The glow of her monitor lit the cramped bedroom like a tiny stage, cables snaking across the floor in chaotic knots. The hum of an overworked fan barely covered the clack of her keyboard as Isabela leaned closer, eyes reflecting lines of shifting code.
Her lips curved into the faintest grin as a firewall screamed warnings she silenced in seconds. A private banking server, halfway across the world, opened like a locked diary in her hands. She didn't care about the money, that wasn't what drove her. No, what she wanted was the chase, the proof that she was smarter than the faceless adults who thought they owned everything.
Another layer fell, and she whispered to herself in Portuguese, "Muito fácil… too easy."
Then came the tension, alerts flashing red, corporate AI sniffing at her trail. For a heartbeat, adrenaline shot through her veins. She typed faster, her mind working in elegant patterns, slipping through gaps others couldn't even see. A minute later, silence. She was safe again. The bank never even knew she'd been there.
She leaned back in her chair, headphones slipping off her neck. The room was still dark, the only sound the muted hum of traffic below her apartment window. A victory, and yet the hollowness crawled in almost immediately. No applause. No one to tell her she was brilliant. Just another ghost in the system.
Morning dragged her to school. Same corridors, same whispers. Teachers saw her as "distracted," classmates barely noticed her. The one time she answered a question correctly in math, a boy snorted, "Must've cheated." Invisible. She was always invisible.
At lunch, Isabela sat in the corner of the cafeteria, tray untouched, watching groups chatter around her. Screens, her screens, were the only places anyone ever "saw" her. Online, she was a legend in the shadows, maybe even feared. Offline, she didn't exist.
By the time she got home, her mother was already asleep on the couch, uniform from her second job still wrinkled on her shoulders. Isabela tiptoed past her, guilt pricking but quickly buried. The keyboard called.
That night, she logged in again, hands moving automatically. Her chat logs were empty. No replies. She pulled up a black screen, endless text scrolling, and whispered into it like a prayer: "Does anyone see me?" No answer.
She sighed, shut the window, and crawled into bed. The monitors still glowed faintly, bathing the room in artificial light. Her eyes slipped shut with the ache of another day unseen. And for the first time, she dreamed.
(Perspective Change)
The chauffeur bowed as he opened the sleek black car door, but Aiko barely noticed. She slid inside, the leather seat cold beneath her, and fixed her gaze on the skyline. Tokyo shimmered in the morning light, towers of glass, neon still pulsing from the night before. To everyone else, it was alive. To her, it was distant, unreachable, like looking at the world through aquarium glass.
At school, she was greeted with polite bows and hushed giggles. Some classmates smiled too brightly, their whispers trailing behind her like perfume. "That's her… the shipping heiress…" She smiled back with perfect grace, the kind of smile she had been trained to wear since childhood, but it never reached her eyes.
During lunch, she sat with her "friends," though it felt more like a business meeting. They laughed at shallow jokes, traded rumors about celebrities, and complimented each other's handbags. Aiko's thoughts drifted. She could feel the weight of her phone in her pocket, buzzing with new emails from her family's advisors. She didn't check it. Not yet.
The final bell was almost a relief. The car was waiting again. She slipped inside, another bow, another round of formalities.
Home wasn't much better. The mansion echoed with silence, its high ceilings and polished floors swallowing her presence. The only voices came from the dining hall, her uncles gathered around a table too long for intimacy, their words sharp, transactional.
"We'll need you to attend the shareholders' dinner this weekend," one of them said without looking up from his documents. Aiko bowed slightly. "Of course." They didn't ask about her day. They never did.
That evening, she ate alone in her wing of the house, a single plate of food set neatly on a massive dining table. She thought about childhood birthdays when the same table had been filled with guests, not friends, not family, just business associates who smiled and shook hands while she sat quietly at the head, a doll in a dress chosen for her. She could still remember blowing out candles while no one watched.
Her fork scraped against porcelain. The silence pressed in tighter. She excused herself, not that anyone noticed, and retreated to her room. The city stretched beyond her balcony, lights glittering like stars fallen to earth. Millions of people lived out there, laughing, crying, breathing freely. And she, in all her wealth, had never felt so poor.
Eventually she got sick of the suffocating atmosphere so she decided to go to sleep She curled beneath silk sheets, staring up at the ceiling. The faint hum of the city seeped through her windows, and she let it lull her toward sleep. And for the first time in years, she didn't dream of boardrooms or empty birthday halls.
(Perspective Change)
Danielle rose before dawn, the way she always had. Sleep was never deep, never safe. She rolled off the thin mattress and dropped into stretches, counting each breath like a soldier. Knife drills came next, her blade whispering through the air. The League had burned this discipline into her bones, and though she had run, her body remembered.
Her safehouse was nothing but peeling walls and broken windows, but it kept the rain off her head. She told herself that was enough.
Later, she prowled the alleys, hood low, slipping through Gotham's crowds unseen. She bartered stolen bills for bread, but her mind was elsewhere. Her reflection in a dirty window caught her off guard: dark hair, sharp eyes, features carved by legacy. She hesitated, because for a second she saw him.
A boy's face, younger than hers, with that same sharpness. A boy who hadn't run like she had. A boy who carried their bloodline's name openly. Damian. Her jaw tightened. She forced herself away from the glass.
By evening, she sat on a rooftop, watching kids her age play basketball. Their laughter carried through the cracked court. It hurt more than she expected. The League had trained her to be a weapon, not a child. But somewhere out there, her brother still bore the weight of that name, that destiny. Did he laugh like that? Did he even know how?
Night came, and Danielle returned to her shelter. She ate quietly, chewing slowly, as if savoring every bite might trick her into thinking she wasn't alone. When the silence grew too heavy, memories surfaced — Damian at her side in the compound, both of them drilled by tutors and trainers, voices cold as steel.
Only, he had been chosen. Groomed. Seen. She had run. Curling up on the mattress, knife under her pillow, she whispered into the darkness. "I hope you don't hate me for leaving." Sleep came slowly, dragging her into dreams where shadows stretched long and familiar footsteps hunted her still.
(Perspective Change)
Evangeline Arktis leaned back in the stiff plastic chair of a nearly empty café, her notebook sprawled open in front of her. The pages were a maze of sketches, gears and circuits that shouldn't fit together, endless scribbles of machines that bent the rules of physics, half-finished formulas crowding the margins.
To the world, she looked like just another dropout wasting time, nursing a lukewarm coffee she could barely afford. But inside her head, the worlds were endless. She tapped her pen against the paper, frustration mounting. 'I could build this, if I had the right tools. If I had the money.'
If this world even knew what half of this meant. That last thought made her smirk bitterly. Because she did know. She remembered. Things no one here should. Fictional men of impossible intellect, her own patchwork of knowledge stitched together with their brilliance. And yet, in this life, it didn't matter. She was just Evangeline: a dropout, a disappointment, a girl no one expected anything from.
By late afternoon she had drifted back home—her small basement room crammed with scavenged electronics and old textbooks. Wires dangled from shelves like vines, laptop screens flickered with equations, and in the corner sat a pile of half-built contraptions that went nowhere. Evangeline stared at them for a long time, then whispered under her breath, "If I had just one chance…"
Night came quietly. She lay on her bed, notebook pressed against her chest, eyes tracing the cracked ceiling. The thought gnawed at her harder than hunger ever did: I know too much to do nothing. But I can't do anything alone.
Her eyelids grew heavy. The notebook slipped from her arms. And as she drifted into sleep, the hum of her broken machines faded, replaced by the sound of someone waiting for her on the other side.