midnight, she looks intergalactic. My mom's skin is the kind of dark that makes you think the universe ran out of starlight halfway through painting her.
She's got this… glow, like her DNA photocopied a black hole and sprinkled it with glitter. People straight-up stare in the street—not just 'cause she's a neuro-ethics legend, but 'cause she walks like gravity's optional and her hair defies three centuries of genetic flat-ironing trends.
Dad? Oh, he's beige. Not even fancy beige. Dude's the human equivalent of unbuttered toast. Pale, freckled, and built like a guy who still thinks "quantum" is just a shampoo brand. Once, I asked him how he landed Mom, and he just grinned and said, "Kid, sometimes the Wi-Fi connects to the wrong printer, and you just roll with it."
He's lame, I know.
" I couldn't really get enough sleep, " I tell her, while she still has one hand holding her hair up and one grabbing my cheeks.
" Oh I can tell. What is it that you were thinking about? "
" Some weird stuff at school that happened yesterday, " I say instead of lying. She'd know anyway. I just need to find a way to avoid the question.
I quickly grab my stuff and walk out the door. I won't take the Teleportation pod from the bus station. Mom keeps yelling at me to tell her what happened and not run away from her but I ignore her. Nope, not today.
Today, I'm taking the Rift-Runner — my beat-up, jury-rigged glider that Dad calls "a lawsuit waiting to happen." It's not a hoverboard. Hoverboards are for posers with corporate sponsorships. This thing? A hexagonal slab of salvaged alloy, thruster nodes welded haphazardly to the underside, its edges glowing faintly violet from the repurposed anti-grav cores I ripped out of a junked security drone.
It hovers three meters up, minimum — high enough to dune-bomb over traffic, low enough to scare the hell out of pedestrians. I kick it awake. The cores sputter, coughing neon-blue exhaust as I leap onto it sideways, boots magnet-locking to the surface. The stabilizer whines like it's judging me. Same, girl.
****
Jiro couldn't stop blasting my holo-wrist all the way to school. Like an annoying bug, he kept asking me if i had already gotten to school. He's just tense I guess, he wants to make a move on his crush today; Jacinthe.
In fact, Jiro's been malfunctioning all week. Not the usual "overclocked his neural-link during a Nexus Wars binge" kind of glitching. No, this is Jacinthe malfunctioning.
She's light in human form– literally. Her Blessing, Photokinesis lets her bend photons like they owe her credits. Today, her hair's a cascade of liquid light—shifting from superheated white to purple as she moves, casting prismatic halos on the walls. When she laughs, the air around her fractures into tiny rainbows, and the academy's holograms warp instinctively, like they're bowing to a queen.
Jiro's usually a walking encyclopedia of bad ideas and worse jokes. He'll recite the melting point of Dax's bionic arm plating (2,468°F, in case you're wondering) or persuade Lissa to hack the cafeteria drones to replace Nutri-Bricks with contraband sugar cubes. But around Jacinthe? His entire system fails.
Today, he's worse. We're in the hallway, and Jacinthe's leaning against a wall, her silhouette warping the sunlight into a corona. Jiro's staring at her like she's a quantum equation he forgot to solve.
" Just go talk to her," I nudge, dodging a janitor-bot.
"I'm calibrating," he hisses, frantically adjusting his belt.
"Calibrating? Your pupils are dilating like you're staring into a quantum core." He glares, his brow bent all the way down.
"It's called spectral analysis. You wouldn't get it." Sure.
Now, she's gliding toward us, each step leaving afterimages that linger like smudged starlight. Jiro freezes, his holo emitting a high-pitched whine as it tries—and fails—to render her light-bent form.
"Act natural," he mutters, voice cracking.
"You're glowing."
"It's—it's a UV filter! For her… photons. Safety protocol."
Jacinthe stops in front of us, and the atrium dims slightly, the ambient light pulled toward her like a gravitational lens. Up close, her eyes aren't just golden—they're alive, irises swirling with trapped sunlight. "Hey, Jiro. Sulien." Jiro's mouth opens, but he can't bring himself to say anything.
I hit him really hard with my leg and he coughs, nodding to her.
" I just wanted to ask if you guys are coming to the concert tonight. It would mean so much to me. My brother's the one performing. " She flicks a finger, and the air around Jiro bends, wrapping him in a shimmering aura of polarized light. He looks like a human gemstone, all fractured colors and awkward angles.
"You're luminous today," he blurts, then claps a hand over his mouth. Jacinthe tilts her head, her hair flaring sunset-orange. "Thanks. Well, are you?"
" Yes, yes we will. " I fake a smile.
She nods and turns around. As she walks away, her shadow stretches and fractures into a dozen chromatic splinters. Jiro slumps against a wall, his H.I.V.E chip cycling through color-coded error alerts. "Nailed it," he croaks. "Yep. Smooth as butter" He groans, pressing his forehead to the cool metal. "Why does she have to bend light? It's like… my brain's a busted prism and she's the spectrum I can't decode." I pat his shoulder.
His shirt's warm from residual lumens. "Relax. Next time, maybe try not to impersonate a someone you're not."
"Noted," he mumbles, squinting at her retreating form. The hallway lights pulse gently where she'd stood, like the air itself is starstruck.
"…Do you think she likes guys who emit gamma rays?"
"You're her wavelength exactly."
"Really?"
"No." He sighs, watching her vanish around a corner, the walls blooming with temporary auroras in her wake.
"Worth a shot."
The moment Jacinthe's light-bent silhouette disappears around the corner, Lissa materializes from the shadows like a glitch in reality—one second empty air, the next a scowling girl with a glare that could kill.
"Please tell me you didn't just agree to go to that concert," she says, flicking a stray spark off her sleeve. Her hair's extra frizzy today, which means she's already hacked something she shouldn't have.
Jiro, still slumped against the wall like a deflated hover-cushion, makes a noise like a dying power cell. "We have to go. It's a societal obligation. Also, her brother's in the band. Also, photons."
Lissa rolls her eyes so hard her pupils glitch into static for half a second. "It's a government-sponsored 'youth engagement initiative.' Translation: they're scanning our brains for curse markers while we're distracted by bass drops."
She jabs a finger at Dax, who's been silently flexing his bionic arm at passing freshmen this whole time.
"Back me up."
Dax blinks, his arm whirring as it recalibrates from "intimidating" to "vaguely listening."
"I dunno. Free snacks?"
"They're nutrient paste in glow-stick tubes," Lissa snaps.
"Free glowing snacks," Dax amends, shrugging.
Zara materializes next to him, her hair shifting from neon pink to "I'm judging you" teal.
"I'm only going if someone promises me a fight. Last concert, a kid with an Echolocation Blessing got drunk on synth-fizz and tried to lick a security drone."
Jiro's suddenly stands up right. "We're going," he declares, voice cracking. "It's strategic. Jacinthe's brother plays quantum cello. Do you know how rare that is? It's like… math you can dance to."
Lissa groans, rubbing her temples. "You're hopeless." She turns to me, eyes narrowing.
"Sulien. Be rational. Tell them this is a terrible idea."
I should say no. I want to say no. But then I catch the way Jiro's fingers tremble around his holo, the way the overhead lights flicker in time with his panicked breathing. And I remember Mrs. Voss's broken body on the pavement, the way life is so short. Death is unexpected.
Maybe we need terrible ideas right now. "We're going," I say, shrugging. "But if we all get brain-scanned and thrown in a government lab, I'm haunting you first, Jiro."
Lissa throws her hands up, sending a rogue spark zapping into a nearby trash drone. It beeps mournfully.
"Fine! But when the feds come for us, I'm definitely using Dax as a human shield."
Dax grins, cracking his knuckles. "Joke's on you. My arm's bulletproof."
Zara's hair shifts to "mildly entertained" violet as we head to class, our shadows stretching long under the flickering hallway lights. Jiro walks like a man heading to his own execution—if his execution involved possible hand-holding and/or spontaneous combustion. Somewhere, Jacinthe's light lingers in the air, painting the walls in fleeting rainbows. (But if anyone asks, I'm absolutely blaming Jiro when this goes wrong.)
***
The bass at this concert is so loud it feels like my ribs are cracking. Jiro's beside me, knee bouncing like he's wired to a faulty reactor core, his retro-astro jacket pulsing neon constellations.
He keeps craning his neck, scanning the crowd for Jacinthe. That's when I see her.
Jacinthe.
Sunflower-yellow dress, hair coiled into a gravity-defying bun, crescent moon hairpin glowing faintly gold. She's laughing near the bar, holding a fizz-drink that shimmers like liquid starlight.
I elbow Jiro. " Jacinthe! There! Yellow dress, by the neon drones!" He whips around so fast his elbow knocks Lissa's neuro-pen out of her hand. "Where?!" "By the—" SHOVE.
A faceless figure in a holo-mask slams into Jiro from behind. He stumbles into a server drone, synth-berry fizz exploding everywhere. The crowd jeers as kids get drenched in glowing blue sludge.
"What the hell?!" Jiro yelps, wiping his jacket. "Who does that?!"
"Forget the push—look!" I grab his shoulder, spinning him back toward the bar.
" What is it? " He looks mad at me. Almost as if I'm the one who pushed him. " Look, sorry you were pushed but I told you to look at Jacinthe. "
" What? No you didn't. "
I stare at him strangely, " I literally told you when Jacinthe walked in to look at her when she walked in and you did. That is, until that guy pushed you. "
" Are you drunk, Sulien? You haven't even drank anything, so what is wrong you with you? " Lissa says as she twirls her hair.
" Dude, you didn't tell him anything. Maybe you just thought you did. No big deal, " Dax reaches out to touch my shoulder.
What the hell? I could have sworn I did that. Jiro literally turned back to look with me. I can't even fathom–
" Well, where is she then? " They all stare at me like with this look. It makes me nervous. I gulp and point towards the bar. However, for some freakish reason, she's vanished into thin air. Am I going insane?
" Where? Has she suddenly made herself disappear? You were lying weren't you? " The freckles on my cheeks itched as I watched Zara's pupils contract into pinpricks - her tell for when she was about to verbally eliminate someone.
" I–I wasn't lying, guys. She was literally right there. She was laughing with some dude– "
" Some dude? " Jiro shrinks into his seat. Disappointment fills his face.
" Yeah and um– she was wearing yellow. Yeah! a yellow, sunflower ish dress? Yeah. Yeah, um, yeah. " I let out a shaky breath.
" Well, maybe she just went somewhere then, " Lissa backs me up and I mouth a 'thank you' to her before facing my front.
The music hit like a system crash to the skull.
A bassline throbbed through the venue, tuned precisely to the frequency that makes internal organs vibrate uncomfortably.
The lead singer—Jacinthe's brother, apparently—was a lanky silhouette backlit by seizure-inducing strobes, his voice autotuned into a weaponized whine that could crack smartglass.
"WE'RE ALL JUST FRAGMENTS IN THE SIMULATION!" he warbled, arms spread like a discount messiah as holographic fractals burst from his armpits.
The crowd roared, a sea of glowing H.I.V.E chips and chemically dilated pupils.
Lissa appeared beside me, her hair smoking slightly. "This is what happens when you let algorithms write music," she shouted over the noise, gesturing at a floating speaker drone hemorrhaging bass drops. "It's a sonic war crime!" A laser grid sliced through the crowd, tagging everyone with temporary tattoos that doubled as biometric scanners.
The lead singer hit a note so sharp, I actually felt my molars crack. "THIS NEXT SONG'S ABOUT GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE!" he screamed, as the overhead projectors beamed a 50-foot-tall hologram of the presidential seal.
"Subtle," Zara muttered, materializing with a stolen glow-stick tube of nutrient paste. "Also, the bassist is literally just hitting a dumpster with a phase wrench."
She wasn't wrong. The "band" had all the artistic integrity of a corrupted hologram—all flash, no soul. Even the mosh pit looked choreographed, a bunch of kids flexing their Blessings on cue: a guy with fireproof skin let people punch him, while a girl with levitation hopped three inches off the ground to half-hearted cheers.
The music climaxed in a shower of sparks. As the crowd chanted for an encore, I realized two things:
1. My ears were bleeding.
2. This was absolutely Jiro's fault.
Just as I'm about to leave this dumb concert to get some fresh air, Lissa taps me from behind. I turn back to see Jacinthe walking in. She has this beaming smile on her face and happens to he apologizing to her friends for coming late as she had to take her dog to a vet.
However for some reason I find it incredibly hard to speak.
Maybe it's because she's wearing red.