Morning light came thin and hesitating through the kitchen blinds, slashing across the linoleum in pale, orderly bands. Saharan sat at the table with both hands flat on the wood, breathing slow so he didn't have to think about what had happened. The house smelled like coffee and rain-soaked grass; beyond the window the yard was still green and normal unlike him.
He reached up and caught the edge of his jaw without meaning to. His fingers came away surprised, callused, knuckled, the pad of his thumb higher than it should have been. He turned his head and felt a small, strange weight along his spine, as if his posture had been renewed while he slept. He was supposed to be five foot nine. He knew that in the way you know facts written on a birth certificate or the crease of a family photo. He pushed his hands down his thighs and the chair creaked and barely seemed to meet him; his knees were farther from the table than they had any right to be.
Amina padded in, barefoot, in an oversized hoodie and the impregnable, practiced gravity of a fifteen-year-old who had already learned how to set the world right if she could. She stopped when she saw him and blinked. Her eyes were full of the practical considerations that always came first with her - he'd slept, he wasn't bleeding, he still smelled like him. Then she looked a little longer and the way she pursed her lips told him she was cataloguing differences.
"You're taller," she said, and tried to make her voice casual. She failed by a fraction.
"A few inches," he said. His voice came out thicker than it used to—less boy, less easy to surprise. He ran a hand through hair that felt the same but lay differently now, as if the angles in his skull had shifted.
"You're enormous," Amina corrected, because she could not help herself. She moved in, muscles in her jaw working, and rested her hands on the table near his. Up close she could see his skin wasn't just darker, there were faint, paler tracings under the surface that snarled and forked in the places he couldn't easily see: the tendons across his forearms, the thin line at the crook of his elbow. The tracings quivered like a phantom current.
Saharan closed his eyes. He wanted to tell her it was fine. Instead, the world answered in a burst that had nothing to do with his will.
He opened them and the kitchen exploded.
Not with light, not in any way that people understood light, but as if every layer of color had been peeled back and laid in front of him like a deck of cards fanned out: ultraviolet whispered along the edges of the coffee mug, a low, throbbing band of far-red hummed where the radiator breathed, and there were threads of radiation in slices he couldn't name that braided the air between the window and the table. The patterning made the room look wrong- too loud, too obvious. Contours doubled. Mirrored echoes of objects bled into one another. His peripheral vision pulsed with a slow, indecent intelligence.
Amina reached for him before he could panic and her hand which was familiar and warm found his wrist. To her he would be the brother she had always known. To him, she was the only family he cared about: a single, grounding point in the cacophony.
"Focus on me," she said, and did not ask whether he could. She had the kind of certainty little girls used when they coaxed stray cats down from roofs. Saharan let her voice pull at him like a rope.
He tried. He concentrated on the brown of her eyes. Immediately the brown multiplied: there were brown hues he had never known brown could bear- deep, black-flecked sepia; a smear of umber threaded with the faintest ultraviolet tags; a shimmering curve of ochre that hummed like a tuning fork. Each color sang at him; the edges of Amina's face wanted to bloom into extra contours. He felt like a man placed before an orchestra with no conductor, and every instrument insisted on being heard.
Amina's other hand slipped to his forehead, warm and surprisingly firm. "Breathe with me," she told him. She set the pace: in, slow; out, slow. She counted under her breath -one, two, three- soft as a prayer. He matched her. He let the counting be the framework the sight could not overthrow.
As he steadied, the spectrum tightened. The ultraviolet whispering ebbed. The impossible reds folded back into the radiator's real, ordinary glow. The braided strands withdrew like hands letting go. Still, there was a residue; some edges were too crisp, and sometimes, when the kitchen light struck the mug just so, it would throw a tiny halo in a color his mind could not name. He blinked and counted and let Amina's hands anchor him.
"You need water," she said, and stood up to get him a cup. She came back with a glass and pressed it into his hand like it was the most obvious offering in the world.
He drank. The water was cool and tasted like nothing extraordinary, and that was relief in its own right.
"Can you... hear other things?" she asked, because she'd been there when the sword had stabbed him.
"Can you—feel it, inside you?"
Saharan swallowed. It was a poorly phrased question for an impossibility.
"Sometimes," he said. "Like... like there's something awake under the ribs. It doesn't speak, well, not like words- it... suggests. Reflexes. Images. When I run my hand down my arm I feel static, like the place where a wire is laid under plaster."
Amina tucked a stray curl behind her ear. "Do you remember things? Things that aren't yours?"
He thought of the memory that had burrowed into him the night the blade vanished, pure white wings, the sky lit with thousands of weapons of unknown origins.
"Sometimes," he repeated. "Fleeting but I know they aren't mine."
She took it all with the same flat-eyed efficiency she used for math homework. "Okay," she said finally. "We can't tell Mom and Dad yet. Not before we know. They'll only put you somewhere to get mental help or... or worse. We keep today quiet. You stay inside and I'll make sure you eat."
He smiled without humor. "You're fifteen. You sound like a bailiff."
"You need bailiffs," she said. "All right? Because if you don't—if you go out there like last night and do...whatever you can do - people will come with guns and questions." Her voice broke for a breath at that and then smoothed. "We work this like variables. We test. We record. We stay quiet until we know what this is."
Saharan looked at her, and for a moment the weight of his new height, the strange tracings under his skin, the colors like foreign music in his eyes - everything - felt lighter because she moved as if she could organize it into sentences. He let himself lean back in his chair and study the lines the morning made on her face. She'd grown older overnight too; fear and resolve had added tiny marks to her brow.
He flexed his fingers and let them rest on the glass. The faint tracery under his skin was visible if he turned his hand just so, a pale map of veins that sometimes shivered like a fish at the touch of a current. He flexed his hand again, listening for the reflexes the blade had seeded.
Outside, somewhere down the street, a car alarm shivered and then died. A neighbor's voice called a name in a bored register, and then the neighborhood returned to its low, domestic rhythms. The sword could change physics and light and the shape of a person, but it hadn't yet changed the way the world kept its small, stubborn normalities.
"We should record everything," Amina said. "Okay? Cameras. Temperature. How you move. If you sleep differently. If you dream—" She stopped herself and made an abrupt, humorless face. "We journal."
He stared at the notebook she pulled out her hoodie pouch, at Amina's tidy columns and penciled, practical plans. Her plan was simple but he didn't have the urge to be a science experiment just yet. It should have been easy to nod, to let her organize the unknown into neat boxes.
"No," he said.
Amina froze with the pen half-lifted. For a heartbeat she looked as if he'd told her the sky had fallen. "What—"
"I need to walk," Saharan said. The word was small, but it carried a weight that did not suit the kitchen. He set the pen down with deliberate slowness. "I can't sit here and make charts while my head keeps telling me to do other things." He flexed his new, wider hands and felt the downspring of wanting in his bones, the need to move, to test the edges of himself in open air.
"Out there?" Amina's voice tightened. "You want to go out after what happened?"
"I need to see what I do when I'm not trying to fold myself into a careful, quiet shape. Charts won't tell me how my legs hold up over distance, or if my eyes break again when the sun hits a car windshield, or whether this," He tapped his chest where the blade had vanished "-keeps making suggestions when the world's noise is louder."
Amina scrubbed a hand over her face. She was fifteen and furious and terrified all at once; her fingers trembled imperceptibly. "Saharan, you could get hurt. You could get taken, or—"
"Or I could learn something," he said. There was no bravado in the sentence, only a bare truth. He looked at her—really looked, across the table and the cup rings and the notebook—and saw the thing he loved in the way she always organized disaster into plans: love, yes, but also possession, an insistence that he remain hers to protect. He softened. "I won't go far. I'll text you. I won't do anything stupid."
Amina opened her mouth, closed it, then narrowed her eyes in the way that meant she was making a bargain, the kind she'd struck a thousand times when she wanted to win without losing. "You come back before sundown," she said. "You call if anything weird happens. You don't go near the park by the canal—" She stopped and pinched the bridge of her nose. "And you don't talk to strangers."
He let a small, rueful smile cross his face. "I won't talk to strangers," he repeated. "But I might meet friends."
Her jaw tightened at the last word. "Fine. You take the route down Oak. Stay on the side streets. If you see-"
"If I see armed men with recruitment badges, I run toward the noise and make sure they get distracted by a very loud pigeon," he said, trying to make light of it. Amina didn't smile. She shoved the notebook toward him like a shield. "Okay. Then write down the time you leave. Measure yourself when you come back. If anything at all is different, you tell me first, then you tell no one else."
Saharan reached for the notebook, the newness of his hands making the action feel both clumsy and precise. He wrote the time, the destination, his height in the margin 6'4"—and then closed the book. He stood, and the chair scraped the floor in a sound that announced how much larger he filled the room.
He stepped outside without a coat; the morning air hit him like cool applause. For the first time since the sword, moving felt less like a reflex and more like testing a tool he had yet to know. Sunlight tilted across his shoulders and the world settled into its ordinary rhythms around him- the same dogs, the same newspaper bundle, the same woman watering her porch plants as if nothing at all had shifted.
He texted Travis and Amore with three quick words: "Outside. Oak route." It felt both reckless and necessary. The message vanished into the small, private network that still made their lives manageable.
He left the house carrying a small, private gravity. The air outside was ordinary trash bins waiting for collection, a woman watering marigolds, the same hum of a morning that refused to notice anything as consequential as a person changing. Saharan's steps ate the sidewalk with the quiet confidence of someone still getting used to a new stride. He couldn't stop thinking about speed.
The taste of movement had been in him since the sword an itch behind the sternum that wanted testing. Last night, when everything was raw and bright, he'd felt flashes of motion that weren't his: impressions of running so fast the world blurred into bands of color, the idea of speed so complete it left him dizzy. He'd been told, in fragments he didn't know the origin of, that his body could one day keep pace with light. The notion lived in him like a dare. But words and potential were different from standing on the pavement and taking a step.
He shortened his stride, then lengthened it, measuring lengths by feel. The extra inches he now carried were advantages, longer arcs on each step, more ground gone with less effort. He thought of the physics someone once taught him in school: speed equals distance over time, and if distance could double in a single bound, time would be the thing to beat. He imagined his legs as pistons in a different engine and wondered where the fuel came from.
At the corner, a truck eased past, the driver nodding at a pedestrian who hobbled across with a cane. Saharan watched the license plate as the vehicle moved, curious, counting the seconds between its passing and the way the streetlight flicked in its wake. He focused on ordinary markers—the lampposts, the paint stripes on the road, a slice of graffiti on the brick wall—to calibrate himself against the world he'd always known.
He picked up the pace, then tested a burst. For a few heartbeats his feet struck the pavement in a rhythm that felt like a metronome set faster—long, economical strides that ate the distance between the lampposts. Every muscle read like a new letter learned fluently. He pushed more, drawing on the quiet core of energy that thrummed in his chest, and for a breath the neighborhood became a smear: colors smeared into lines, the faces of passersby reduced to the suggestion of motion. He felt his edges sharpen; the world dipped into a narrowed tunnel of sensation where sound smeared and light elongated.
But it wasn't light. Not yet. The burst carried him past parked cars and down a block faster than any sprint he'd attempted before, faster than the teens who raced mopeds on summer nights. When he slowed again his lungs wanted more than they got; his heart thudded in his throat like a fist against a door. He checked the stopwatch on his phone—an inelegant tool, slow to respond, but serviceable—and saw a number that made his breath hitch: he had moved at speeds comparable to a high-speed car, perhaps seventy or eighty miles per hour over that short distance. It was ridiculous, thrilling, and terrifying.
He realized then that whatever the sword had given him wasn't a simple on/off switch. It was a scale, a stairwell. Right now he was on the lower landings—faster than anyone in his circle of friends, absurdly faster than his old self, but not anywhere close to the white, instantaneous speed he had tasted in memory. The notion of being as fast as light hovered like a distant lighthouse: visible, present, but miles away.
His pulse settled as he kept to the side streets, taking the long way toward the corner store where Travis and Amore liked to meet. Each bout of speed left a residue—sweat, a ringing in his teeth, a small electric bloom behind his eyes. He managed that bloom with breath, slow counts Amina had taught him, and with a focus on the nodes of the street: mailbox, cracked curb, the spray-painted heart on an alley door.
When he rounded the last block and saw Travis and Amore waiting by the doorway, they both tensed just a fraction, as if they had felt the change in the air. He walked the final yards at a normal pace, letting his pulse return to something less theatrical. As he slid into place beside them, he could still feel the ache of having pushed himself, the knowledge that the sword's promise could be coaxed, inch by dangerous inch, toward something that might one day outstrip humanity.
"How'd you get here so fast?" Travis asked before either of them could pretend they weren't measuring him for scale.
Saharan gave a small smile he wasn't certain he meant. "Practice," he said, thinking of the stairs he had yet to climb and the long, luminous distance that waited above them.